If you look for it this morning, it is all still out there.
The tweeted epitaphs for the Gareth Southgate era, the fire and fury in the WhatsApp groups at half-past-nine, the scathing analysis of a 1-0 defeat from the non-believers halfway back to the tram.
And yes, tucked away in draft folders on laptops — though, thankfully, not consigned to public record — the hastily deleted intros to post-mortems destined for column inches such as these.
So, who could really blame Ivan Toney, who until this summer has watched every England tournament in his lifetime, the good and the bad, from the perspective of a fan, from looking at what was happening, knowing what was about to happen and thinking, ‘Nah, you’re alright’.
Readying himself for introduction 120 seconds before forecast doom, the Brentford striker must have felt as if he had landed a cameo in Walking with Dinosaurs just as the asteroid pierced the clouds. All that, for this? All those goals in the lower leagues, the loans at Scunthorpe and Shrewsbury, the breakthrough at Brentford, the eight months of lonely graft in self-inflicted exile, for this?
For a spot in the photographs of one England’s darkest footballing nights; for a place among the bodies sprawled at the whistle soon to come; for a portion of the blame. Gareth Southgate admitted Toney was “pretty disgusted” with the timing of his major tournament debut.
“I knew he had the hump with me for putting him on,” Southgate said. “But I said to him, ‘This could be the moment’.”
And, of course, it was, though not Toney’s quite yet. But, after Jude Bellingham’s instantly-iconic leveller, suddenly the last man to arrive at the world’s worst party found himself with an extra half-an-hour to make something happen, and needed just a minute of that.
His header to set up Harry Kane’s winner was simple, yes, but oh-so clever and composed.
CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? 😱
— ITV Football (@itvfootball) June 30, 2024
Harry Kane puts England in the lead at the beginning of extra time 🏴#Euro2024 | #ENGSVK pic.twitter.com/knUPc2gabI
A more panicked mind, maybe just a goalscorer’s selfish instinct, would have said straining to glance Eberechi Eze’s mishit volley directly towards goal was the play, but the angle and the ball’s loopy flight would have made scoring near impossible.
Instead, Toney made the percentage call, nodding calmly back across the box to leave Slovakia’s defenders in a horrible position, pushing out in one direction as Kane, ball, the game and their tournament all suddenly lurched in the other.
Southgate said later that he had hoped Toney’s introduction would bring some “chaos” (quite why he wanted only two minutes of it remains unclear), and if another incoherent attacking display is anything to go by, it may be a method England are forced back to before this tournament is done.
At half-time in extra-time, Toney was left as the lone front man by a shattered Kane’s withdrawal. Given the chance to reset, you wonder whether Southgate might have preferred Ollie Watkins from that point, a pacier threat in behind, knowing a third goal would have killed the game.
Toney, though, played the occasion brilliantly in his own way, burnishing the theory that for all Watkins’s goals and assists for Aston Villa this season, it is he who offers the better substitute for Kane, blessed with the same presence and similar aura.
Twice in the final minutes he had the England bench on its feet, winning free-kicks to which he had no right to take time off the clock and hope out of Slovakian hearts.
And yet, as Toney did his thing and England snuck out of shtook to book a place in the quarter-finals, it was hard to shake a familiar, infuriating question, one that on this evidence may yet be asked in more rueful circumstances somewhere down the line: why, oh why, did Southgate leave it so long?
