Grotty displays, odd outbursts, angry fans - it's nice to be back with England (2024)

He was sitting to my left, and to begin with, it was difficult to be sure he was breathing. Why was he slumped in his seat like that? Can someone give that man a prod? A fluorescent-jacketed steward tapped him on the cheek and, briefly, he stirred. Everything was OK, he was just sleeping. Sleeping? Yes, sleeping.

September, 2013: Ukraine 0-0 England. Dietmar Hamann, the ex-Germany international, referred to it on TV as “football stuck in the Dark Ages”. Gary Lineker called it “woeful”. And, though it is difficult to be sure of the exact timings, the Sleeping Man was zonked out from roughly the 11th minute to whenever everybody else in the Olympic Stadium, Kyiv, went home.

“There is a gag in there somewhere,” I wrote at the time. “England: the team that send people to sleep. They dull the senses. They huff and they puff, and sometimes the good old English qualities of guts and perseverance, and all those other cliches, are enough. But it is joyless, utterly joyless.”

Not always, admittedly. Every so often, they do something that takes you by surprise. Those are the moments when England’s fans are reminded that, in football, the good times feel so much sweeter because of the bad times.

If we can ignore, for one moment, what our eyes are telling us, maybe Euro 2024 will be one such occasion. Stop me if this sounds faintly ludicrous but, once the players have completed their victory parade through central London, maybe those grotty performances against Serbia and Denmark and the back-and-forth between Harry Kane and Gary Lineker will feel irrelevant.

We will laugh at the memories of Denmark’s fans singing, “It’s never coming home,” (a twist on the old Three Lions song) and that weird thing Gareth Southgate said the other day about not being able to replace Kalvin Phillips.

For now, though, there is just an uncomfortable sense of deja vu. And I say that as someone who has seen, close up, a heck of a lot of England disappointment. This is my seventh European Championship, to go with six World Cups, and each one has involved an investigation of some sort into the soul of English football. Every time it happens, that soul diminishes again.

Euro 2012, anyone? England went out of that tournament to Italy and, even now, I can vividly remember the callous snigg*ring among the rows of international media when UEFA’s officials distributed the sheets of paper containing some very revealing match statistics.

The data informed us England’s most accurate passer was… Joe Hart, the goalkeeper. England’s most successful passing combination? Hart’s long kick to Andy Carroll, a 60th-minute substitute.

That came off 15 times, which was more than James Milner, with 13, passed the ball to anyone. Andrea Pirlo, Italy’s masterful midfielder, put together more passes, 117, than England’s entire midfield quartet of Milner, Steven Gerrard, Scott Parker and Ashley Young.

Oh, the memories. England had 25 per cent of possession in extra time. Then, in the penalty shootout, Hart embarked on a course of action that can be described only as, well, different. He eyeballed Italy’s penalty takers. He stuck out his tongue. He pulled faces and made silly noises. He gurned, he squawked. He did everything but drop his shorts and squirt water from a pretend flower in his pocket.

“Who is this guy?” Pirlo found himself wondering on the walk from the centre circle to the penalty spot. “Time to bring him down from the clouds.”

Pirlo’s Panenka was a peaco*ck-like spreading of his feathers. More than that, it felt like an accurate appraisal of a wider story of tournament after tournament of underperformance, paralysis and, at times, capitulation: the bloke in the England shirt overdosing on silliness while the serial champion put him in his place and the rest of the football world giggled behind their hands.

If nothing else, it should also be a reminder all these years later that what is happening in Euro 2024 is not, whatever social media might be telling you, as bad as it can possibly be.

But the deja vu is considerable: waiting for the team to turn up, to deliver, to buck up their ideas, to play the way we expect them to play.

Euro 2016 still jabs at the senses. Another ordeal, another tragicomedy. And, on reflection, I’m not sure I have ever forgiven whichever bright spark at the Football Association thought it was a good idea to give the team’s lucky mascots, the Three Lions, their own seats on the plane. The Three Lions were cuddly toys (Kit, Cee and Leo, if you wanted to be on first-name terms). Each had their own lanyard, too. Yes, seriously. They were even given inflatable headrests to ensure a comfy flight into France.

Then England went out to Iceland — a nation with a population the size of Coventry — on a summer’s evening in Nice that brings back all sorts of memories: the chants of, “You’re not fit to wear the shirt,” the sight of Gary Cahill galloping around as an extra centre-forward, the sheer wonder of losing to a nation whose top-flight footballers earned, on average, £23,000 a year.

“England’s second-round opponents in Euro 2016 might as well have been called Iceberg,” Paul Hayward wrote in his 2022 book, England Football: The Biography, in a chapter aptly named: “The Titanic goes down again.”

Kit, Cee and Leo were squashed into a metal crate for the flight back to England, never to be seen in public again. Hodgson resigned: grey, broken. fingernails bitten to the quick. Nobody ever explained why he had passed up the opportunity to watch Iceland play their final group game in Paris five days earlier (Hodgson chose instead to spend the day sightseeing and went on a boat ride along the River Seine with his assistant, Ray Lewington).

And, on the day after England’s elimination, there was the unintentional comedy of the FA wheeling out its chief executive, Martin Glenn, as the man tasked with finding and appointing England’s next manager.

Glenn was previously the chief executive of United Biscuits, which manufactured Twiglets, Jaffa Cakes and Jacob’s Cream Crackers, among others. He introduced himself to England’s press corps by promising he would try his absolute best, then cheerfully admitted there was something else we ought to know and it was that, in his own words, he was “no football expert”.

The moral of the story is… well, is there really a moral other than: don’t ever be so stupid and daft and insanely arrogant to put up a clock at St George’s Park, the FA’s headquarters, ticking down over years to the day England were supposed to win the 2022 World Cup? (Memo to any new football fans here: yes, this really did happen).

Don’t be co*cky. Don’t get your hopes too high. Don’t just assume that what you see in the Premier League will automatically transfer itself to international football. And don’t keep coming out with all that tedious stuff about England inventing the sport. It’s true, but better sometimes not to shout it from the rooftops when we haven’t seen too much in the way of royalties so far.

In the 2014 World Cup, the FA had a 72-person entourage with them, including a psychiatrist, nutritionists, chefs, a turf specialist and one guy whose job, it seemed, was to spray the players with water when they started overheating in the Brazil sunshine.

There were industrial fans, heat chambers and box after box of individually tailored recovery drinks. The FA had even invited a bunch of scientists from Loughborough University to study the players’ sweat patterns. “Anyone who thinks we can’t win the World Cup has to be barking up the wrong tree,” said Hodgson. And then the old-fashioned stuff — the football — got underway. Six days in, England were out. Home before the postcards? England had been knocked out before their players had finished their week-long course of anti-malaria tablets.

South Africa, 2010. Again, England were discredited as well as defeated in a World Cup. Again, the inquest should have restricted itself to one conclusion: that quite possibly we were just not as good as we liked to think we were.

Maybe you recall the English banner that appeared at the laboured 1-0 win against Slovenia in Port Elizabeth: “6,000 miles for what?” Or the goalless stalemate for Fabio Capello’s team against Algeria in Cape Town when England’s followers started barracking the players after 10 minutes. Southgate was a pundit for ITV that night. “We look frightened,” he observed.

And now? Southgate, to give him his due, has succeeded in his eight years as manager in making it less of an issue than it was previously. Many of us who remember England’s pre-Southgate years think he deserves a bit of slack for that, at least. England are top of Group C and can look ahead to the knockout stage before their final group assignment against Slovenia in Cologne. It is easy to understand why he wants everyone — the players, fans, media — to remain calm.

Unfortunately for Southgate, there is something else you learn when you have followed England to all the major 21st-century tournaments where they have qualified and the majority of games in between: that there is, almost always, a general absence of calm. At times, you have to wonder whether they should come out to the theme from Jaws.

Malta, 2017, comes to mind. You might have forgotten it. I doubt Southgate has, though.

It was his ninth game in charge. England won 4-0 against a team that had a player from Ebbsfleet of the National League, English football’s fifth tier, in their defence. But the final score felt like a deception. Three of the goals came in the last four minutes and, before that, the mood among the England fans was straying dangerously close to mutiny. “We’re f***ing s***,” went the chant, over and again, on loop.

It was not the worst abuse I have ever seen England’s players encounter (that was in 2007, in the Steve McClaren era, when Stewart Downing, in particular, became the scapegoat of a 3-0 win against Andorra in Barcelona). It was, however, the only time I had witnessed a mass walkout of England’s supporters. Around two-thirds had left the Ta’ Qali stadium before the flurry of late goals. “Fish and chips,” chanted the Malta fans, confusingly.

The interesting part, looking back, is that England won both those matches but still found out how quickly everything can escalate when their fans’ patience has eroded.

That, perhaps, should be the biggest worry for Southgate at a time when his popularity, which peaked at the 2018 World Cup in Russia, has dipped dramatically and it is starting to feel like there might be another iceberg ahead.

What will the reaction be if England continue with these humdrum performances? Hypothetical, for now, but the lesson of history suggests it wouldn’t be pretty.