Unpredictable England meet reliable operators in contest of thin margins

Wiegman's side have to respect opponents who smashed Germany and are consistent at tournaments

- Jonathan Liew

The homeless man lies in the doorway of England's team hotel every morning and every night. The players pass him as they go to training and pass him again as they come back at the end of the day. His shirt is unbuttoned as he sleeps, dirt-smeared bags perched under his resting arm. The hotel staff barely even notice him any more. Security do not move him on. After all, he's supposed to be there.

And unless you decided to peer particularly closely, you might not even notice that the homeless man in the doorway of the Dolder Grand hotel in Zurich is not a human being at all but a hyper-realistic sculpture called The Traveler, created by an American artist called Duane Hanson in the 1980s and bought by the Dolder Grand hotel in Zurich in the late 2000s as a symbol of... well, what exactly?

We can assume for starters that the juxtaposition is not accidental. So why does a Swiss luxury hotel where rooms cost upwards of £1,000 a night choose to install a sculpture of a homeless man at its front door? An act of subversive arch provocation towards its moneyed guests? A kind of postmodern soul food disguised as an act of subversive arch provocation? Is it supposed to challenge or is it supposed to comfort?

"Selling rooms alone is not enough today," says the hotel director Markus Granelli. "We have to entertain people." But Hanson - who died in 1996 - never regarded himself as an entertainer so much as a truth-teller, a faithful chronicler of the American working class whose work always had an overtly political dimension. How would he feel about this piece being presented in this setting? And - more pertinently, for our purposes - how do England's footballers feel when they see it? Does it discomfort them, titillate them, gross them out? Where do their ultimate sympathies lie? With the browbeaten outsider? Or with the luxury brand graciously allowing this fibreglass vagrant to shelter in its doorway?