The England vs Colombia World Cup reports you were never meant to see

By now you have probably already read everything about England’s dramatic penalty shootout win over Colombia. So here is something you definitely won’t have

Football journalism isn’t all inventing transfer rumours, hanging out with players and travelling the world watching matches for free – there is also the odd bit of hard work involved, too.

One of the hardest things about the job is writing ‘on-the-whistle’ match reports. They pretty much do what they say on the tin: reports written from games which have to be emailed over to a team of editors as soon as the final whistle blows, so that they can be quickly checked and published for your viewing pleasure.

They’re fine to write when the game is settled quickly and relatively incident-free – but an absolute nightmare when there’s late drama. And there was a lot of late drama in Moscow last night, with England conceding a 93rd minute goal to Colombia before unexpectedly prevailing on penalty kicks.

Jack Pitt-Brooke was our man at the Spartak Stadium and needless to say, it proved a pretty challenging evening for him. The match report he eventually filed was fantastic, although it was far from the only version he wrote on a night that kept twisting and turning. And so we thought we would provide you with a hopefully interesting peek behind the curtain by revealing the two introductions he wrote – and quickly scrapped – for a 1-0 England victory in normal time as well as a Colombia win on penalties.

Scrapped intro #1: England win 1-0

This web page was quickly deleted... (Independent)

It is the youth, novelty and tournament-innocence of this England team that makes this World Cup run so exciting, and those factors made this testy, acrimonious scrapped-out 1-0 win over Colombia so gratifying.

England did not know what to expect from this team going into this last-16 match, and how they would fare under pressure that was entirely new to them. But here they were playing England’s biggest game in 12 years, on a stage none of them had even reached before, knowing that they had a winnable quarter-final after this, and doing all of this under the most bruising physical provocation you will ever see in a football match between two top teams.

Without James Rodriguez, Colombia were not going to out-play England. So they tried to kick them out of the game instead. At least when Panama tried it in Nizhny Novgorod there was something almost endearing about their amateurishness. But here Colombia - a team who reached the quarter-finals of this competition last time - cannot have plead the same excuse as the World Cup debutants.

Like Panama, that physicality eventually cost Colombia. England had not created much in the first half and looked like they were waiting for some help from the referee. But eventually it came when Kane was fouled in the box, and his converted penalty made it 1-0 to England, a scoreline they saw out comfortably over the rest of the second half.

Scrapped intro #2: England lose on penalties

... and so was this one (Independent)

For this new generation, a new mental scar.

England’s World Cup exit here in Moscow was so painful that the fact it came on penalty kicks is not even the worst of it. England have a proud history of penalty eliminations after all.

But long before the penalties England were safely 1-0 up in the third minute of five added on. Two minutes away from the quarter-finals, two minutes from Sweden in Samara on Saturday evening, two minutes from the easiest World Cup quarter-final England have faced since Cameroon in 1990.

They were so close that everyone here at Spartak Stadium could start to visualise, start to plan, and start to reasonably think whether Croatia or Russia would be harder opponents in the Moscow semi-final. That is just what people do when they get nearly touch something they want, when they get that close.

But of course Yerry Mina’s header, up, down and back up again, woke England up from those dreams like a cold bucket of water in the middle of night.

That was the moment that England lost this game and were knocked out of the World Cup. From that point on they were drunk, not from a flurry of punches but from the worst hit of their lives. They barely touched the ball in the first half of extra time, rallied mildly in the second, but they never transmitted the slightest bit of conviction. How could they when they had been robbed of any belief in themselves?

And the final product: England through to World Cup quarter-finals after dramatic penalty shootout victory over Colombia