This was the sort of semi-final where every missing detail gets exposed, and Joe Hart’s verdict on Declan Rice went straight to the heart of it. England did not merely lose 2-1 to Argentina; they lost control of the middle of the pitch at the worst possible time, and Hart’s point was brutally simple: Rice was not at his best when England needed him most.
Hart made his comments after the match on the, and he did not soften the issue. Rice, he said, “did struggle” in central midfield. More than that, Hart argued England had taken him for granted a little in the way they set the team up. That is the uncomfortable truth here. When a player is asked to do the running, the creation, the set-pieces and the dirty work, there is no hiding place if the legs are not quite there.
Rice was carrying too much, for too long
The background matters. Rice entered the tournament with a lingering hamstring injury from a gruelling season with Arsenal, and he did not hit his usual levels for large parts of England’s campaign. Three days before the semi-final, he had been bedbound before England’s quarter-final with Norway, and even that game ended with him hooked at half-time after struggling in the intense Miami heat. By the time Wednesday’s semi-final arrived, the signs were already there that England were asking too much of a 27-year-old who had been running on fumes.
Hart’s criticism was not that Rice stopped caring or disappeared entirely. It was sharper than that. It was about the role England gave him and the reality of what he could physically deliver. As Hart put it, Rice needed to be top of the running stats, creation, taking free-kicks and corners, and the long, hard season he had with Arsenal had caught up with him. That is not a tactical footnote. That is the centre of the story.
England’s issue was magnified in the final ten minutes, when Rice was replaced by Nico O'Reilly and the team moved into a 5-4-1 formation. By then, the shape told its own story. England were not chasing the game with conviction; they were protecting themselves and hoping the final stages would not get worse. Hart said Gareth Southgate had taken criticism before for shutting up shop in big moments, and he also suggested Thomas Tuchel changed it as soon as he did because he did not believe his team could land any more punches on Argentina.
The void was real
That is where Hart’s line about the void lands hardest. He said Anderson did everything he could to fill the gap Rice left, but there was no doubt that, at the latter end of the tournament, Rice had struggled a little. In a knockout game of this scale, a little struggle can become a decisive problem very quickly. Central midfield is where big tournaments are often won or lost, and England were second-best there when it mattered.
So the verdict is not simply that Rice was poor. It is that England depended on him so heavily, over so many phases of the game, that once he dropped below his standard the whole structure looked thinner. Hart’s analysis was pointed because it cut through the usual comfort blanket of star-player excuses. Rice has been crucial for England, but on this evidence he was not able to carry the load all the way to the final.
That is the lesson from a 2-1 semi-final defeat that leaves plenty of questions behind. England did not just lose to Argentina. They lost the midfield battle, they lost momentum when it mattered, and they left one of their most important players with too much to do and not enough left in the tank.
