For Harry Maguire, in the way he dispelled grave doubts about his form, Qatar 2022 was a personal success.
Even against the world champions, the man who cannot get a Premier League start for his club team was hardly given the runaround. Maguire more than justified Gareth Southgate’s faith in him.
But for the Manchester United captain, this tournament failure - and it was a failure - hurt even more than the semi-final defeat by Croatia at Russia 2018 and the Euro 2020 final loss to Italy. Why? Simple. Because the England players believed they would win the World Cup.
He says: “The hardest thing to take, which is why I’m the most disappointed I’ve been, is that we believed we would win the tournament. That is not arrogant. It is the first tournament I’ve come to where the group of players getting to a quarter-final, going through and losing in a semi-final or a final would not have felt good enough for us. It is disappointing and we are hurt.”
And Maguire knows that, for all the talk of how well England played, the decisive factor was that France were more clinical, if only on two occasions.
He goes on: “When you go into big games, you go with the mindset that you look after the performance. You look after the performance and then hopefully the result looks after itself.
“But sometimes it doesn’t. We were the better team, we created the most chances, we had more pressure, we dominated the ball. “But that’s football, especially tournament football. It’s about big moments at big times. We didn’t take ours, they took theirs.”
But the consolation Maguire could cling to was that England have again made it through to the latter stages of a tournament and have gone out to the reigning world champions. He says: “I know we’ve lost but it’s probably the best performance we’ve had against a big team. They are the world champions and, for me, I feel like they will go on to lift the cup.
“And if we are being totally honest, we were a lot better than them in a lot of areas. But they are the world champions for a reason and the reason is that they are clinical, they are ruthless, they’ve got experience.
“But one thing I’d say about this group of lads which has now been proven is that we belong on this stage now. We belong playing these big games and we belong playing in these big tournament knock-out matches and we’ve proven that.”
And Maguire has proven that he still belongs at the very highest level, although that is the smallest crumb of comfort.
He explains: “I’ve played every game and I’m proud of my mentality to prove to myself again - I don’t need to prove to others - but at the moment, I don’t look at myself, I look at the team and every time I put this shirt on, I want the team to do well. Listen I’d have much preferred to have had a bad game against France and gone through.”
