This shaky win in Stuttgart was the last time any England side were able to win a knockout game at a major tournament. Sven-Goran Eriksson’s ‘Golden Generation’ went to the 2006 World Cup in Germany as one of the heavy favourites, but simply failed to get going and somehow stuttered through a group that contained a pair of minnows in Paraguay and Trinidad & Tobago.
One point of contention was that Eriksson’s rigid 4-4-2 formation was failing to get the best out of his attacking midfielders Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, and so for this second round fixture with Ecuador, he switched to 4-5-1 with Michael Carrick acting as a holding man behind the two superstars and Wayne Rooney acting as the lone striker.
While England did win, the tactic didn’t work as well as Eriksson had hoped – the Three Lions had a lot of possession but didn’t create a lot and looked clumsy at times, allowing Ecuador a handful of clear chances on goal, and Lampard and Gerrard couldn’t get far enough forward to truly support Rooney.
In the end, it was captain David Beckham who bailed his team out – scoring one of his more underrated goals directly from a free-kick from around 30 yards out with about half an hour remaining. Beckham cleverly whipped the ball up and over the wall, sending it sneaking in at the near post from a low trajectory. England had made it to the quarter-finals, but still hadn’t really played all that well.