The Age of Gareth lives on: England’s peaks and troughs lead to Swiss test

OK. So you’re saying there’s a chance. With 94 minutes of football already played at a clammy and frazzled AufSchalke Arena, with England 1-0 down against Slovakia and about to exit the European Championship in miserable fashion, with the entire Age of Gareth poised to sink into a toxic farewell, the range of possibilities for the next few seconds seemed fairly stark.

Forty minutes later England would leave the pitch victorious, 2-1 winners of their last-16 tie after extra time, drenched in the sweet, sweet sounds of Sweet Caroline, and ready now for a quarter-final against Switzerland on Saturday.

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They were propelled there by a stunning intervention from Jude Bellingham, and by an extra-time winner from Harry Kane as Slovakia briefly fell apart. How exactly, did we get from there to here?

This was a moment of genuine double take, to the extent it even felt a little subversive. English sporting failure has a rigid, unforgiving kind of shape. We know the muscle memory of these occasions too well. This is after all just people in shorts standing around doing things.

There was a circularity, too. Eight years on from the last great English men’s footballing collapse, the all-time low of defeat against Iceland in 2016, England seemed to be turning Southgate’s final game at this European Championship into a repeat of the match that helped bungle him into the job as a replacement for the replacement.

Here we had yet another bedraggled defeat against a likable minor nation in blue, fringed by the boos and roars of your own supporters. You can change the culture, lift the spirits, become the subject of an uplifting West End play about reimagining England. But the island is still an island. The island, Gareth, is us.

Anyway. That’s what didn’t happen. Instead Bellingham decided to do something else.

It takes a particular kind of freshly turned 21-year-old to look around with those 94 minutes of drudgery and pain already passed, with England becoming England, the face in the mirror revealing itself, and to decide that in fact this really would be an excellent time to produce a flying overheard volley into the corner of the Slovakian net.

But then, Bellingham is already an extraordinary figure, the most beautifully gifted, impossibly mature 21-year-old. He is already a superstar, already a source of main-character energy, a Birmingham boy who skipped the Premier League and became a star with Borussia Dortmund and now a superstar with Real Madrid.

Bellingham is also still in his origin story phase. We don’t know yet what he will be. There will be twists. His brashness has drawn a few weary shrugs in the last fortnight. He has an edge. He doesn’t apologise for being good, has no faux humility, or even faux-faux humility. Bellingham isn’t as good as he thinks he is, some have said. Well, yeah. But then nobody has ever been as good as Jude Bellingham thinks Jude Bellingham is. That is his super strength. Aim higher.

And as of Sunday afternoon he is also the person who produced here one of the most extraordinary moments in English sport over the last however many years you want to count, the kind of moment that might have been cut from the script by a 1980s daytime soap opera on grounds if implausibility.

Make no mistake, England had been dreadful in this game to that point. From the opening moments they played once again like a team that had taken the brown acid. Why do England seem to have fewer players? Why are those players demagnetised, repelled, space always between them. Watching England try to play coherent international football here has been like watching a colony of gerbils trying to work out how to assemble a flatpack wardrobe, overseen all the while by a frowning, bearded man who has taken a vow of silent inaction, and as a result can only look on sadly in a pair of slacks and a sports-casual T-shirt.

And yet, England do have this other thing, the Bellingham possibility. English football is prone to belief in saviours, to moments of messiah-dom. Probably this isn’t going to do it any good at all in the longer term.

But it happened all the same, as the players pulled out of the air three perfect touches. Kyle Walker hurled the ball long from the right-hand side. Marc Guéhi flicked it on. Next: the thing happened.

Bellingham waited, read the flight of the ball, then had the spatial intelligence, the basic will and athleticism to launch himself up, rotating in mid-air to a state where his right foot was now higher where than his head had just been, bringing it up in a perfect arc to make contact with his instep and send the ball fizzing inside the far post.

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We tend to find flaws in sport, to revolt against the idea of hype and cheerleading. But come on. It was a perfect finish. Frankly, the Arena AufSchalke, already tortured by England’s witlessness to that point, struggled to take this in. There was a moment of silence, something that sounded more like a gurgle, then a wave of noise, bodies seething and rolling stands, as the Slovakians collapsed on the pitch.

It was an amazing for its timing too, with the world turning hostile, the evening already dissolved into a kind of wake for the age of Gareth. Being England manager is usually portrayed as a quest, as a journey towards something, that thing being the same old thing, the reinstatement of English greatness, the removal of the sword from the stone.

In reality it is a flight. You are the quarry. And the thing pursuing you is failure. Every victory is no more than an act of delay. Southgate is essentially out here divvying up legacy, teetering at every turn between defiant success and crowing failure. Which way will it fall? England will now play Switzerland in Düsseldorf, a game they can win if they play well, something that frankly seems laughably remote on the back of four matches so far. But stranger things have happened. One of them here.