A place at Brazil 2014 might be in their own hands but England have been here before, and the omens are against them.
It is almost exactly 40 years since the Three Lions last needed to beat Poland in a make-or-break World Cup qualifier - and the man who stopped them then is back in town.
Jan Tomaszewski will be watching at Wembley on Tuesday, where he entered footballing folklore with a virtuoso, if unorthodox, goalkeeping performance on 17 October 1973.
Famously dubbed a "circus clown in gloves" by Brian Clough on TV before kick-off, his heroics helped Poland hold England in a game Sir Alf Ramsey's side needed to win to reach the 1974 World Cup finals.
None of the England team were laughing at the end of a completely one-sided match that saw them take 36 shots to Poland's two, force 26 corners, hit the woodwork twice and have four efforts cleared off the line.
But Tomaszewski has much happier memories.
"I have never watched the game again," he told BBC Sport. "But if you have a game like this, you always remember it in your heart. I can wake up in the middle of the night and remember every minute."

The build-up - win or bust


Nobody was panicking, however. After all, England had been at every World Cup finals since they entered for the first time in 1950, had won the tournament less than eight years earlier, and had been one of the best teams at the 1970 finals in Mexico too.Poland had gone top of a three-team group with one game to go after beating England in a bad-tempered match in Chorzow in June and Ramsey was coming under pressure from the press.
"It was win or bust but I don't think anybody seriously thought England would fail," said Barry Davies, who was at Wembley commentating on the game for the BBC.
"This was still in the age when everybody felt we had an entitlement to be in the World Cup finals, and it was simply unthinkable that we wouldn't be there."
Poland boss Kazimierz Gorski thought otherwise. He knew his players saw Wembley as an impenetrable fortress and, according to Tomaszewski, used that to inspire them.
In the dressing room before kick-off, Gorski told his players: "Win against a weak team and there is no joy. You can play for 20 years and in 1,000 games and nobody will remember you. But tonight, in one game, against a team like England and at a place like this, you have the chance to put your names in the history books."
They did.