[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

Awful match and two awful teams on show but England finally break their penalty voodoo. They do need to seriously improve against Sweden.

There are some matches which, if you insist on watching them as a neutral rather than being emotionally invested, you end up not seeing the forest for the trees. As a lifelong England fan, last night's match was the biggest rollercoaster I've been on since at least the Greece game at Old Trafford in '01, and at an actual World Cup, probably Argentina in '98. If you'd paid a scriptwriter to cook up a story for that match they could hardly have done better than the cagey first half and dirty tricks of Colombia, the eventual penalty and deserved lead, the nailbiting attempt to see out the 1-0 win culminating in the body-blow of a stoppage time equaliser and fear of a Colombian winner in extra-time, only for Southgate to earn his penalty redemption in the final act (in a shootout where England went behind, no less).

England being England, we'll probably go and blow it against Sweden now, but this was an old-school blinder of a game which laid some big ghosts from the 1990s (and beyond) to rest.