Remember how everyone was supposed to boycott the World Cup because of Putin?
There was even an attempt to shame England into having it's football players walk out of the World Cup.

Well, a funny thing happened yesterday.

Russia has sent out a fresh invitation to Theresa May to lift her ministerial boycott of the World Cup after England beat Colombia to reach the quarter-finals.
Speculation as to what May might do if England reached the final was classified as premature. Extending her cagey Brexit negotiating tactics to a wider field, a Downing Street source said she was taking each game as it comes.

It turns out that success is the worse possible scenario for those who want to boycott Russia.

Sweden, whom England are due to meet in Samara on Saturday, have proved less resolute. The British government had believed Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, had given a commitment that no Swedish ministers would attend any of their team’s games for the duration of the tournament.

But the excitement at Sweden’s progress out of the group stages, and now a hot ticket to the Sweden-England quarter-final on Saturday, appear to have proved too much for Löfven. Some things – beating England to win a place in a World Cup semi-final, for example – are more important than politics, it emerged.

May’s interest in football is passing, unsurprisingly since her local team Maidenhead United plays in the lowly Vanarama National League.

The Swedes cracked under the pressure of football success.
So far Britain has refused to break, but that could be an even bigger problem for Theresa May.
If England doesn't lose soon, she could end up in a nightmare scenario.

The pressure on her is mounting as the team made it to the quarter-finals. In what would be a particularly cruel twist of fate, England could even cross paths with Russia on July 11 in the semi-finals. It’s not as if May doesn’t have enough to worry about next week: a testy NATO summit, hosting Donald Trump and the perennial headache that is Brexit.

Imagine the coup of Putin having to publicly offer his congratulations if the game were to happen and England were to win.

Imagine the irony of Theresa May having to privately root against the English team in order to avoid a political embarrassment that she created.
There has already been a PR price to pay for the Boycott Russia play that the Tories pushed.

The U.K.’s ambivalence over the tournament also extended to discouraging fans from traveling to Russia, meaning that at Tuesday’s game against Colombia -- which ended with England’s first ever victory in a penalty shoot-out -- they were massively outnumbered by their opponents. The image was of England as a bit-part player, not the major global power it would like to be.

Most fans have been left at home listening to BBC radio pundits extolling the delights of Russian hospitality and the carnival atmosphere in the host cities. Not quite in keeping with the warnings over hooliganism and “anti-British sentiment or harassment” issued before the tournament.

To add to May’s discomfort, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman said on Wednesday that there’s no ban on his senior team traveling to Russia to watch England.

Corbyn, a little late, could tell which way the political wind was blowing.
May has put herself in a position where she has to deny the wind.