If Jodie Taylor felt the weight of history on her shoulders she did not show it. With her first real chance of an edgy, nervy, game England’s principal striker took a single steadying touch and dispatched a beautifully weighted, awkwardly angled shot across France’s goalkeeper and into the bottom corner.

Taylor’s fifth goal of Euro 2017 proved the decisive moment of a night which not only earned Mark Sampson’s Lionesses a semi-final date against Holland in Enschede on Thursday, but secured England’s first win against France since 1974. With Sampson having raised eyebrows by devoting much of the game’s preamble to directing jibes at Olivier Echouafni, his Les Bleues counterpart, that typically ruthless second-half finish had the additional benefit of preventing such hubris from morphing into humiliation.

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The resultant relief left England’s coach – who knew his brash facade represented a high stakes gamble – literally jumping for joy at the final whistle before finally remembering his manners and giving Echouafni a consolatory hug. With the Lionesses two games away from a first major tournament win he could afford to be compassionate as the familiar strains of “Three Lions” boomed out of the sound system of one of the tournament’s more modest venues.

The home of Go Ahead Eagles, this tight, compact, slightly dilapidated little ground, complete with wonderfully retro floodlights, had a definite air of the old English fourth division. Not that such humble surrounds could disguise the game’s importance. This was an evening on which Sampson, for all his outward bravado, for all his provocative comments about Echouafni being “wet behind the ears”, must have felt under immense pressure to justify the Football Association’s £17.7m annual investment in the women’s game. The England coach’s ultimate aim is for the Lionesses to replace the United States as the world’s premier female team but he was desperate for the tangible proof of progress that a first victory against France for 43 years would bring.

After seeing his side come close to a shock elimination from Group C, Echouafni was under comparable stress. Following less than successful stints in charge of the men’s teams at Amiens and Sochaux, the former Marseille and Nice midfielder is anxious to prove that he is the right man to lead Les Bleues into the 2019 World Cup in France.

He was without his suspended captain Wendie Renard – widely hyped as the world’s best centre half – and her similarly banned fellow defender Eve Perisset. That said, their replacements, Laura Georges and Jessica Houara-D’hommeaux, were far from shabby understudies.

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Sampson, meanwhile, reverted to his A team, making 10 changes from the “second string” XI he used to beat Portugal in England’s third group game. Benefiting from a brief rest, Jill Scott and company helped ensure the game began at a blistering tempo with both attacks taking turns at appearing menacing.

After three defeats and two draws in his previous five games against France, England’s coach really needed to adjust the power balance and he could have duly done without a slightly scrappy first half full of sound and fury but lacking a shot on target. Despite this absence of initial cutting edge the accomplished Camille Abily capitalised on Lucy Bronze, unusually, being caught out of position before providing Marie-Laure Delie with a glorious pass from which the latter could only scuff a shot wide.

Yet if France’s rapid change of attacking pace and, at times, seamless manipulation of the ball at times fazed England, they refused to allow such concerns to distract them from their gameplan of pressing Les Bleues high up the pitch with the generally outstanding Bronze surging forward dynamically from right-back.

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This tactic left Echouafni’s players unable to build possession from the back quite as much as they would have liked – and also won England a dangerous free-kick, well delivered by Jordan Nobbs but headed wastefully wide by Millie Bright, who had out-leapt Georges.

Scott was left needing to watch her step following a booking for sliding in unnecessarily on Amandine Henry, France’s increasingly impressive holding midfielder, in an arguably borderline red card challenge. As it was her second yellow card of the tournament, she will miss the semi-final. As half-time approached the Lionesses had looked sporadically vulnerable to swift counterattacks featuring Eugénie Le Sommer and Abily showing off adhesive control and subtle movement but, overall, it was very much ebb and flow. Neither side was really in charge, neither goalkeeper exactly over-worked and Sampson’s pre-match assertion that England “would not need to be at their very best” to win had begun to ring slightly hollow. Part of his problem was that as many problems as his formidable right-wing axis of Bronze and Nobbs posed, Sakina Karchaoui, Echouafni’s jet-heeled left-back, kept offering high-speed solutions.

Moreover it seemed as if the two managers’ technical area tensions had transmitted themselves to a pair of nervy teams. Admittedly Le Sommer came very close to breaking the impasse when she headed inches wide after Bronze’s momentary concentration lapse but it took Taylor’s incisive intervention to change the narrative. Hats off to Bronze for seizing a loose ball and playing in Euro 2017’s leading scorer whose shot confounded Sarah Bouhaddi. Sampson’s Lionesses would subsequently survive a few goalmouth scrambles and lose Karen Bardsley to injury but, with a single swipe of Taylor’s boot, England’s horizon had been transformed.