I feel utterly disconnected from England as a nation, but supporting their football team has brought me happinessIt’s the morning after my wedding. I’m sitting down to brunch with some friends of the family. While we’re waiting for the food to arrive, I pull out my phone and browse the latest sport headlines. “Oh look,” I announce to nobody in particular. “We won the Under-20 World Cup last night.” At this, my sister-in-law’s boyfriend narrows his eyes accusingly. “Who’s we?” “England,” I respond. He looks at me like I’ve just sprinkled salt on my cornflakes. “Huh,” he says eventually. “‘We’. That’s interesting.”I support England. England is by many objective measures a terrible country ruled by terrible people with a terrible...
France are favourites, but I like the look of Portugal. And the question for England is can they handle the pressure?In an ideal world you would start a tournament perfectly and go through it winning everything. That’s what every team at the Euros wants to do. It is the pressure and expectation around that desire for perfection that derails so many teams and campaigns, because a loss early on becomes a big deal. But you can lose and progress. I was part of the Denmark team that showed that at the Euros in 2017: we lost to the Netherlands (who finished as champions) in our group but still got out of the group and reached the final.How you cope with...
The speed of Sterling and Rashford had seemed the default option in support of Kane, but can Southgate afford to leave the skills of Foden and Grealish on the substitutes’ bench?Welcome to the month of living dangerously. At the end of the strangest, most fractured build-up to any modern tournament England’s footballers have at least avoided one familiar pitfall.Too often this has been a tale of boredom and stale systems, of hotel-emptiness and simply waiting for things to start. Related: Harry Kane feels England in ‘better place’ than at 2018 World Cup Related: How we made Three Lions: David Baddiel and Ian Broudie on England’s Euro 96 anthem Continue reading...
Gareth Southgate has been forced to carry out a plate-spinning act but the seven-strong contingent will strengthen his handTyrone Mings’s forearm smash on the Austria striker Sasa Kalajdzic. Jordan Henderson’s taking of a penalty away from the centre-forward Dominic Calvert-Lewin against Romania, and missing it. Any number of defensive slips, individually or collectively.The thought has occurred all too frequently during England’s Euro 2020 warm-up games: thank goodness it was not the finals. Can you imagine if these kind of errors, some rooted in the all-consuming desire to impress, in players essentially losing their composure, had happened, say, against Croatia in the opening group game on Sunday? Related: Harry Kane feels England in ‘better place’ than at 2018 World Cup Related:...
This shameful and hurtful act in response to taking the knee before the game only adds to the fraught buildup to Euro 2020Romania’s players agreed to take the knee for the first time at the Riverside Stadium as a gesture of solidarity with their English hosts. As loud, angry boos rang out around the ground the Romanians must have wondered what they’d stumbled into here. What kind of weird, contorted, backwards kind of country is this England anyway? Didn’t they used to be someone? Welcome to England 2021. Divided, belligerent, set against itself – and reduced now by the formalities of a football match to debating the idea of “Englishness” until it falls apart at the seams. Related: Ernesto Valverde:...