Talk about a bitter pill to swallow.
England were the best team on the night and yet we’re coming home from Qatar because a man you’d normally bet your life on missed from the penalty spot and because France, ultimately, were more streetwise than we were.
That’s where we’ve got to get to now. We have to find a way to win in games which really matter, which is exactly what the defending world champions were able to do.
It’s all right Kylian Mbappe laughing after Harry Kane’s penalty miss but he barely had a sniff because Kyle Walker snuffed him out. But what France did have, though, was Antoine Griezmann in fine form and he ultimately made the difference.
People always talk about teams winning games but sometimes you need one player to get you out of the s**t, someone to step up and do the business when it really matters, and Griezmann did that for Les Bleus.
He was a Rolls-Royce on the night, part playmaker and part line-breaker. He popped off little one-twos to get himself and his side out of jail at times, he played passes here and there, and put a cross on a dime for Olivier Giroud to score the all-important second for France.
For so long he was the forgotten man in French football but he was excellent, a really good technician in key areas of the park and a cut above.
Of course, had Kane followed up his first penalty by beating Hugo Lloris again then we may well have at least forced extra-time and who knows how demoralised France would have been to have twice thrown away leads.
But it wasn’t to be and Lee Dixon got it spot on in commentary when he said Kane looked as if he wanted to go the same way against Lloris, his club-mate and a man he knows well, and just tried to put more power — too much as it turned out — on it.
What a shame for Kane and for England. Had that opportunity gone in then we could have continued to target Theo Hernandez, who has been comfortably the worst left-back at the World Cup. So bad, in fact, that he reminded me of Emmanuel Eboue at his absolute worst for Arsenal.
I know in the days to come there will be a sense of injustice about the fact referee Wilton Sampaio and his VAR team didn’t pull play back for a foul on Saka just before Aurelien Tchouameni’s opener but I wasn’t too concerned by that.
He’s a no-nonsense referee, Sampaio, and where the France midfielder took the shot from and the passage of play before that I didn’t really see a problem, we had time to sort it out.
If an England player had been disallowed a goal from that position following something that was fairly innocuous I wouldn’t have been that happy. As for the first penalty shout, when Kane went down under a challenge from Dayot Upamecano, it wasn’t a penalty.
Kane does that all the time, he chucks his legs around an opponent’s legs and makes it look like contact. I’ve seen them given and seem them not.
If I’m going to be picky, Phil Foden was disappointing on the night — I don’t think he ever managed to get into the game in the way that we’d want him to, the way we know he can.
But Declan Rice was excellent, 8/10 or 9/10 and so, too, was Harry Maguire. And in terms of his creativity and influence going forward, the same must be said about Bukayo Saka.
They will be gutted, we’re all gutted. We had a chance to reach the semi-finals at a second successive World Cup but sadly we came up short.
