Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThree a.m. has a very particular texture to it — not quite night, not yet morning, just a suspended sort of dark that seems designed for bad news. Which, on this occasion, it duly delivered.
England lost. Argentina, not for the first time this tournament, decided that a match wasn't truly interesting until the final quarter of an hour, and turned up right on schedule to spoil things. Credit where it's due — you don't get to lift trophies by accident, and there's something almost annoyingly reliable about a team that keeps finding late goals precisely when you've allowed yourself to relax. Deserved winners, in the cold light of a match report, if not in the considerably colder light of half-three in the morning.
What stung more than the scoreline, if I'm honest, was the shape of it. England had the ball, had the platform, and still contrived to play like a team mildly worried about what might happen if they actually tried anything. Cautious to a fault, waiting for the game to come to them rather than going out and unsettling it — which, four years on from the last version of this same conversation, starts to feel less like misfortune and more like character. Some habits are structural. This one appears to be England's.
Still, there wasn't much time to sit in it. Disappointment is a luxury best rationed on a work day, and this one had no interest in waiting for me to process anything. Early rounds started not long after I'd finally talked myself into getting up, the sort of morning where your body is present and your brain is still somewhere over the Atlantic, watching penalty boxes.
Physio came next — the shoulder again, though the right one this time, which feels almost democratic of my joints, taking it in turns to remind me that neither is quite as young as it used to think it was. Progress, apparently, though progress in physiotherapy has always struck me as a very patient sort of word.
I made it back in good time for lunch, which felt like a minor triumph after a morning that had already asked rather a lot. The afternoon, less forgiving, filled itself up with rounds almost the moment I sat down — steady, occupying, exactly the kind of busy that leaves no space for replaying missed chances from six hours earlier, which was probably the day's one mercy.
By the time I got home, dinner was waiting, and so, in a smaller sense, was the quiet acceptance that comes after any tournament exit — not devastation, just a kind of familiar shrug. England will regroup, analyse, promise boldness next time, and quite possibly not deliver it. In the meantime, there's a third-place match against France to look forward to, which has never once in footballing history stirred anyone's blood, but there it is regardless.
Bed tonight, without question, at a sensible hour.