James Lawton in Niigata: Eriksson's great trick is confidence

The force is with Sven, and the luck

Sometimes greatness – or at least the impression of it – will just not take no for an answer. However unpromising the circumstances, it will get its way. It will batter through brick walls. It will bestow the most improbable gifts. It will, we discovered here last night, even have Emile Heskey score a sweet goal.

Heskey's grass-skimming strike came from a lovely little intuitive pass from a still plainly half-fit David Beckham. It completed the extraordinary eclipse of the Danish team, which had switched off the lights of the world champions, France, just four days earlier, and was Heskey's first since Germany were eviscerated in Munich last September. That fact reminded you that sometimes greatness can also play doggo.

But even though Brazil are probably next up, and there were times here last night when Denmark ran so many rings around England's defence they were in danger of striking oil, greatness is clearly in no mood to quit on the team that came here shattered by injuries – and still less on their coach Sven Goran Eriksson.

The extraordinary truth that glowed through the drizzle here is that England in many ways came to Niigata's "Big Swan" stadium with most of their beauty hidden like rice shoots below the surface of the surrounding paddy fields. That's how they left, too. But then why would Eriksson and his men be sheepish about the largesse that poured their way when Denmark's Sunderland goalkeeper, Thomas Sorensen, threw Rio Ferdinand's header into his own net in the fifth minute, or that by the time Michael Owen scored his first in four games for England – a pure, trademarked piece of razored finishing – the flying Danes Dennis Rommedahl and Jon Dahl Tomasson had half a dozen times turned England's defence into match-wood?

Winning World Cups isn't always about being the worthiest, most brilliant team. It wasn't when West Germany, having been slaughtered by Hungary in a pool game, won the final against the same team captained by Ferenc Puskas in the 1954 final. Four years ago, France, in a round-of-16 match, couldn't buy a goal until Laurent Blanc scored a golden goal against, yes, Paraguay. No, winning a World Cup can also be about piecing together a string of fortune, a gathering sense that it is your time so you just might as well get on with it in the happy knowledge that whatever happens there is a very good chance you are going to come out on top.

Eriksson may bridle at the growing suggestion that he is indeed a lucky manager, but, even if it is true, good fortune can only be the beginning of the story and not the end. Some teams more gifted than England could have felt the tug of indulgent gods twice as strongly as Eriksson's last night – but with only half the effect. What Eriksson has done is create a climate of belief, and one extraordinarily free from any dependence on the need for excessive contact with certain realities.

If Heskey had read too many of his recent critical notices he would probably have dissolved when Beckham served him his invitation to strike on goal. Instead he shot with a conviction that again scrambled the reactions of the distraught Sorensen. A few days ago Eriksson was defending the value of Owen despite a descending strike rate. Here, Owen's confidence when he received the ball as he likes it, low and quick on the ground, was again devastating.

One by one England's various parts are making a reality, which just a week ago, before the stunning triumph over Argentina, would have stretched any football imagination. It is that they can come through to win a World Cup with France and Argentina gone, Italy jumpily irresolute and Brazil mixing brilliant attack with shamelessly inadequate defence.

Of course reality is still deeply challenged. That Danny Mills has gone through four World Cup games with just one disaster remains staggering, but for how long must be questioned all over again after his two-fisted collision with Danish defender Rene Henriksen, which earned a yellow card and a yelp of shock.

Paul Scholes, who came off just after half-time suffering from the effects of a kick, is not, as it happens, too big on irony, which is just as well because after more or less carrying England through the first phase of the tournament, with conspicuous help from Ferdinand, he didn't have a single moment of significance in this most dramatic of results.

He was obliged to accept that this is an England campaign that is unlikely to be marked by the pressing rhythm upon which his game feeds too effectively. Consistency of performance was as elusive as ever last night as the Danes, who had the stunned faces of victims of a car crash, wondered whatever happened to the warm currents that coursed through them in the squashing of France.

What it was, of course, was something of the spirit rather than the mind. Something which, like a sudden gust of wind, blows away a fistful of certainties.

Denmark had a great tournament until they ran into Sven Goran Eriksson's England – and a few other factors beyond their control.