Two words for our young Three Lions England team: Thank you
Gareth Southgate and his young England team reminded us of the game’s power to move us, to inspire us, to fill us with pure, undiluted joy
FOOTBALL came home.
Perhaps not in the way that we dreamed football would come home – because of course the Fifa World Cup trophy itself is destined to go to Paris or Zagreb.
But over the past month football has come home to the country that gave the game to the world.
For at this World Cup, we fell in love with football all over again.
Gareth Southgate and his young England team reminded us of the game’s power to move us, to inspire us, to fill us with pure, undiluted joy.
And a sense of national pride.
An unapologetic love of your country.
Patriotism felt like the most natural thing in the world.
The flag of St George has been everywhere. In pubs, in shop windows, on cars, on scaffolding, on hats and shirts and flying above 10 Downing Street.
And nobody was sneering at our flag now. Just guessing, but I doubt if anyone will be sneering at that flag any time soon.
Not even Labour’s Emily Thornberry.
What a ride. What a month-long high. What an adventure for those of us who are old enough to remember 1966 and also for the children who will remember this as the first World Cup they watched.
Fifty years from today, those kids will still remember how they felt when England won a penalty shootout against Colombia, and when Kieran Trippier bent it better than Beckham after five minutes against Croatia.
And they will remember to their dying day exactly what it felt like when we knew that England was not going to the final.
The tears are real but so is the pride. And the pride — even more than the disappointment — is the overwhelming emotion today.
England played with big hearts, true grit and the fearlessness of youth.
They come home not as legends to rival the boys of 1966 but with their heads held high. Their nation is proud of them.
And yes, it is only a game. It is not a war. Nobody died.
But at a time when our nation is more horribly divided than at any time in modern history, we were reminded what a great country this still is, and how much we have to be proud of, and how much there is to love.
And it was not your imagination — England was united once again.
“Our country has been through difficult times in terms of unity,” said England’s young manager in his thoughtful, softly spoken manner.
“Sport — football in particular — has the power to help that.
“We’re a team that, with our diversity and our youth, represents modern England.In England, we have spent a bit of time being a bit lost as to what our modern identity is. I think we represent that modern identity and hopefully people can connect with us.”
Gareth Southgate is right about the healing power of sport. This World Cup brought us together in a way we’ve not experienced since the London 2012 Olympics.
But 2012 was before the bitter wounds of Brexit.
It is Gareth Southgate himself who is the main reason this country has rallied around this England team.
Southgate with his courtesy, his decency and his Yoda-like intelligence.
Southgate, who talks about “owning the process” and “managing our energy” — it is quite difficult to imagine the former England manager, Big Sam Allardyce, being comfortable with that kind of 21st Century dialogue. Southgate with his dapper shirt, tie and waistcoat combo, as suave as a suburban James Bond.
Southgate who carries himself as if he is the living embodiment of Rudyard Kipling’s most famous poem.
“If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those imposters just the same . . . you will be a man, my son!”
Even as England were celebrating their very first win in a World Cup penalty shootout, Southgate took time to comfort Mateus Uribe, one of the two Colombian players who had missed their penalty.
This was more than an act of sportsmanship. It was an act of humanity.
Because we all knew that Southgate has been there.
The abiding memory of Gareth Southgate as a player — the one moment that everyone remembers — is in Euro 1996, with his shoulders sagging inside a grey England shirt and his spirit smashed after missing a penalty (we never recall the players who were too cowardly to step up and take a penalty — history gives them a pass).
Stuart “Psycho” Pearce had known penalty redemption — missing in Italia 1990 but scoring in Euro 1996. Southgate’s redemption has been infinitely more convoluted.
There was an image that went viral of the 25-year-old Gareth Southgate after just missing a penalty in 1996 being comforted by the 47-year-old Gareth Southgate who shook up the world in Russia in 2018.
If this World Cup has gone some way to healing our divided nation, it has also gone a long way to healing the pain that Southgate has endured for half a lifetime.
It is true what they say — success is not final, failure is not fatal.
The manager was well served by this young team, who were light years away from the central casting image of the Premier League footballer — the pampered, wag-shagging, blingtastic, Bentley-crashing, multi-millionaire airhead.
These England footballers — even the star striker, Harry Kane, who would cost a minimum £100million if Real Madrid came knocking — were clearly of and from the working class.
They hail, every one of them, from modest beginnings. Most of the squad — 15 — paid their Premier League dues while out on loan in the lump-kicking lower leagues.
“Barnsley, Leeds, Bolton, Blackburn,” said Southgate. “We’re lads who have come from those places.”
And Tyne & Wear and Walthamstow and Milton Keynes.
This England team are not ordinary boys — they are elite professional athletes — but they have all been ordinary boys, and there was a humility about them, a work ethic and total lack of pretension that made you believe they will never forget their roots.
And if they come from everywhere from the North East to Yorkshire to the Essex/East End borders, they also come from every kind of family.
There were those who grew up in solid nuclear families with both mum and dad and siblings present, and those who were raised by single mums, and those who are from domestic chaos.
Raheem Sterling’s father was murdered in Jamaica when he was two, and Dele Alli escaped the turmoil of his riven family life by moving in with his best friend’s family when he was 13.
Their backstories are as diverse as our nation, but every one of them has grafted to get to the top.
Sterling was berated for having an assault rifle tattooed on his leg but nobody ran harder or longer for the England cause than Raheem.
When you watched his mesmeric, lung-busting runs, how could you not warm to him?
How could you not forgive one dumb tatt?
“Good lads,” said Southgate of his England squad, those boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne, from Bury and Leeds and Sheffield, and once again he said it all.
They are good lads and we cheered them, and celebrated with them, and in the end, we shared their pain because it was our pain too, even in defeat against Belgium yesterday.
They were a band of brothers and for one magical sun-drenched summer month, they lit up our nation.
This World Cup was a roller-coaster ride that grabbed you by the scruff of your replica Three Lions shirt from the first match against Tunisia and refused to let go until the end of extra time against Croatia.
They came SO CLOSE — Croatia led England for 11 minutes.
That’s how agonisingly near we were to saying, “Bonjour, Monsieur,” in today’s World Cup final.
It was gloriously entertaining, but it was also far more than just entertainment.
It felt like Gareth Southgate and that young England team represented the very best of us.
We learned — or we were reminded — that decency is not weakness, sportsmanship is not soft, and you need never feel one twinge of shame if you give your all.
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And we learned that we love our national game with a passion that can never be denied.
I honestly thought we would win it.
Typical England fan!
I believed that this was the year we added the second World Cup winner’s gold star to the team shirt.
When the England players were chucking around rubber chickens at a training session just before the Croatia semi-final, I thought it was a tension-busting masterstroke.
It wasn’t to be.
But this England team have been through the full range of human emotions — from joy to despair, hope to disappointment, and this country has been with them every step of the way.
The struggle continues, the dream will never die.
I reckon 50,000 England football fans will already be making plans to go to Qatar in 2022.
This World Cup will be remembered for breaking our hearts and uniting our nation.
And a grateful, emotionally exhausted country has just two words for those Three Lions.
Thank you.