Jonathan Wilson
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If Gary Lineker had been denied a penalty against Cameroon England's tournament could have ended like many others with elimination at the quarter-final stagePerhaps, given England's perceived lack of success, it's only natural that we should hark always back to 1990, that we should be forever trying to recapture what made that tournament so compelling.
Yet it is a little odd. It doesn't take much of an examination of England's World Cup record to see how fine the margins sometimes are. In the last eight World Cups, England have reached the last eight (in 1982, the second phase comprised four three-team groups; so for the purposes of this stat I've counted the teams who finished second in those groups as losing quarter-finalists) on five occasions. Put like that, England's World Cup record doesn't sound too bad in fact, only Brazil and (West) Germany can beat it.
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Yet it is a little odd. It doesn't take much of an examination of England's World Cup record to see how fine the margins sometimes are. In the last eight World Cups, England have reached the last eight (in 1982, the second phase comprised four three-team groups; so for the purposes of this stat I've counted the teams who finished second in those groups as losing quarter-finalists) on five occasions. Put like that, England's World Cup record doesn't sound too bad in fact, only Brazil and (West) Germany can beat it.
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