Netherlands vs England: Electric moments light up Three Lions at Euro 2024, will semi-final provide another?

“We’re enjoying the ride," England captain Harry Kane said following Saturday night's dramatic penalty shootout victory over Switzerland — and for the first time this summer, it feels as if the rest of the country is, too.

Gauging the public mood is always one of the challenges of reporting from inside the bubble of a major sporting competition, particularly when it's being played overseas, but the sense from afar across the course of this European Championship has been of a tournament, at least from an English perspective, burning slow.

Gareth Southgate and his team have been victims of their own success in that regard, expectations rising steadily throughout the manager's tenure and the country becoming a little harder to woo.

When Southgate first took over eight years ago, so desperate were affairs that any tournament win was enough of an event in isolation to sweep the nation off its feet (his first, against Tunisia in the opening game of the 2018 World Cup, matched the tally of the previous two campaigns combined).

Now, though, the bar is higher: England go into tournaments aiming to win them and expecting to go deep. So, when the football is as bland and uninspiring as it has been this summer, whatever slim pleasure can be taken from, say, drawing 0-0 with Slovenia to top the group, does not come close to masking the anxiety that, surely, they won't go on to win anything playing like this.

Except, of course, they might. Some tournaments are won by wonderfully cohesive teams, like the peak tiki-taka Spain or the turn of the century's France, and it is clear now, heading into the semi-final against the Netherlands, that England will not be one of those.

But others, like Argentina's triumph at the World Cup just gone or Portugal's at Euro 2016, are defined and decided by brilliant players doing brilliant things, in spite of logic and in thrall to moments.

Certainly, above all else, that is what these summers are remembered for. As completely forgettable as their overall performances have been, in Jude Bellingham's bicycle-kick against Slovakia and Saturday's shootout win, this England have provided two genuinely iconic tournament moments. Was there a single one, of positive lilt at least, in almost two decades between Michael Owen's Argentina wonder-goal in 1998 and the day Southgate took the helm?

Southgate regularly talks of England tournament matches as being "national events" and to scroll through social media on very late arrival back at our Düsseldorf hotel on Saturday was to confirm that the game we'd just watched had met the brief.

There were brilliant scenes of community and celebration during other events at Edgbaston, Silverstone and Sandown Park, and even, in its own, more restrained way, signs of shared ecstasy on Wimbledon's Centre Court. WhatsApp groups buzzed not with grumbles at how late Cole Palmer had come on, or speculation as to whether Kieran Trippier even owns a left foot, but with an excitement rediscovered and the rituals of recent tournaments set back in motion.

"How many tables shall I book for Wednesday night? What time's the final on Sunday? Do I book Monday off now? How long's the drive to Dortmund? Shall we go straight from there to Berlin?"

The meeting with the Dutch will be another of those national occasions and, who knows, perhaps even the last under the man who, for all his tactical flaws, has rather spoiled us with their regularity over the past six years.

Southgate is no longer the unifying, figure of 2018 and 2021, but any animosity should be put aside here, ideally, for reasons of national unity but if that won't do, then for the futility of complaint, since whatever happens over the next week, he appears almost certain to walk away.

"If I can't enjoy this moment, then it's a waste of time," Southgate said, after dancing in front of England's travelling hoards in Düsseldorf. It is a sentiment we'd all do well to heed.