Euro 2024, the semis: they're a rum old bird, this team
Sometimes you just have to surrender yourself to the moment. Sometimes they just defy any attempt at rational analysis.
The first football tournament that I remember is the 1982 World Cup finals. For a nine-year old still fresh in their innocence of the game, I had no idea of the extent to which the events of that summer would foreshadow the decades to come. England, I had already concluded, were a rum old bird of a football team. Books had already taught me that they hadn’t even made it to the last two World Cups, but also that in the ancient pre-history of six years before I was born they’d won the damn thing. What is a kid to do with a legacy like that?
England’s return to the World Cup finals after a gap of twelve years played out, to quote Sean Connery in the subsequent FIFA film of the tournament G'olé! as being “like a Canaveral countdown; 3…2…1… zero”. The goals ran out, and their elimination from the competition eventually sounded like a balloon slowly deflating. A few days later, Marco Tardelli expressed what it means to win one of these things through the medium of running and screaming. Forty-two years later, we’re all still waiting to feel that ourselves.
A theme had been set. Early encouragement followed by a gradually dawning realisation that no, this wasn’t going to happen; not this time. And that feeling became a biennial part of my circadian rhythms to a point that by the time I was an adult I’d already learned to shrug my shoulders at the inevitability of it all and get on with the rest of my day. Why let this lot spoil it for you?
The nine-year olds of today might just have a different legacy to ponder. Might. And the fact that they have so much as that possibility is primarily down to a manager who has shifted both hopes and expectations at an ironic cost to himself. With two appearances in the final of the European Championships and one in the semi-finals of the European Championships, there’s already a case for saying that Mister Gawuff is the most consistently successful England manager of all-time. On Sunday evening in Berlin, he might even cement that status further.
It is entirely fair to say that, up to last night’s semi-final against the Netherlands, England had been a difficult watch at Euro 2024. There’s a whole conversation to be had over how this reflects the difference between football as a sport and football as a branch of the light entertainment industry, but when the end result is the same it all feels like something of an irrelevance. Is it luck, to have a player who can overhead kick a perfectly placed shot in the 94th and a half minute, or take five perfect penalty kicks? Perhaps it doesn’t really matter.
Last night’s match between England and the Netherlands felt like a typical England script as read in a mirror. The Netherlands struck first, a sensational long-range shot from Xavi Simons upon which Jordan Pickford could only get half a finger. The bunting sagged. The beer felt a little flatter than it had a minute earlier. But then something very strange happened, the first of several very strange things to punctuate the evening.
England started playing actual football, hard-pressing, with fluid movement and spritely passing. Ten minutes later, they were level. Was it a penalty or not? At this point, I can only refer back to a conversation passed on to me from my former podcast co-host’s brother a few years ago. While watching a match with his wife, who never, ever watched football, she asked him, “How do you know if it’s offside?”. He replied, “See that guy over there with the flag? If he sticks it up in the air, it’s offside”. That ‘the referee’s decision is final’ is a motto with which we’re all familiar.
Harry Kane converted the kick. The football continued. Phil Foden, revelling in a midfield in which at least four players seemed to be playing a free role, had a shot stopped on the line after a magical run and then hit the outside of the post. England slowed in the second half. It’s July. You can’t keep up that pace for 90 minutes at this time of year, as Spain had demonstrated the night before against France. Denzel Dumfries rattled the England crossbar with a header from a corner.
The clock continued to tick down with no substitutions. When they finally came, it was to howls of derision. FODEN OFF? WATKINS ON? WHAT KIND OF MADNESS IS THIS? OF COURSE THE LEGIONS OF HALF-DRUNK FANS ON TWITTER KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS THAN THE MAN WHO’S BEEN MANAGING THIS TEAM FOR EIGHT YEARS!
We were wrong. We were all wrong. And sometimes it’s the best sort of wrong.
The clock ticked towards 90 minutes. By this time, your mind is spinning with mental calculations. The thirty extra minutes. The hard-wired inevitability of that sinking feeling. The previous 89 and a half minutes may not have gone according to any script with which we were familiar, but there was still time for the air to be let out of the room.
89 minutes and fifty seconds. Rice to Mainoo, who lets the ball run onto Palmer. Palmer moves the ball on to Watkins, who’s timed his run into the Dutch penalty area perfectly. Watkins doesn’t even try to pass his marker and turns to an even more acute angle. And then a low shot fizzes under his marker’s outstretched leg, wide of Bart Verbruggen’s flailing arm and bounces up off the base of the goal, bulging the net.
My reaction, alone in my living room on the south coast of this profoundly strange island with my own kids asleep upstairs? “NO, WAIT, HANG ON, WAIT, WHAT?” The living room window is open, and I hear a long, extended screech of disbelief blowing north up the road from the coast. They’ve pulled it out of the bag from somewhere. The script as read in a mirror was right all along. England’s men are in the final of a major tournament on foreign soil for the first time. Such are the fine margins between victory and defeat.
The better team on the night won. They were fortunate with the penalty award, were slack for the first thirty minutes of the second half, and they couldn't have left it much more late, but the better team won. They’ve improved throughout the tournament at a level so incremental that very few of us even noticed it. And now they’re in the final, with a growing feeling that perhaps—just perhaps—they could stumble all the way to the winner’s podium on Sunday evening.
We love football, its mixture of script and improvisation, and its endless permutations. We analyse and rationalise it, in the hope of maybe one day of getting to the kernel of what makes it what it is. But sometimes you just have to surrender yourself to the moment and take whatever pleasures and pains the ether chooses to grant us. Sometimes, all you can do is throw your arms in the air.
England will start Sunday’s match against Spain as outsiders, but that’s all for another day, even if it’s only a couple of days away. But if you were Luis de la Fuente, watching from a cool, air-conditioned room to see what you’d be facing in the final, what on earth would you make of it all? Would you be able to resist the clearly logically absurd idea that perhaps destiny could be on the side of your opponents? Or would you simply look at it all and smile knowingly at the knowledge that your players can cut a path through all this chaos and restore something like the natural order?
For now, all that really matters is that they’re there. The striker held together with bits of blu-tack and sellotape. The goalkeeper whose mental development stopped at 13 years of age, and in the best possible way. The box-to-box midfielder who was Irish until he wasn’t any more. The young lad who had to pop home for a couple of days for the birth of his kid. The manager who’s kept his cool through all the derision. They’re all there, as are we all. They’re still a rum old bird of a football team, this lot, but perhaps that also applies to the rest of us, as well. If I could send a message in a bottle back in time, through 42 years, it would read, “Enjoy the good and let the bad go. It’ll be for the best.”