A talented squad’s involvement could end before a euphoric momentum to match 1996 and 2018 has a chance to build
International tournaments are only tangentially about the football – which is probably just as well given how unsophisticated it often is beside the very best of the club game, how sluggish it can appear. They are about the stories and the mood, about the scandal and the drama and, most of all, the sense of shared experience.
Russia 2018 was a very good World Cup and an enjoyable tournament to cover, but watching England’s victory over Colombia alone in a drab flat in Samara, surrounded by another journalist’s drying laundry, and seeing the scenes of jubilation from back home, there was a distinct sense of being bypassed by something significant. As the Irish columnist Con Houlihan observed of Italia 90: “I missed it … I was in Italy at the time.”
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