We had been yelling at Gareth Southgate to make changes for weeks on end.

And the England manager performed the greatest double replacement in the history of his country’s team right here at the Westfalenstadion in Dortmund, on the boundaries of Utopia.

After an incredible first half, the Dutch had pressed England back, and with 81 minutes remaining, Southgate substituted Ollie Watkins and Cole Palmer for England’s all-time leading scorer Harry Kane and Footballer of the Year Phil Foden.

Then, in the ninetieth minute, Palmer found Aston Villa striker Watkins, who turned and fired a shot into the lower right corner.

England was suԀԀenly in Never-Never Land, facing Spain in the final on Sunday in Berlin, after the Netherlands had been beaten.

Despite facing backlash and mockery in recent weeks, Southgate was pulling off a brilliant tactical manoeuvre that secured England’s place in the tournament for the second time in a row.

Currently, England has won three straight knockout games after coming back from behind.

This team clearly has the bottle, and they cranked on the style with a fantastic first half full of energy and purpose as Kane’s penalty equaled Xavi Simons’ early opener.

Encountering England in a major international semi-final was one of those really uncommon occasions.

Similar to Turin in 1990, when Gazza shed tears, and Moscow in 2018, when England, in the era of Southgate’s feel-good waistcoats, threw away a lead against Croatia.

An hour before kickoff, there appeared to be a heavy weight of history in the air. Or perhaps it was just the extreme humidity that caused a stunning cloudburst.

The famed Yellow Wall in Dortmund was painted orange, and England’s crowd was so greatly outnumbered that it seemed like an away game.

Ever cautious, Southgate chose his normal squad, with Marc Guehi the only player back from suspension (Ezri Konsa was absent).

He had been persuading himself—if not the rest of us—that their play had been excellent.

It didn’t really matter how England got here, though, now that they were. This was all that mattered.

Three Lions was played before to the start of play. If this team didn’t put the formbook and the history books through the shredder, thirty years of pаin could turn into sixty years.

Nevertheless, the Dutch scored after seven minutes of their initial оffensive.

Declan Rice was mugged by Xavi Simons, who advanced and rocketed a shot past Jordan Pickford into the far corner.

Strangely enough, though, England had launched the game with far greater fluency than they had ever done since their opening game against Serbia.

Saka, their goalscorer and man of the match in the quarter-final win over Switzerland, was full of delicious devilment.

And after Kane had a powerful drive pushed away from the bottom corner by Bart Verbruggen, it was Saka who plotted the course towards England’s equaliser.

The Arsenal man darted inside from the right, headed into a scrum of orange, then saw his pass deflected to Kane, who shot wide before he was caught by the boot of Denzel Dumfries.

At first, ref Felix Zwayer wasn’t interested but he was sent to his monitor and awarded what was very much a new-school slow-mo VAR penalty.

Kane stepped up and drilled it low to Verbruggen’s right. Doubted by most of us, the England captain was suԀԀenly tied for the lead in the Golden Boot standings with three goals.