Football and statistics still do not always sit comfortably alongside each other, but sometimes curiosities do not need to be tricky to count or analyse. There is, for instance, the quirk that ahead of their World Cup 2022 meeting on Friday, England are yet to beat their USA counterparts in even a semi-competitive meeting.
Those don’t come around all too often, of course: the sum total of them is the 1950 World Cup, the 2010 World Cup and, sandwiched in between but stricken from the minds of many, the 1993 US Cup. The earliest of those was the infamous 1-0 reversal which some outlets reportedly thought must be wrong, and so printed an erroneous scoreline. The most recent saw Steven Gerrard score, before Clint Dempsey’s equaliser trickled through Rob Green’s hands and over the line.
