Final opponents may offer more thrills but careful planning has turned great underachievers into true contenders

Now we take Berlin. One way of looking back over England’s progress at Euro 2024 is to see it as geographically performative, a struggle to move beyond the green-fringed industrial centres of Germany, Gelsenkirchen, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Dortmund, places where even the football grounds resemble giant clanky ­tubular factory parts.

Grudgingly, awkwardly, and, for 20 minutes against the Netherlands, fluently, these Rhine-Ruhr staging points have been ticked off. England’s rustbelt football has prevailed. And now they have the reward, a trip to Mitteleuropa’s vivid, artsy, mega-city capital, and the prospect of a meeting with Spain, the team of the tournament, at the Olympiastadion on Sunday night.