Euro 2024; Everybody performing their allotted roles

The journey to and from the stadium was borderline dangerous, while England outstodged Serbia on the pitch. If this had all been scripted, it would have been rejected as too obvious.

It was the opening day of the 2011 Women’s World Cup and we were on our way back to the centre of Berlin from the Olympiastadion with tens of thousands of others when the train stopped at a station around halfway between the two, near Charlottenburg. A crackly loudspeaker message told us, without reason, that we needed to alight the train and await a connecting train to Hauptbahnhof railway station, about fifteen minutes away.

For the best part of an hour, we stood at the end of a platform watching the signs as the arrival bounced from line to line, as though being directed by Walt Disney. About three hours after we left the stadium, we completed the six-mile, in theory half-hour journey. A friend who’d lived in Germany had warned me before I left, “If you want to disavow yourself of the notion that Germans are exceptionally well organised, all you have to do is catch a train that isn’t an intercity one”.

To a great extent, the news of yet another city with a stadium a few miles from its centre without any thought having apparently been given as to how people in that city centre might get to it by public transport doesn’t come as that much of a surprise. Football supporters in the 21st century are still treated like cattle while simultaneously being expected to pay through the nose for the privilege.

In Gelsenkirchen, it was a combination of trams, buses and trains that ground to a halt for no apparent reason, and not only to the stadium; they’ve managed to station their fan park a couple of miles out of town too, only in a slightly different direction. Water? Toilets? A functioning mobile phone signal? What do you think this is? The 21st century? Who do you think you are? Visitors to our city?

While both social and mainstream media were focusing on the biannual ritual of laser-focusing on some familiarly tasteless songs being sung (for those who couldn’t make it out in the stadium, the Guardian had their correspondent ready and waiting to file within thirty minutes of the final whistle being blown - Jimmy Lockett was a 45 year old England supporter who died suddenly a couple of years ago, for the record) and the violent behaviour of an even smaller number of people, thousands of supporters who weren’t causing any trouble whatsoever and had no intentions of doing so were being treated in a way that seems increasingly familiar at these ‘big occasions’. So it goes.

There was something comfortingly familiar about the first weekend of Euro 2024. England were drab but won their match. Scotland were abysmal but their supporters were great, while Germany’s footballers gave their public transport providers a lesson in the very efficiency that they apparently need. Big target man strikers were the order of the day, because international football doesn’t have time to drill extremely complex tactical systems into players at just a few days’ notice. Christian Eriksen did a fairytale. Wout Weghorst did what Wout Weghorst does, and can only do.

And England won with asterisks attached. Their match was decided after thirteen minutes by Jude Bellingham. Suffice to say that if you’re Bukayo Saka swinging the ball into the middle of the penalty area, you couldn’t have asked for greater determination from the player attacking it. It was to a great extent a very English goal. Direct. Aggressive. Bypassing routes two through to infinity and beyond.

Were they hanging on by the end? Well… kinda? Serbia were too stodgy to pose an enormous attacking threat even in the latter stages of the match, and certainly after they took the surprising decision to replace Aleksandar Mitrović with just over a quarter of an hour still to play. But you could tell the extent to which it had been drilled into the England players by the speed with which Harry Kane mentioned that all that mattered was the result in his immediate post-match interview.

This was all enough, not that you’d know that from the fevered reaction on social media. We went through exactly this three years ago, when England scrambled through their group with two 1-0 wins and a goalless draw, all played out against a soundtrack of caterwauling that this football wasn’t entertaining enough for a watching audience of millions, many of whom seemed to have forgotten that there is a part of football that is still a sport rather than merely a branch of the light entertainment industry.

In fact, we’ve been through this numerous times before. England tend to start tournaments slowly. Only in 1950, 1970, 1982, 1998, 2006, 2018, 2021 and 2024 have they ever broken this mould by winning their opening match, and all bar one of these came in the World Cup finals, and note that three of these eight came under Gareth Southgate. England failed to win their first match in the Euros nine times before beating Croatia at Wembley three years ago. If anything, winning this match was a substantial improvement on what we might consider ‘normal’ for England in the opening match of a European Championship.

But the first casualty of England in the finals of a major tournament is always moderation (the second is often plastic furniture, but that’s a different matter), and as ever everyone is seeing what they choose to see. The seven matches played so far have seen three genuinely impressive performances, and England weren’t among those (those three were Germany, Switzerland and Spain, of course), but the extent to which this was somehow a disaster has also been predictably overstated.

They got the early goal and when Serbia did pose a threat, Jordan Pickford seemed to be in good form, making one particularly good save from Dušan Vlahović. Marc Guéhi was immensely impressive in the centre of the defence. Jude Bellingham is still developing into one of the best attacking midfielders in Europe. Bukayo Saka remains an impish presence on the wing and a chance-creating or goal-scoring threat in any attacking position. The second closest we came to a goal all evening also fell to England, an incredible save by Predrag Rajkovic from a Harry Kane header.

But there also remain reservations. Kane starts tournaments slowly, we were repeatedly told last night as he… started the tournament slowly. Trent Alexander-Arnold was decent in midfield, but the defensive lapse of control which gifted a half-chance straight to Mitrović in the first half can’t simply be overlooked. And it was all less comfortable than Gareth Southgate would surely have wanted, while it’s also notable that none of his substitutions really improved the team or the flow of the game that much. Cole Palmer remained resolutely on the bench. There remains work to do.

Life goes on. England gonna England, for better or for worse. In perpetuity. There is something almost comforting about everybody reverting to type in this way. The entire portmanteau feels like a cast of characters all playing a role. There was Jude Bellingham, the young prodigy being built up before he’s knocked back down. There was Harry Kane, having two kicks of the ball in the first 45 minutes.

There were the fans, singing the national anthem (for the whole of the UK because England doesn’t have a national anthem) because only that, the music from The Italian Job, and Rule Britannia are the only ones that aren’t widely considered verboten in the 21st century and no-one’s bothered to come up with any new ones (and the jury is definitely split on Rule Britannia).

The manager’s under fire. The fans were treated like shit. The hot-takes flew in all directions. The year is 2024, and only the only thing that ever seems to change is the volume of the noise getting louder. Otherwise, for all the changes to the squad over the last couple of years, this was all very familiar indeed.