Hope, Fear and 175 Seconds: England’s Football Journey

The writer Rebecca Solnit once argued that hope, properly used, can move societies. In football, it tends to move stomachs. From Lincoln City’s grim 2-1 loss to Wigan in 2024 to England folding against Argentina on Wednesday, the same line keeps surfacing like a bad chant: “It’s the hope that kills you.”

It has no clear author. People attach it to Shakespeare, Peter Ustinov, anyone with a vaguely wise face. Ted Lasso tried to rehabilitate it – “I think it’s the lack of hope that comes and gets you” – while Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses sharpened it into something darker: “It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you – that kills you.”

You didn’t need fiction to understand it in those final 10 minutes against Argentina. You just needed a pulse.

Fear first, always

Hope doesn’t walk out with the players. Fear does. It’s there in the absurd 10-second countdown, in the first backpass to Jordan Pickford, in the thud of your own heart going double time. The opening exchanges don’t calm anything; they just establish a baseline of anxiety.

Then the rhythm of the game settles into a familiar English neurosis. Giuliano Simeone harries and hacks and snarls. Every challenge from a blue-and-white shirt feels like a crime. Every foul from an English player is, somehow, justified. A yellow card for them is overdue; a yellow card for us is harsh. The pint in your hand becomes a pint of pure myopia.

Half-time arrives and with it the first proper wave of pessimism. The longer this stays tight, the more you back Argentina’s know-how. They have muscle memory, you mutter. They’re wily, you say, with a respect that sounds a lot like dread.

When hope finally walks in

Then the cross. The finish. The eruption.

For a few seconds it’s not about tactics, or shape, or expected goals. It’s about noise. Relief, joy, disbelief, all tangled together. The first clean hit of hope. Not the vague, pre-match kind, but the sharp, specific sort: we’re ahead, they need two now, we’ve seen enough football to know that matters.

From that moment, every action carries weight. Djed Spence, who has drifted through the evening with the air of a man who’ll go home and do the washing-up afterwards, suddenly detonates into the tackle of the night. Perfect timing, perfect aggression. The celebration is pure Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci, a defender’s primal scream.

You shout “Yes, Djed!” at the screen. In another timeline, that challenge becomes a montage anchor, a statue outside a stadium. The tackle that saved the semi-final. The tackle that changed everything.

The slow retreat

But the retreat has already begun. The back line sinks, then sinks some more. The midfield drops with it. Whether it’s a call from the bench, an instinct from the players, or that deep-rooted English paralysis, the pattern is unmistakable: protect what you have, even if it means inviting the inevitable.

Nobody really needs another chalkboard breakdown. You can feel the shift without freeze-frames. The ball stops sticking up front. England’s attacks become clearances. Argentina’s attacks become waves.

And yet, in that storm, hope starts to grow rather than shrink. Every minute survived feels like a small heist. Every block, every save, every hacked clearance adds another brick to the fantasy.

In the 82nd minute, Nico O’Reilly charges down a pass, then chases the ricochet and blocks again. England are suddenly pressing in the opposition half, a brief expedition into foreign territory. “That’s saved eight seconds,” you say, half-joking, fully serious.

Moments later Lionel Messi, the man built for these endings, floats a cross that drifts harmlessly over everyone and out for a goal-kick. That’s the instant it turns. Maybe. Just maybe.

The mind races ahead. A World Cup final. A few surreal days in New York. Preview podcasts and radio hits that practically script themselves. A column about hope, but the good kind this time. The professional privilege of riding the wave instead of analysing the wreckage.

Two minutes and 55 seconds

Goal-kick to England. Pickford waits. John Stones juggles the ball, killing seconds with little keepy-ups that feel both outrageous and entirely necessary. Pickford launches it long. O’Reilly contests, forces a throw-in deep in Argentina’s half.

Guy Mowbray notes the time: 84 minutes. Alan Shearer admits he keeps staring at the clock, convinced it’s barely moving. The nation does the same.

At 84:24, Enzo Fernández lets fly from distance. Pickford tips it over. The shot is rising, probably going over anyway, but the fingertips touch is reassuring. The crowd exhales. Just hold your line. Just keep your shape.

At 84:55, Enzo has the ball again, this time with too much room on the edge of the box. No frantic pressure. No desperate lunge. He shoots. He scores. And everyone watching knows, instantly and absolutely, that it’s done.

From the moment of real, unguarded belief to the equaliser, the window is brutally small: two minutes and 55 seconds. That’s all the time hope truly had.

It didn’t kill anyone. It did something stranger. It thrilled, it terrified, it made the whole thing feel alive.

Living with the almost

For England supporters, the question isn’t just whether they’ll ever see this team win something. It’s whether they’re ready for what that would actually feel like. The release after decades of scar tissue. The end of a story that has defined generations of fandom.

Maybe that test never comes. Maybe the near-misses keep stacking up, each one adding a new layer to the national complex. For now, a sliver of hope still seems to be enough. Not the grand, banner-waving kind, but the fleeting, private variety that lives in those 175 seconds before Enzo’s shot hits the net.

If hope can drive people to change the world, it can certainly do something smaller and stranger: it can let you picture Adam Wharton lifting the European Championship trophy in 2028, just for a heartbeat, before reality barges back in.

And that brief, impossible image is why people keep coming back. Not because hope kills them, but because, for a few minutes at a time, it makes them feel more alive than anything else.