Larry Ryan: One of these England Euro-winning heroes is going to get parachuted onto Love Island. Literally.
England's midfielder Jack Grealish joins team-mates in a walk-about during an England training session at St George's Park in Burton-on-Trent in central England on June 30, 2021 during the UEFA EURO 2020 football championship. (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP) (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)
We can get through this. It’s coming home, we know that much now, but we’ll cope. It’ll be grand. At least we’ve had fair warning.
Sure, there are folk out there who can’t be placated, who won’t be consoled.
They convinced themselves long ago that you can’t pass a waking moment without hearing about 1966 and there is a great foreboding about what we will be exposed to when the hurt finally ends next weekend.
‘We will never hear the end of it,’ is the sorrowful refrain, as prayers are offered up for perpetual succour via the intercession of the Danes, who we've forgiven for everything.
Fevered visions have Guy Mowbray riffing a fresh interpretation of ‘they think it’s all over’ at the Wembley final whistle next Sunday. Gary Lineker will probably have found some excuse to be down to his jocks again. Rio Ferdinand to be sued by a deafened BBC sound engineer for self-conscious celebratory braying into a microphone.
Everyone’s Room 101 is plastered with front and back pages of bellowing that Europe has been conquered again, Harry Kane mocked up in every known military regalia. And up yours Jacques Delors, we’ll straighten or bend our bananas whatever way we want.
Vivid nightmares feature Boris Johnson wearing an England shirt in the Commons. Or in worse places, if leaked footage emerges. Nigel Farage is happy. And Piers Morgan. There are chants of No Surrender and the crunch of broken glass.
In this vision of hell, the England band is bugling an interminable, rasping drone.
Dec Rice and Jack Grealish are bantering with James Corden, Peter Crouch, and Tom Davis into eternity.
Harry Maguire is always on Graham Norton, unless he’s on Jonathan Ross. Tubridy might get Gareth Southgate on Zoom and ask him about Roy Keane. Gareth will be unfailingly polite in the face of this gennetry.
One of the heroes will surely be parachuted into Love Island. Literally. Grealish, again, the most likely candidate. Though Kyle Walker ought to be there or thereabouts. There will be knighthoods. Books. . . A Netflix dramatisation with Cumberbatch as Southgate. Ed Sheeran will write a song, with McCartney guesting on a Hey Jude Bellingham chorus.
Nearly every Premier League game will involve Martin Tyler warmly hailing a ‘European champion’ every 10 minutes, wryly referencing a ‘tournament you may have followed’ out there in the neverland beyond Sky. None of these European champions will ever again be shown as much as a yellow card.
Look, it won’t be ideal. But we’ll get over it.
Wouldn’t we be 10 times worse ourselves? Fortycoats would get remade just so Jordan Pickford could shout, ‘I’m the Pickarooney’.
And if we have to endure one single sports story for the rest of our lives, shouldn’t we give thanks that we’ve already been adequately prepared by a lifetime hearing of the urgent need to remodel the provincial structures in Gaelic football?
But rest assured, it won’t go on forever. Because forever doesn’t last as long as it used to.
Think of it this way, there are many out there who were just as horrified at the prospect of Liverpool ending their great drought. When they eventually won it, the tears had dried within days and the Reds faithful were already fretting about ‘signings’.
Within six months, many of them were mired in the deepest personal crises, had sworn off football altogether, or were whispering that Klopp must go.
In the social media age, things get old in 20 minutes. By the morning after the final, they’ll already be wondering why England couldn’t have won it in style. Go out in the group stage in Qatar next year and Southgate will be back selling pizza.
Think of it this way too, the worst will be over. This possibility had hung over nearly every major tournament of our lifetimes. Ultimately providing rich comedic material sure, but marring the build-up, the nagging fear that this could be their year.
Certainly, this could have come at a better time, England’s now inevitable rise to the pinnacle of football. It’s a pity it coincided with this spell when they have gone even heavier than usual on the exceptionalism, when they have set themselves apart. While they are doing their level best to cut all ties with Johnny Foreigner.
This win will certainly be interpreted as a victory for Brexit, it will be milked for every bit of badness by scoundrels. It will be taken as proof that England is simply ‘a much better country’, as their education secretary claimed of their vaccine coups.
The badness in them was to the fore again in the widespread baiting of a young German girl captured crying on television during that last-16 victory. A variant of the virus that has them booing their own players for taking the knee. But we know them better than that too. We know them as friends and neighbours and cousins whose sofas we’ve slept on.
In Southgate, we see a leader with decency, in Gary Lineker their national self-awareness, joking about getting carried away even as they plot who should be rested in the semis.
In this house, we’ve seen that same self-awareness a lot lately in their magnificent kids football show, Jamie Johnson, another gift from the BBC that RTÉ has been showing a lot lately.
JJ tackles it all, in a light and family-friendly way. Intolerance, bullying, greed, poverty, sexism. It reminds us of the power of decent, sensitive leadership in shaping young dreams.
And it helps us remember that while England will never be an underdog, many of their footballers know exactly how that feels.
Good luck to them.
