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England went a goal up in a World Cup semi-final. Then, with more than half an hour left, they invited Lionel Messi to spend that half hour crossing the ball into their own box. It finished 2-1. Argentina are in the final. England are in the third-place game against France.
I didn’t go to Reddit for the heartbreak. I went for the diagnosis. And what I found on r/ThreeLions, a few thousand comments deep across the night, wasn’t a grieving fanbase slowly working out what went wrong. It was a fanbase that had already decided, before the final whistle, exactly whose fault it was, and spent the rest of the night arguing about whether that decision was fair.
Almost nobody in the thread was surprised, and almost everybody wanted somewhere to put the blame.
The moment England scored (Anthony Gordon, just before the hour) the mood didn’t lift, it dropped. People described the exact same sinking feeling, at the exact same time, watching the team retreat toward its own goal. “About 10 mins after we scored I started getting that sinking feeling,” wrote one commenter on 218 points. “We lost all the momentum and applied pretty much zero pressure, you could only see it going one way.” Someone underneath added the line that half the thread was thinking: “Can’t have the lead too early. Too much time for the bus to breakdown.”
Whether that’s a crowd that genuinely read the game better than the manager, or a crowd that needed a villain and found one the moment things started going wrong, is a fair question, and the thread doesn’t fully settle it either way. What’s true is that the feeling arrived early, and it arrived at the hydration break specifically: people assumed the manager would use the break to steady the team and go again, and instead watched him take off the fastest attacker for a defender. Whatever you make of the tactics, that’s the moment the mood turned from anxious to furious.
The single most upvoted reaction, on 468, just reached for a cartoon. 👀 “I feel like it’s the end of a Scooby Doo episode where Tuchel is unmasked to reveal Southgate.” 👀
You could feel the whole thread nodding, whether or not the nodding was fair.
What I didn’t expect was how much of the anger arrived with a spreadsheet attached.
This is a crowd that doesn’t just feel a game, it counts it. Someone posted the possession split for the twenty-odd minutes between the two goals: England 15%, Argentina 85%. Others had it at 12% for the spell right after Gordon scored. And then the stat that genuinely stopped me, sitting quietly a few hundred comments down: “England’s number of accurate passes in the 18 minutes and 37 seconds between 66:05 and 84:42 was just 2. Both of those accurate passes were between goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and centre-back John Stones passing to each other in the same position.”
Two passes. In nearly nineteen minutes. Against Argentina.
Somebody else, more bluntly: “Kane walked more than Messi.” It’s the kind of line that sounds damning in the moment and worth treating with a bit of caution once the anger’s worn off, but it’s the sort of thing a thread like this produces by the dozen once it’s decided who the villain is.
The central charge was the one the Scooby Doo joke made. England spent a lot of money and a lot of goodwill replacing Gareth Southgate specifically so this wouldn’t happen, and then it happened, arguably worse.
“Lose by trying. Not lose by just giving up,” ran one of the night’s most upvoted lines, on 309. Under it, a hundred variations of the same feeling: that losing would have been survivable, but surrendering was not. “I’d rather lose by trying than losing like that,” someone wrote. “That was heartbreaking to watch and go through.”
The comparison to Southgate came up constantly, and the thread mostly landed on the uncomfortable verdict that this was worse. Southgate, the argument went, drifted into caution slowly, and had the excuse of rebuilding a broken team. This was a switch. Go 1-0 up, bring on defenders, shift to a back five, hand Messi the freedom of the pitch. One long, much-liked breakdown put the sequence in order: sixty minutes in, better team, comfortable, dangerous on the break, then three subs including the left winger and the midfielder who’d been doubling up on Messi, then “no longer any pressure on the greatest player of all time, he goes on to get two assists.” The word “cowardly” appears a lot. So does “sabotage,” usually half as a joke.
But the thread isn’t a single voice, and the honest bit is that a real minority pushed back, and pushed back well. One commenter did the sums the other way: the collapse in possession started at minute 55, when England scored, and the substitutions didn’t come until fifteen and twenty minutes after that, so “it wasn’t the substitutions that lost us the game.” A neutral Danish fan, there out of curiosity, said the English habit of pinning 95% of the blame on the manager and glazing the players was a bit much: England weren’t just outplayed after the goal, they were “massively outworked.” And a couple of people made the point that stings the most, because it’s true: “if we had won 1-0 everyone would have been praising Tuchel as a master.”
The thread never fully resolves that argument. It just holds both halves of it at once, which is closer to honest than most match reports manage.
Then, in the middle of all that, a completely different thread, and a completely different internet.
Djed Spence went into this tournament as a punchline. A Tottenham full-back plenty of England fans didn’t rate, or actively didn’t want in the squad. He came out of this game as the one player nobody had a bad word for, and the thread about him turned into something you don’t see often online: a long, sincere, unprompted queue of people apologising to a stranger for having doubted him.
“His performances were a massive f*ck you to all those talking shit about him beforehand. Well done, lad.” (290 points.) “My name is Maniac and I was also responsible for talking shit about him before the World Cup. I am sorry Djed, I was wrong.” “I was djead wrong.” An Arsenal fan, a Leeds fan who’d had him on loan and thought he was hopeless, one after another, publicly changing their minds. The top comment in the whole thread was three words. “Love you Djed.”
The moment they kept coming back to was a last-ditch tackle he made on Simeone. On 136 points: “That tackle🔥.” Underneath, the ache of it: “When he made that tackle it felt like a defining moment to show that we would go to the final. It hurts to think back on it now.” He was hurt in the build-up to Argentina’s winner, stepped on, unable to get back up in time to stop the cross. So the one player the crowd had misjudged was also, quietly, in the middle of the goal that ended it. Nobody blamed him. They just felt for him.
Every fanbase has a coping mechanism. England’s, apparently, is to convert en masse to a new nationality.
Within an hour, r/ThreeLions had a thread that was pure, load-bearing silliness, and it was some of the funniest stuff I read all night. “Absolutely. I’ve been supporting Spain for so many minutes now. Really hope they can finally pull this off.” That one sat on top, at 513. Right behind it, on 311: “there’s a lion in their flag, and there’s a lion in our logo. we are all practically spanish now.” A German wandered in to announce he had “a trolly problem” about who to support in the final, and was gently told it was the easiest trolley problem in the world. People started replying to each other in Duolingo Spanish. “Today, I feel Spanish.” “Repite conmigo: hoy, me siento español.” Someone offered to make paella for Sunday.
It’s daft, and it’s also the sound of a few thousand people making each other feel better at once.
I’ll be straight about the other side of it, because the crowd is not one wise voice and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. There was a separate, much darker thread about a banner some Argentina players held up after the game, and it pulled in everything you’d expect: the Falklands, real bitterness, a decent amount of plain xenophobia, and a few comments I won’t repeat. What’s worth noting, from a community point of view, is what was happening underneath it. The r/ThreeLions moderators were visibly at work in real time, auto-removing accounts brigading in from rival subs, pulling comments flagged as antagonistic, leaving the tidy-up notes in the thread. The same community that produced the paella jokes also produced its worst instincts, and a volunteer mod team was quietly standing between the two all night.
Not, I think, that the crowd was simply right and the manager was simply wrong. A few thousand furious people at 11pm on the night of a semi-final defeat are not a neutral panel of judges, they’re a fanbase that needed somewhere to put the pain, and Tuchel was standing in exactly the right spot for it. Plenty of the thread’s angriest lines read, on a second pass, like a want for a villain more than a verdict.
But it’s worth noticing what the crowd did with that anger. It didn’t just vent, it argued with itself. The Danish neutral who thought the players were getting let off too easily. The commenter who admitted that if England had won 1-0, the same substitutions would be getting called a masterclass. The stats people kept quoting instead of just shouting. None of that resolves the argument about whether Tuchel got it right or wrong. It just means the thread, taken as a whole, was more honest about its own bias than a single hot take from any one commenter would suggest. It wanted a villain, and it knew, some of the time, that it wanted one.
And then, in the same night, on the same subreddit, it turned around and did the opposite thing entirely: it forgave a player it had written off completely, in public, unprompted, the moment he proved it wrong. That’s the part I keep coming back to. The same crowd capable of deciding a manager’s fate in the space of a hydration break is also capable of queuing up to say sorry to a full-back.
The last word I’ll give to the commenter who summed up the whole national mood in one image. Furious, and then, in the same breath, decent: “I hope there are no idiots sending death threats to Tuchel. I hope there’s no reaction at all. All it warrants is a Tesco value gift card. ‘Thank you for your work. Kind regards, England,’ with a £5 Greggs voucher that expires at the end of the month.”
Gutted. Still funny. Still, somehow, kind about it.
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