England’s Latest Lesson in Suffering: Hope and Fear in Football

There is a line in Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark that lingers long after you’ve put the book down. She quotes Maria Popova: “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivety.” It’s meant for politics and protest, for people trying to bend history in a kinder direction. It works just as well for 30 tortured minutes of football.

Because if you watched England’s collapse against Argentina, you weren’t thinking about social change. You were thinking about survival.

You were thinking about your heart rate as the ball rolled back to Jordan Pickford.

You were thinking about hope, and why it always feels like a trap.

“It’s the hope that kills you” – or is it?

The phrase has become football’s unofficial slogan of despair. Lincoln City fan Graham Burrell wrote it after a 2-1 defeat to Wigan in 2024, mourning a play-off push he felt had just died. It’s been pinned to pub walls, muttered on concourses, turned into gallows humour for generations who have watched their teams almost get there.

Nobody knows who said it first. Shakespeare? Peter Ustinov? Some bloke in Row J at Wembley? It doesn’t matter. The line has survived because football keeps providing the evidence.

Others have tried to fight it. Ted Lasso, the fictional optimist-in-chief, rejected it outright: the problem isn’t hope, he argued, it’s the lack of it. Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses went the other way, twisting the knife: “It’s not the hope that kills you. It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you – that kills you.”

On Wednesday night you could imagine both of them in the England dugout. Lasso would never have ordered a back six. He’d have them 10 yards higher, pressing, playing, insisting on bravery. Lamb would have lit into them, torn strips off anyone who retreated, called them idiots and told them to get on with it.

Arm round the shoulder or boot up the backside. England, in those final minutes, looked like they needed both.

Fear first, always

Hope never starts the game. Not really. Not in knockout football. The dominant feeling in the build-up is fear: fear during the warm-up, fear during the absurd 10‑second TV countdown, fear as Pickford takes his first touch and you realise how much you care about where he puts it.

The match settles, but your nerves don’t. They just change shape. The opening exchanges become a kind of base-level dread, punctuated by spikes of anger. Giuliano Simeone snaps into challenges, hacks, snarls, and every contact feels like an injustice. Where’s the yellow card? What’s the referee doing? Are the conspiracy theorists onto something?

By that stage, even a perfectly timed Argentine tackle looks sinister. Every English foul feels righteous. You drink in the myopia. Another pint of it, please.

Half-time brings the first real wave of pessimism. You look at the clock, at the pattern of the game, and the logic kicks in. The longer this goes, the more it suits Argentina. They’ve done this before. They know where to stand, when to foul, when to slow it, when to quicken it. You mutter phrases like “muscle memory” and call them “wily bastards” because that’s what they are.

And then the goal comes.

The surge

The cross is perfect. The finish is perfect. For a split second, the whole thing feels easy, inevitable, like this was always going to happen. The stadium erupts not just in joy, but in release. Relief floods the place. Shoulders drop. Voices crack. You hear yourself saying the familiar line: “Well, at least they need two now.”

That’s the first true moment of hope. Not the cautious, pre-match kind. The real thing. The dangerous stuff.

It returns a few minutes later in a tackle that should live much longer in the memory than it will. Djed Spence, who has floated through the contest with a kind of languid composure, suddenly explodes into life. He flies into a challenge with the force and timing of a defender who has decided, absolutely, that this attack is going no further.

The celebration is pure Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci – veins bulging, fists pumping, a roar to the sky. “Yes, Djed!” you shout at the screen, because you know how rare that is. If England hold on, that moment becomes montage material. It becomes a statue outside a stadium. The greatest England tackle since Eric Dier on Sergio Ramos – and, this time, with even more at stake.

Instead, it becomes a footnote.

The retreat

By then, the retreat is already under way. The back line drops. The midfield follows. The front players turn from attackers into auxiliary full-backs. Somewhere, in a TV studio or a WhatsApp group, someone is saying: “It’s too early to defend this.”

But England do it anyway. Whether it’s instruction, instinct or paralysis hardly matters. The pattern is familiar: possession ceded, territory lost, time stretched. You know exactly how this story usually ends, and yet you keep watching.

Because this is the strange thing about hope in football: it often grows in the ugliest moments. With every scrambled clearance, every missed Argentine chance, every Pickford save, the possibility creeps closer. It doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It sidles in, uninvited.

In the 82nd minute, Nico O’Reilly charges down a pass, then charges down another. England, briefly, are in Argentina’s half – a foreign land by that stage. You look at the clock and calculate the gain in seconds. Eight, maybe. Eight precious seconds.

A minute later, Lionel Messi – yes, that one – floats a cross hopelessly over everyone and out for a goal-kick. It is such a harmless, human moment from a footballing alien that it jolts you. Maybe. Just maybe.

Now you’re thinking ahead. Not just to the final whistle, but beyond it. To a World Cup final. To the days in between, filled with preview shows and tactical breakdowns and endless debates about destiny. To the privilege of still being in the tournament, of watching other games knowing your team is still alive.

Two minutes and 55 seconds

Goal-kick to England. Pickford, the clock, the angle. Scoring a goal is hard, even if you have Messi. England just have to not concede one.

John Stones starts doing keepy-ups in his own area, a tiny act of defiance, or maybe just a way of killing a heartbeat or two. Pickford launches it long. O’Reilly gets something on it. Argentina’s throw, deep in their own half. The commentators are clock-watching now.

“Eighty-four minutes on the clock now,” says Guy Mowbray. “I keep looking at that clock and thinking it’s going ever so slow,” replies Alan Shearer.

At 84:24, Enzo Fernández lets fly from distance. Pickford tips it over. It’s going over anyway, but the touch is a statement: not this one, not yet. You tell yourself it’s fine. Just keep your shape. See it out.

At 84:55, Fernández has too much time again on the edge of the box. No one gets close enough. No one shuts down the shot. Enzo shoots. Enzo scores.

In that instant, you know it’s done. Not mathematically, not rationally, but emotionally. The air goes out of you. The hope that had been building, fragile and thrilling, is punctured in one clean strike.

Two minutes and 55 seconds. That’s the window. The span of time in which hope was not theoretical, not aspirational, but real. A living thing.

It didn’t kill you. It did the opposite. It made everything feel sharper, louder, more alive.

The morsel that keeps you coming back

England’s men may never win anything in your lifetime. That’s the quiet thought many fans carry, even if they rarely say it out loud. And there is a genuine question, buried under all the jokes and fatalism: are you even ready for what it would feel like if they did?

For now, that question remains hypothetical. The trophy lifts belong to others. The parades happen elsewhere.

But hope, in small doses, still does its work. A few minutes here, a perfect cross there, a Djed Spence tackle that makes you leap off the sofa. A fleeting belief that Adam Wharton might be the one hoisting the European Championship trophy in 2028.

It might never happen. It might only ever live in that thin space between the whistle and the equaliser, between the keepy-ups and the goal.

For millions, that morsel is somehow enough to keep turning the TV back on, to keep walking through the turnstiles, to keep risking the same old line:

It’s the hope that kills you.

Or is it the only thing that keeps this game – and all its suffering – worth living through?