1998 - Dominating the match? That's not how I remember it. I remember a decent first half, but pretty desperate defence for most of the second half. And penalties is theoretically a 50:50 shot, yet we lost. You can argue about Beckham's red card, but he was fool enough to retaliate right in front of the referee.
Argentina scored first with a very generous penalty. They equalized with that sucker punch free kick where they passed to the unmarked zanetti, and basically did nothing else the rest of the game despite having an 75 minutes with an extra player. Think Shearer at one point forced a good save out of Roa, Scholes missed the inside of the post by fractions of a cm, and Sol Campbell scored a perfectly good goal to win it late on that was disallowed for reasons still unknown. We deserved the goal, we had shown far more quality going forward even without Beckham on.
If a dodgy red card, the lack of cards for Argentina in a game they basically kick lumps out of us in, the disallowed goal and the dodgy penalty werent enough for you to see the referee might have had a really bad trip to London and didnt want us to win much, he then allowed the Argentinians to pick the ball out of the net and play straight on after the disallowed goal, essentially playing from the keeper straight out then stop for the free kick, which should have won them the game. England suddenly turned round to see Argentina on the edge of their box outnumbered, and it was only Darren Andertons superb tackle that saved the match. Anderton was one of the few players, probably 2-3, that had realised what was going on and had tracked back.