Bellingham double seals quarter-final comeback win for England against Norway
WINNER: Jude Bellingham bags the winner from a rebound early in extra time. Pic: Nick Potts/PA
Off the wire? Perhaps. Off the hook? Surely.
Thomas Tuchel and England are off to a World Cup semi-final, just the second time in 36 years they have made it this deep. Again they had to go into the depths of themselves to get there. Some were empty from the get-go on a Saturday evening when one’s idea of ‘heavy sweating’ was redefined, T-shirts and cheeks and whole faces changing colour within minutes of stepping into the unconditioned air.
You ask yourself how they got there? When, even after two hours of surely they can’t, they did. The answer would appear to be mostly the same way they have since they crossed the Atlantic: by relying oh so heavily on one of their two game-changers and finding a couple of other heroes from a rotating supporting cast who should thank all of the gods for Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham.
Here, with Kane a shuffling peripheral presence, it was Bellingham who reclaimed centre stage with two very different moments of clinical brilliance. His brace brought him to six tournament goals and was enough to see off Norway who will also now wonder how. Their fairytale summer is over when it could and maybe should have been extended on to Atlanta on Wednesday.
Having seen Dan Burn write his name into some kind of history — we don’t yet know how meaningful all of this is but English momentum feels compelling — off the bench against Mexico, Tuchel saw Djed Spence deliver a supersub display which helped swing the contest in extra-time. Morgan Rogers also had an impact while Elliot Anderson ran himself into the Everglades. And honestly, that was enough.
Argentina and Switzerland will soon fight to join them in that Georgia semi-final but Tuchel’s class of 2026 have perfected the bend-don’t-break thing. Even if they came awfully close this time.
Norway had seen Torbjørn Heggem’s bundled rebound 10 minutes after the restart of normal time ruled out for an Erling Haaland shove on Anderson. Yet England would get away with a defensive shove of their own in the chaos after Kristoffer Ajer hit Jordan Pickford’s crossbar on 76 minutes.
It may have been a cloudless cauldron of a day but Tuchel’s men were having officialdom, fortunes and perhaps even fibre-optic cables all shine on them. Jordan Pickford looked antsy and the midfield had mostly been surrendered to Martin Odegaard, who was absolutely magnificent. Oscar Bobb and Antonio Nusa had come in with pace either side of Haaland and Tuchel’s idiosyncratic changes — Reece James added as a shield in front of the back four? — felt like the kind to be pored over in post-mortems to come.
But these are the games that England win now. Two summers ago in Germany, Slovakia and Switzerland had them on the brink but they clawed back. The cathartic penalty breakthrough against Colombia in Moscow another in that genre.
Six days after their heroic defensive stand at the Azteca England dragged themselves to extra-time here by denying Norway Haaland anything remotely clear cut. His teammates also denied him that.
England were blessed to be level at the interval, Alexander Sorloth abysmally butchering a two-on-one which could have been a 42nd-minute knockout blow had he fed Haaland. But one of Tuchel’s two game-changers who’ve also had to be game-savers over the past month had done it again. While Norway raged at the intervention of an overhead camera cable in the equaliser, Ørjan Nyland’s goal kick looked to take a deflection off the wire, Bellingham only raced forward, slicing through the softest viking defence to level.
By the end Bellingham would be leading another deafening chorus of Wonderwall then Hey Jude.
For those wondering whether this would be a night of English miscues, things got off to a promising start, songstress Ellie Goulding was forced to persevere though not one but two ditties with a faulty microphone. Her compatriots didn’t fare much better with the national anthem, the east end of Miami Stadium saving their king at a much higher tempo than those opposite.
The statistical dives and debate over which of Tuchel’s defenders had the most success in keeping Haaland quiet in the Premier League felt like just more hot air to add to the perma-pressure systems of south Florida. The mercury made clear that this wasn’t Manchester and club isn’t country. In the end, the man who had the best record against him, Aston Villa’s Ezri Konsa was shuttled out to right back anyway, John Stones moving into the centre in the reshuffle resulting from Jarell Quansah’s suspension.
Tuchel’s other call was to swap Noni Madueke in for Bukayo Saka, graft over craft the easiest way to explain it away. That kinda day.
Mostly the 24 minutes which preceded the first hydration break were an illustration of the conditions rather than context dictating a contest. This may have been a quarter-final pitting two teams carrying momentum and belief and a sense of destiny in here. But FIFA’s decision to play it on a Saturday afternoon in a boiling boil built on land reclaimed from the Everglades swamps meant things like pace and tempo weren’t the priority. Anthony Gordon looked like someone had been throwing plums at him, red faces aplenty.
By the half-hour, the eight players with the most touches were English and Haaland had less than a handful. What did it count for? Precious little. Six minutes later it counted for nothing at all.
Kane felt that Patrick Berg had dispossessed him from behind with too much force and sat on the turf whinging to Clement Turpin as Norway got on with it. Odegaard fed the ball softly to Schjelderup and that’s where the softness ended. The sole change to the Norway line-up, the Benfica man paid it off with a piece of ferocious beauty.
Haaland was free at the back post but it was surely a shot, flashed with so much power across Jordan Pickford’s face and he turned, eerily like David Seaman had in Shizuoka 24 summers earlier, to watch it rattle in off the post. Odegaard was under Schjelderup and had him on his shoulders in a flash. English shoulders slumped and stayed low. Norway could have kept them there but instead had to look up the other end at night’s end and see Tuchel’s Lions linked arm in arm for another Oasis karaoke classic.
But they were absolutely wobbling for the ten minutes after they’d gone 1-0 down, lost in a stunned, humid haze. Sorloth absolutely butchered the chance to put them in an even deeper swamp. His lack of composure when freed down the right into wide open green, Haaland to his left and only Stones between them, was criminal. Haaland put out one arm then two begging for the ball. Sorloth seemed to have quicksand under his feet and between his ears. He did…nothing.
As the second half went deeper and chances became rarer things, it was hard not to look back on it as the moment when the evening could have been decided before it became a night.
When it did darken, Bellingham shone again. Just three minutes into extra-time he found a burst through the brutal heat to bury a ball badly spilled by Nyland. Spence, Burn and the rest of the cast again saw it home, even able to afford a penalty awarded to Spence being overturned for his cynical dive.
Is it harder or easier to be cynical about England’s hopes of winning it all after this? One way or another they’re getting it done.
Nyland, Ryerson, Ajer, Heggem, Wolfe, Odegaard, Berge, Berg, Sorloth, Haaland, Schjelderup.
Aursnes for Ryerson (60), Nusa for Schjelderup (70), Bobb for Sorloth (70), Pederson for Wolfe (90), Ostigard for Heggem (91), Strand Larsen for Haaland (110) Goals: Schjelderup (36)
Pickford, Konsa, Stones, Guehi, O’Reilly, Anderson, Rice, Madueke, Bellingham, Gordon, Kane.
Eze for Rice (HT), Saka for Madueke (HT), James for Gordon (71), Spence for O’Reilly (80), Rogers for Konsa (89), Burn for Bellingham (111).
Clement Turpin (France)
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