They had fought each other into extra time, Gareth Southgate’s team on the occasion of their young lives at Wembley playing the game without the ball for so much of it and still alive as the final went past 10pm on a night when everything was on the edge.

A wild night following a wild evening at Wembley. Outside beforehand the crowd was dense and in parts unpleasant – and those who came to see a piece of history could be forgiven for quickening their pace and pushing their way through to the safety of the stadium. Bottle and cans underfoot, and the smell of smoke flares in the air. It felt like too many people for the place, and certainly the reduced capacity of the stadium. Tens of thousands – some estimated 250,000 – had come to the Wembley area. There was a wildness to the night and more than two hours before kick-off it had started.

Crowds of 50 fans, perhaps more than 100, rushed the flimsy screens around the ground where the stewards patrolled Covid checkpoints and soon it was a regular occurrence. By the time kick-off came the Football Association was still claiming that the number of forced entries was “small” and that none of them had made it into the stands, but it did not feel that way. The usual easy flow from concourse to seats of Wembley, the lingerers shooed off the stairwells to their places – all that absent this time. The stewards were overwhelmed. One of the disabled areas was not cleared of standing fans until half-time.

The footage taken on phones of a fight on a concourse suggested something much darker, a violence and belligerence that will take much longer to erase from the soul of English football than updating the England football team for the 21st century.

The crowds of fans, ticketed or otherwise, were still on their feet when Luke Shaw scored the first goal, and the place descended into chaos for a few brief minutes. England burst through the front door of this game. It was a charged start that took the Italians into a place that they did not want to be. A tumult in the stands and on the pitch, a kind of change overtaking Italy. Their plan was to pass their way out, but England came right up to the edge to meet them and in certain moments they stood eyeball-to-eyeball over it. Harry Kane, Mason Mount and Raheem Sterling hunting them down.

There was a time when England seemed like they were a beat ahead of Italy every time. Kane dropped deep and behind him the wing-backs, Shaw and Kieran Trippier, ran into those spaces. The plan to pull Italy out of shape and separate the old chain links of their defence from one another felt like it was working. There was an urgency and an untidiness about England and it flowed down from the stands, too. A febrile night and an impatience about Southgate’s team as well.

You could see it in the players too, Trippier jostling with his opposing full-back, the Chelsea man Emerson Palmieri. England had the Italians pinned back in their best moments, the team in blue trying to piece together sequences of passes that felt fragile and so often ended up at English feet. Emerson looked out of control as he chased one lost cause on to Declan Rice’s ankle. The possession count was in Italy’s favour by the end of the half, but there was always the greater glint of danger about England.

It is an old England weakness that in times of stress, the retreat just invites greater pressure. So it was once more in the second half as the wing-backs were pushed back and with a careful retention of the ball, at a pace and tempo they were never permitted to settle into in the first half, allowed Italy to build the pressure. Why were they given that time to do so? Before half-time they had been hustled and coerced into mistakes and now they were in control.

Young Federico Chiesa had been the main point of resistance in the first half, a fabulously strong runner with great command of the ball who could pick it up where you least expected him to be a danger and then evade and swerve his way through. He had to be kept at arm’s length and yet England were letting him and others get ever closer.

This was their great test approaching. Still no goal conceded from open play in the tournament until at last Jordan Pickford, who had stood up well – pushing an earlier big shot that he did save away from Italian feet – could only glove one on to a post and there was Leonardo Bonucci.

Now for the reckoning. This is where England have been so ripe to be flicked aside in times past. A broken shell of confidence and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Southgate switched to the back four with the replacement of Trippier with Bukayo Saka and it might have been the sheer tension of the deadlock that Wembley forgot to call for the summoning of its favourite son from the bench, Jack Grealish.

The great test lay ahead. They had lost momentum. Could they regain it?

This is a different England team, perhaps more similar than they know to the lost boys of ’66, who were told at the start of extra time by Sir Alf Ramsey in his great final that they had won it once and must now go out there and win it again.

As extra-time commenced, it felt like England team had let the chance to win it on their own terms slip from their fingers. With the giant Gianluigi Donnarumma between the posts, the Italians would hold the edge in the shootout. England can only hope they don’t have to wait as long to get another shot at glory (© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2021)