It's penalties for England but this time they win.

It's penalties for England but this time they win.

Once again it came down to penalties for the England football team. It always does. Just when you might have thought they'd been afflicted by that same old problem, the long 22 year wait has now been officially declared over and not before time. For well over two decades the England football team have stared down that menacing looking gun barrel and found those familiar explosives ready to do their nasty work.

But this was different. Completely different. This was that moment in footballing history when after years of agony, suffering and pain England finally mastered the art of taking penalties and converting them in the right order and the right time. At times you almost feel as if England have been deliberately tormenting us for reasons that none of us will ever know. Finally though that irritating ordeal is now a thing of the past and England are in the World Cup quarter finals. How good does that sound?

Last night England met a Colombian side whose only objective it seemed was to not only stop England from playing but using any means be they illegal or possibly legal at times. It was hard to believe some of the appalling methods Colombia were deploying because football it quite clearly wasn't. To the impartial observer some of their antics bore no relation whatsoever to football and so deplorable and disgusting was their on field behaviour that you wondered what was said to them before the game.

This was quite the ugliest display of theatrical skulduggery and dreadful gamesmanship seen by any international side in recent times. It was football of the lowest common denominator, football that descended into the darkest pit of them all and a World Cup match that must have brought the game, albeit briefly, into shameful disrepute.

By the end of this scrappy, fragmented, mishmash of a World Cup last 16 game between Colombia and England, you could almost sense that the weight of the world had been released from Gareth Southgate's shoulders. His England were through to the quarter finals of the World Cup and nothing else mattered but even he must have been baffled by the ridiculous antics and Shakespearean histrionics of the yellow shirted Colombians.

For a large part of this game Colombia seemed to be auditioning for some Chekhov play such was the crazy play acting on show and the frequency with which it seemed to take place. There was the almost incessant face pulling, the clutching of heads, legs and any part of the anatomy they could find in an England player that was there to be potentially injured. This was not the England match we were hoping for and, much to the annoyance of all who were watching, it didn't really stop.

Still, Gareth Southgate must have been immensely pleased with his players self restraint and complete detachment from the bedlam that threatened to ruin his players morale. It seemed at times as if Colombia had come for the most disruptive of boxing matches rather than the compelling spectacle they were hoping for. The stoppages in play, the foul, underhand tactics, the cynical tackling from behind and the sheer stupidity of the South Americans confrontational approach must have been an enormous shock to England's system.

But England prospered under the most intense pressure and provocation. For most of the first half and most of the second half England controlled without ever looking a genuine goal threat. There was a pleasing flow and fluidity to their football that might have surprised the Colombians. Occasionally though, England may have been too slow and cumbersome when in possession and there were periods when the likes of Kieran Trippier, John Stones and Kyle Walker treated the ball like a hot potato. And yet there was never indecision or any sign at all of alarming discomfort, but all three were terribly reluctant to move forward into dangerous areas of the opposition half.

The first half itself was stuttering, unfathomable and almost flat footed with both sides testing each other's emotional reflexes and finding that neither were willing or able to commit themselves at any point. England were quicker and easier on the eye for the first half an hour or so but then dropped back into some muddled and befuddled defensive shell. The passes were neat, cute and well intentioned but lacking any real bite or seriousness.

England's midfield, including the ever cultured and cultivated Jordan Henderson, all balletic poise and technical brilliance, Dele Alli, the superbly roving and roaming Raheem Sterling and Jesse Lingard, forever prowling with considerable know how and enterprise, were now determined to take the Colombians on at their own game. There was much huffing and puffing, plotting and conniving but little in the way of  power and penetration. England for a while, couldn't quite find that significant hole in the Colombian defence.

And just when you thought the game had more or less vanished into some obscure wasteland the Colombians found themselves confronted with an England corner. But this was no ordinary corner. This was a corner fraught with farce and mayhem. As England prepared to take their corner two lines of Colombian and English players seemed to be squaring up to each other. It reminded you of a queue of shoppers waiting for the doors of a supermarket to open. What followed was sheer nonsense and insanity.

Suddenly, an ordinary corner in a football match turned into some unsavoury clash of bodies where the inevitable outcome had to be a penalty. We had shoving, pushing, jostling and then ludicrous manhandling the result of which left poor Harry Kane hauled to the ground. After repeated warnings from the referee Colombia had quite literally fallen foul of officialdom. This was to become a common theme running through the game like a stick of seaside rock. Suddenly the game had turned into the most aggressive arm wrestling contest most of us had ever seen.

Colombia quite inexplicably, resorted to some of the grossest rough house tactics ever seen in any World Cup for quite a while.  For almost the entire second half Colombia surrounded the referee, chased the referee, hassled the referee and pestered the referee like a group of angry, militant trade union officials on a picket line. It was all very irrational, inexcusable and unnecessary and it was easy to imagine that eventually the referee may have considered taking all of the irate South Americans off  the pitch and telling them to go to bed immediately.

What we now had was a watered down version of the 'Battle of Santiago' when both Italy and Chile chased each other around the pitch and then threatened murder of the most bloodthirsty kind. It was the 1962 World Cup in Chile and for whatever reason things seemed to get out of hand. It was largely thanks to that wonderful referee Ken Aston that order was restored to proceedings. Aston promptly marched the Italian and Chilean players off the pitch as fists flew and eventually anger subsided.

Sadly, last night's furious fiasco between Colombia and England hadn't quite matched the passion and petty petulance displayed in the Italy and Chile punch up. But throughout the second half  Colombia certainly had the most festering grudge on their minds. Why, they seemed to make it clear, were England the evil villains of the piece is beyond anybody's understanding but slowly and surely England began to run out of both steam and energy. You can only take so much.

When Harry Kane tucked home England's penalty for England's opening goal after the maddening melee in the Colombian penalty area the general opinion was that England, although comfortably in the driving seat, hadn't quite discovered a fifth gear. Now England began lurching, grasping desperately for some semblance of attacking cohesion where none existed. Harry Kane carefully shepherded the ball in a now deeper midfield role but didn't quite know what he was supposed to be doing.

Above all the sound and fury though, England were still holding their own although with a man down after the sending off, Colombia now ironically woke up and made a game of it. They inched their way back with some geometrically perfect attacking movements. For the last 20 minutes England were back pedalling, out of sorts, regularly giving the ball away wastefully and then recognising that the match was now drifting away from them.

And then in the 93rd minute Colombian drew level. They had now thrown the kitchen sink, the cooker, the bread and biscuit tin and any other domestic utensil they could find to hand to throw at England. From their last corner and perhaps their only real attack of any substance the ball was floated into the England penalty area and one Yerry Mina, a name always to be recalled by some, jumped the highest and nodded the ball firmly past England keeper Jordan Pickford for the most wretched of equalisers - from an English viewpoint anyway..

During injury time Colombia looked a side reformed, fired up, revitalised and almost unstoppable. They strung their passes across the pitch like washing on a line, picking gaps in the England defence at will. A transformation had looked as if it had been achieved with England now on the back foot. But for the second half of extra time, England called on heroic reserves of stamina and sprung back into the Colombian half with well engineered attacks that must have caught the South Americans out.

It was though now penalty shoot out time with both sides locked together by a vice like grip. Now we all know of course that England and penalties don't get on at times. There is something of a mutual misunderstanding between the two parties that has never really been resolved. There was the 1990 World Cup where Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle decided to do a very convincing impersonation of a rugby drop goal where the ball seemed to land in a Florence back garden rather than the net.

For current England manager Gareth Southgate it was an evening that might have come back to haunt him. At the end of a tense and intense Euro 96 semi final, England were faced with penalties against their celebrated rivals Germany. Southgate, entrusted with the final and vital penalty kick, ran up to the ball, briefly and unintentionally took his eye off the ball and blasted the ball at a German goalkeeper who leapt high into the air when the ball bounced off his knees. England were not to attend their own European Championship winning parade. Southgate looked on grimly.

So there we were waiting for something to happen and it did. It did work this time and how grateful we were. After Jordan Henderson missed what looked to be that crucial penalty for England, we looked to the skies and prayed for a miracle. It couldn't happen again. Surely not. After all those years of teeth gnashing and penalty taking ineptitude it all boiled down to Eric Dier of Tottenham.

 With the whole of England on their edge of their collective seats, Dier calmly strode up to the ball and fired the ball powerfully and low past Colombia keeper David Ospina. Cue the wild celebrations, the hokey cokey, the twist again like we did last summer, beer glasses flying into orbit, fans jumping joyously, sheer pandemonium. Oh to be in England now that summer is here.

And so we left our three lion shirted England shirts to their merry making, dancing in imaginary fountains, leaving all their inhibitions on the pub counter as the bar staff joined in with the fun as well. These are precious days and nights in the world of the England football team. Of course we've all been here before a hundred times, a thousand times and it almost feels as if it'll always be this way. England fans are almost hardened and conditioned to this four yearly footballing torture.

It's Sweden in the quarter finals of the World Cup on Saturday and quite possibly the hosts Russia in the semi final but now we're just ahead of ourselves and believing in the impossible. That can never be the case with England because rash predictions were never part of England's mindset.

Even so we still have Gareth Southgate, England's very modest and humble manager who will not repeat the Sir Alf Ramsey' statement of half a century ago. Ramsey, of course was convinced that England would definitely win the 1966 World Cup and he was right. But Southgate was never one for  brash and rash predictions and even if he privately thinks that his England can bring home the World Cup for only the second time he'll never tell the rest of the nation. It's time to prepare for Sweden on Saturday. This could be the right time.