The ruthlessness driving England’s mighty Lionesses towards 2023 World Cup glory

This is history. This determined, steely women’s team have it in their grasp. Here in Stadium Australia, they completed the job again. It is now 57 years since an England football team appeared in a World Cup final. In Sydney on Sunday, they finally go again.

Sarina Wiegman, composed and poised as ever, appears not to grasp the feeling of desperation. This is one of the head coach’s charms: the Dutchwoman’s studied distance from the terrible history of English agony that she has inherited, her straightforward dismissal of this national nonsense.

She was asked afterwards about the 57-year thing, about being only the second person ever to have guided

England into a World Cup final. Please, Sarina, throw us some kind of cerebral reflection about the meaning of all this. And she said she felt “lucky”.

Lucky? I’m sorry but lucky isn’t good enough. Lucky doesn’t come close. Lucky is how we feel when Sam Kerr, Australia’s star striker, blasts a chance of an equaliser wide from eight yards out.

Yet Wiegman and her emotional froideur are clearly perfect. She can try to retain her team’s coolness for the next few days, she may need to, for the immensity of this achievement was lost on none of them after this game.

For those who relate the 57 years and – OK, I suppose we can’t not go there – those “years of hurt” to men’s football, there has been another tormented history altogether lived by their sisters in the women’s team.

Semi-final elimination in 2015, the same in 2019. Some of this team have lived it and carried the scars. I spoke to Alex Greenwood after the game, brimming with emotions she hardly recognised and struggled to express.

“I cannot put it into words,” she said. “I just keep having to say, ‘We’re in a World Cup final.’”

And that terrible weight of the two semi-finals she had played and lost, she said, had finally lifted. “That’s something we don’t have to think about any more.”

There’s a danger, here, of suggesting that this is job done – we’re in a final, we’ve done enough – though that would be selling these women short and it would undervalue everything that Wiegman brings and the mindset and efficiency that they have brought to their expertise. They are not a team who dazzle. They will not go out in blazes of glory. They do not dominate and they certainly haven’t towered over this World Cup. Sometimes they have underperformed.

Even on Wednesday they were a safety-first unit whose caution gave the Australian Matildas more opportunities than any sane supporter could reasonably wish to live through again.

Yet they have a mentality and a quality that seems to get the job done. Efficiency is a term linked to machines and German teams, it feels rather un-English and that maybe explains why they have edged their way to an opportunity so rare that a special kind of history beckons.

The team are so effective, so capable, that you can overlook their excellence too. We came here, to Stadium Australia, to marvel at Kerr, wondering if she could rise to the occasion, if she could live up to her superstar billing – and sure enough, she picked up the ball on the halfway line and ran at Millie Bright so confidently that the England captain was back-pedalling at such a rate that she was unable to prevent Kerr from unleashing a shot from 25 yards that beat the goalkeeper too. Talk about moments of greatness.

Yet this was the same Kerr who then floated a header over the bar. That should have been 2-2. And she then fluffed the final chance, eight yards out, a volley sitting up beautifully yet blazed wide. Again, should have been 2-2.

Meanwhile, if it’s efficiency that you want, then it’s Alessia Russo who will deliver for you. Two opportunities in two games, on both occasions she takes the ball into the right side of the penalty area, hammers her shot unswervingly across the face of the goal, out of the reach of the goalkeeper and inside the left-hand post.

No one is talking about Russo as one of the world’s best, but she has produced in consecutive knockout rounds to take England into Sunday’s final. Thank you very much; Wiegman was never particularly wowed by superstars. This is all about the team.

One other thing about Russo’s goal: it was scored at the Wilkinson end. Twenty years after the drop-goal with which Wilkinson did the job for that 2003 rugby team, Russo converted over the same piece of turf to give England the 3-1 lead and ensure that the Lionesses would get a shot at a world title too.

And so Sunday beckons. The history of England and World Cups is desperate indeed. The men have won only one single version of each of the football, rugby union and cricket World Cups and they were each so hard to win they all required extra time.

The England women’s cricket team have won their World Cup four times; the rugby team have won theirs twice. The Lionesses, meanwhile, have never been to a final. That anomaly is no more. Now the greater opportunity is presented here.

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In those vivid, exciting moments after this match, Ella Toone discussed her brilliant strike that put England ahead in the first half and the new state of the world that her team now inhabit. “We wanted to take England and women’s football to a new level,” she said, “and, over the last 12 months, we have certainly done that.”

Indeed they have. And they will return, now, to Stadium Australia, already a historic place for English sportsmen and sportswomen.

– The Times

Originally published as The ruthlessness driving England’s mighty Lionesses towards 2023 World Cup glory