Cole Palmer
Cole Palmer
There were 96 minutes on the clock. England under-21s were 1-0 up and seconds away from winning the Euros. Only it did not feel like it. Not when the referee went to his monitor and awarded Spain a penalty.
Emile Smith-Rowe pulled his shirt over his face on the bench. Morgan Gibbs-White remonstrated with the fourth official. had his head in his hands. , in the words of goal scorer Curtis Jones, were 'cooked'.
Spain, after all, had dominated possession in the 2023 final and Lee Carsley had already taken off key players like Gibbs-White, Angel Gomes, Cole Palmer, Smith-Rowe and Gordon.
If Spain equalised and took the game to extra time, England would have needed an almighty response to rally and win the tournament.
However, those negative thoughts had not entered the mind of Palmer, who was watching on from the touchline. "I knew Traff was going to save it," the Chelsea star recalled this week.
James Trafford was similarly confident. Trafford had not conceded a single goal at the Euros and the calm goalkeeper had already prepared for the eventuality of Spain captain Abel Ruiz stepping up to take the spot-kick.
"Levi [Colwill] told me it was going to be a pen so I was like, 'Sound,'" Trafford remembered while looking back on the footage with Palmer and Jones for England's YouTube page. "I just looked at my bottle and it said dive right so I just thought, 'Dive right. See what happens.'
"We did it the night before. We watched his pens and the majority were to my right. If you looked at a few things, he was going to go there so I was confident when it was him.
"I'm just trying to put him off but wait for him to kick it and dive and it just happens that quick so you don't have time to think about it."
Not only did Trafford make the initial save, though - the goalkeeper was also alive to the rebound. No wonder figures on the bench remarked: "Everyone run to Traff!" ahead of the final whistle as England won the Euros for the first time since 1984.
Trafford would join Burnley less than a couple of weeks later, but Newcastle certainly took note of the goalkeeper's displays in Romania and the Magpies have long tracked the 22-year-old's progress.
Rather than being put off by Trafford's bruising debut season in the Premier League - the goalkeeper conceded 61 goals in the top-flight before being dropped for the final months of the campaign - Newcastle tellingly saw the bigger picture and tried to sign the England hopeful last summer.
Newcastle also knew that Trafford had the character to bounce back - and that is exactly what happened.
The goalkeeper equalled the record for the most clean sheets (29) in English football; recorded the most consecutive shutouts (12) in Championship history; conceded just 16 goals; and saved a whopping 84.5% of the shots he faced as Burnley won promotion back to the top-flight.
Those displays have added a few million to Trafford's price tag, but Newcastle hope this is the window they finally land a longstanding target. A target who, in the right hands, looks destined to be a future England number one.
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