“We might actually be able to win this thing” — Shearer admits he’s changed his mind on England

“We might actually be able to win this thing.” That’s Alan Shearer, England’s record goalscorer turned BBC’s most reliably unsentimental pundit, and he is not a man who says that lightly. He flew to the Azteca not believing it. He watched England absorb everything Mexico and 80,000 people threw at them, and he flew home believing it. Hope was always there — hope is the cheapest thing England takes to a tournament. Belief is different, and belief is what shifted.

What Shearer actually said

Shearer’s position before the Mexico game was straightforward: he did not genuinely think England could win the World Cup. There was hope, he says, because there is always hope with England at a major tournament, but hope and belief are not the same currency. After the performance at the Azteca, he says he has both — and he suspects everyone else does too.

He is careful with the caveat. He does not claim England will win it. He claims the ceiling has moved, and that the way the team dealt with everything thrown at it pushed the whole country further forward than he expected. That’s a narrower statement than the headline, and a more useful one.

The reason this landed is the source. This is the man with 260 Premier League goals and 30 England caps’ worth of scoring, whose punditry career has largely consisted of telling England fans, calmly, that it isn’t happening. When the sceptic files a positive report, the report carries.

Why the Azteca was the right test

The Estadio Azteca sits at roughly 2,200 metres of altitude and holds more than 80,000 people. At that elevation, recovery between high-intensity efforts stretches out — the third sprint costs meaningfully more than the first, and the fourth costs more again. Winning a knockout tie there, against the host nation, is a category of difficulty England have not passed in living memory.

That’s Shearer’s actual argument, and it’s a better one than the quote suggests. He wasn’t persuaded by the scoreline. He was persuaded by the manner: a side dealing with hostility, altitude and an unfavourable script without the structure collapsing. Resilience is only measurable once comfort is removed, and the Azteca removes it.

Every previous England tournament exit of the modern era has arrived when the game turned uncomfortable. Penalties, extra time, a hostile crowd, a red card. The one credential England could never produce was evidence of surviving that. Now there’s evidence.

The case against getting carried away

One knockout win does not rewrite a tournament. England still have to reproduce that performance against opposition who, unlike Mexico, are not obliged to open up and chase the game. Sides that sit deep and force England to break them down have historically been the harder assignment, not the easier one.

There is also a physiological bill to pay. Playing at altitude and then dropping back to sea level costs recovery days, not recovery hours. Sports science staff plan around this in advance because you cannot fix it afterwards, and the euphoria of a famous win tends to obscure the fact that the fixture list does not care how good the night was.

France, Spain and Brazil all remain in the field. Each of those sides carries a decade of knockout-round experience England are still assembling. Belief is a prerequisite for winning a World Cup. It has never been sufficient.

What changes from here

The practical effect of Shearer’s shift is on expectation, not on tactics. An England squad that believes it can win plays differently from an England squad playing not to disappoint — bolder in possession, less anxious in the final third, more willing to take the game to a superior opponent rather than sit and hope. Entire tournaments have swung on exactly that dial.

The counter-risk is the flip side of the same coin. Expectation has historically been England’s heaviest luggage, and a country that decides mid-tournament that it is going to win has a poor record of handling the moment when the tournament disagrees. Managing that is now part of the manager’s job.

Shearer himself doesn’t claim to know how this ends. He knows what he saw at the Azteca, and he knows that what he saw was not the England he expected. For a pundit who has spent a career being right about England’s limits, that is the most interesting thing he has said all summer.

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