England Overcomes Germany, and Its Demons

Two goals at Wembley deliver England to the Euro 2020 quarterfinals, and banish a generation of bitter memories.

LONDON — The history, England’s players has said, did not matter. Not a single member of Gareth Southgate’s squad remembers the pain of 1990. Only one or two had the dimmest recollection of the bitter regret of 1996. For most, the shadow Germany casts over England in soccer stretches back only a decade or so, to 2010, the most recent update of England’s great inferiority complex. But that is not to say that it has not affected them. The maudlin sense of imminent doom that infects England before every major tournament. The self-flagellation and the endemic doubt and the frenzied querying of every decision, no matter how minor: that all stems back to those defeats, to those days when England was so close and yet so far, when Germany stood for all that the country — or at least its soccer team — could not be. It was that, all of that, which they had to overcome to make the quarterfinals of Euro 2020, in front of a raucous Wembley, a place on a hair-trigger, primed to celebrate or to castigate at the first hint of hope or of despair. And it was that, all of that, which came pouring out when Raheem Sterling tapped England ahead, just as the nerves were starting to jangle and the ghosts starting to hover.