You’d think, being professional athletes on the centre of the world stage at the moment, England’s footballers might not have time to joke around on social media.
Luckily, this is the 21st century, and the players can enjoy some much needed downtime between matches, as well as recuperating before they face Croatia on Wednesday, July 11.
As captain Harry Kane plays Fortnite to bring himself back down after successfully leading his team to the semi-finals, other players have taken to Twitter to express themselves.
This time it’s Harry Maguire; the man who put England ahead of Sweden in the first half with an absolute belter of header from another set piece.
Which, in case you missed it, looked like this:
And, just for good measure, here’s Dele Alli’s header, too:
The celebrations haven’t stopped though, and Maguire – obviously pretty pleased with himself, and he should be – has found the time to post a lovely, slightly tongue in cheek tweet to his 107k followers.
He captioned it:
Sliding into the Semi Finals like…
And pictured it:
It’s a spot-on tweet. But, even though he scored a great goal, it didn’t stop his team mates ribbing him on Twitter in the first place.
Despite giving the Three Lions a vital lead in the first half against Sweden,
Maguire was still the victim of some friendly trolling post-match by international teammate Kyle Walker.
The Manchester City footballer couldn’t help but joke about the Leicester City centre back on Twitter after England’s 2-0 victory against Sweden to progress to the semi-finals.
After the match, Walker posted a picture of Maguire with a caption which read:
Yeah so a good header doesn’t hurt. I mean the moment you head it proper, you feel it’s a good one. Know what I mean love?
It’s good to see the England boys having a bit of fun post-match, even Maguire found it a bit funny.
As the national team moves one step closer to reaching their first final since 1966, the Three Lions entered this tournament with one of the youngest and most inexperienced squads. Furthermore, expectations were relatively low.
However, Southgate has given the team – and by extension, the country – renewed pride and vigour, a feeling not felt since Euro 96. After making it out of the group stages, beating Tunisia and Panama (before losing to Belgium) they reached the second round knockout stages where they finally exorcised their demons and beat Colombia in a nail-biting penalty shootout.
Now with Sweden put to rest in yesterday’s quarter-final they can focus on preparing for a semi-final clash with Croatia.
Gareth Southgate’s men will kick off against Croatia on Wednesday, July 11, at 19:00 BST.
As the celebrations begin to wind down towards Wednesday’s semi-final, we’ll probably be seeing less of the players on social media as they focus on the task at hand – bringing it home., of course.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.