What this England team means to me
A brief essay about what England being in a final means for an increasingly old man
I know that many people will be feeling this today, but it’s almost impossible to express how much England being in a major final of a football tournament means to me.
It’s common enough knowledge that I’m a football fan. Yet when I speak to people about it, I think it takes a moment or two before they realise that it runs much much more deeply than they perhaps expect it.
As a child, I lapped up so much about the game. I read pages and pages of news and commentary on Ceefax and Teletext. I can remember writing letters to my Dad when he was stationed away on tour as part of his job summarising the football results (Barnsley beat Liverpool, Dad, Liverpool!). I also consumed a variety of football video games — Champ Man, Sensible Soccer, ISS and FIFA — with many remaining in my diet today.
That all translated into a deeply nerdy appreciation of the sport that shaped my adult life too. I proudly, and somewhat sadly, collect football books, hoovering up histories, biographies and even football quarterlies to stuff on an overburdened Billy bookcase.
My favourite trips abroad have been the ones where I’ve snuck off to see games, usually slapping down less than £20 to see a top game in a European country because football isn’t ruinously broken there.
And although I haven’t achieved my dream (yet?) of being a football commentator, my love of football literally helped me pay the bills in my 20s when I got to work on TV results shows and write about the football video games I revere two decades on from originally loving them.
But when it came to following a team, much of my football loving life was defined by detachment to the club game.
I didn’t grow up in one place. My Dad is in the military so we moved around a lot, traipsing from base to base roughly every two or three years and upending our lives with it.
With that came a difficulty to attach ourselves to a specific side. I, along with one of my brothers, ended up picking a team to follow through our childhood — Leeds United , in my case — in the absence of attachment.
For me, that was a perfectly fine experience and I got to enjoy a lot of highs and lows with them along the way. But it wasn’t until I eventually fell in love with a then local and down on their luck Luton Town who were, as of the late noughties, scrabbling to stay in existence in non league football that I appreciated the depth of connection you can have to a club.
What we did have though was England. And it was the attachment to England, forged at Euro 96, where the appreciation of football transformed into the love affair that shaped my life.
Partly, it was due to the associated pageantry that any child gets excited about when an international competition rolls around. We had the sticker album and the collectible figures, of course. But I remember listening to Three Lions on a tape player on the way to swimming more than that. We also had the sheet music version of it stacked on the piano which I believe, even now, it’s still stuffed away in the little cubbyhole underneath the piano stool in my parent’s dining room.
However it was the matches though that naturally stood out for me. Bearing in mind that I was six at the time and memories are somewhat fragmentary, but I can still vividly remember how the feeling of ecstasy when we beat Spain on penalties juxtaposed so harshly with the tears that flowed when Gareth Southgate missed his effort in the semi-finals.
That tournament, and the contrasting emotions, helped me to ‘get’ football properly. Even with my comparatively floaty attachment to the domestic game, the international game allowed me — and presumably millions others — into an emotional attachment with the sport through one side.
In a life that would then go on to be defined by moving around, being a “citizen of nowhere” in someone’s parlance, that tie to England helped me to contextualise and understand quite a varied (and at times a little unstable) life.
I can contrast the happiness I felt at school in Uxbridge during the 1998 World Cup (England beating Tunisia, live on TV from our tiny assembly hall) with the unease of our 2002 defeat against Brazil at a school I never felt at home in when I was in Bedfordshire. I can remember the disappointment of our 2010 World Cup performance failing to taint my enjoyment of a sunny (and very, very dusty) trip to Glastonbury. I can even remember a rare moment of spiteful, short lived glee when England were shamed by Iceland in Euro 2016 just days after the Brexit vote.
Yet what has been with me throughout that whole time is a sense that England simply weren’t capable of having another moment like Euro 96 again. I can remember my Dad, who did watch the 1966 final as a child, saying that I was unlucky to have England do so well early in my life because we’d struggle to hit such highs ever again.
While I thought it was a joke at the time, he was, for the most part, right. The biggest disappointment of following England in my adult life wasn’t just that we never got close to capturing that performance level again, but that we never even got close to having that spirit either. We tumbled into decades of either over blown hype around selfish players or a kind of stultifying mediocrity where we never threatened to do anything of note.
In this context, the performance of this England team is everything I could want and more. The positivity Southgate’s England generated in 2018 was one thing, but what it has morphed into has staggered me for two main reasons.
First, this is England recast as the kind of side that we used to wish it could be. I can remember throughout my childhood refrains from pundits or commentators that England were tactically naïve, that they couldn’t control games and that individual skill was prioritised too heavily over collective performance.
Yet this side is all those things we dreamed it to be. Yes, we all shared in those early moments of frustration in the group stage where we ground out results in slightly stagnant style.
But the knockout stages showed that this was a group with a plan. Southgate had picked a squad that was capable of shifting approach, changing shape and grabbing control of the games that mattered and, honestly, it’s been a delight to see. I haven’t seen an England team perform with such confidence on a major stage and it’s hard to think how they honestly could have done much better than they have this summer.
But second, and possibly even more importantly, this is an England that’s a ‘good’ side too. I chatted with a friend at the start of the Euros about this, but there hasn’t been a time where an England team has ever been grounded in fundamentally decent behaviour. We have a socially conscious, united and, frankly, friendly group of players who have a togetherness that we arguably haven’t seen in both football and our country at large for years.
So when I see that this team is the one that has made it to the final, it just feels right. Football has been so close to falling off the rails in recent years — the ESL powergrab, the unfortunate soulless nature of Covid football, corruption at FIFA — that the fact it’s this group of lovely, sound lads that have made it to the final…well, it cheers me no end.
I don’t know whether we’ll win tonight or not. If I’m being completely honest, I reckon Italy may well have the edge over us and I could be pretty much crying into a pint in circa ten hours time.
But while I write that, I also know that this England side represents so much of what I love in the game and that simply their presence in a final is enough for me for now.
This national team helped me fall in love with the game, but for many years it felt as if it was destined to be painfully unreciprocated.
Tonight, whatever happens, I can say it has been sparked again. And in light of what I’ve experienced over the course of my life with England and over the past two years personally, I don’t think there will ever be a time in my life where I could have appreciated it more than I do now.
Come on England!
