And fade to red. The Euro 2024 trophy will not, it turns out be coming back with the players to England after all. The parade can be scaled back, the beds turned down, the welcome basket stashed. Monday will be a day for hangovers and regrets, which is in its own way English football’s own safe place.
But it is at least headed to a very good home as England’s footballers were eased aside in Berlin’s Olympiastadion by a supremely coherent and gifted Spanish team. A 2-1 victory, the winner coming painfully late, means Spain are now four time winners of Europe’s elite competition.
Whereas for England, well, the wait goes on, perhaps even shifting now into another phase in that ongoing psychodrama of long marches, honourable defeat and almost-but-not-quites. The age of Gareth Southgate, eight years in the making, might just be teetering very close to the edge now.
This was at least an excellent final, a full-throated affair against the team of the tournament. Spain has been the dominant football culture of the last quarter century, a tactical atelier that has fed the universal global coaching style, not least the Premier League’s own age of Guardiola-imprint possession football.
Football did seem keen to come home here. It just turns out that home is in Catalonia, Galicia, the Basque Country and surrounding provinces.
At the final whistle England’s players were distraught, white shapes scattered around the lime green turf, utterly drained after seven high-drama games en route to a first overseas final in the men’s national team’s history. They will be proud, when the bruises heal, of the way a young team grew into its tournament shape. Under Southgate England have now enjoyed the most sustained period of tournament success in their history. Even if, for now, that collective yearning, the vast and unslaked hunger of flags and painted faces, a kind of grail quest in love with its own falling-short, will now continue at least until the next World Cup, 60 years on from 1966 and all that.
Berlin had managed to dish up all the weather all the time before the game, segueing from hard, pounding rain to clammy high summer tea-time heat to a cool silvery evening light at kick-off. Throughout the day the zig-zagging streets of the city’s east side had been thronging with flag draped figures, duffle bags and rucksacks, a sudden swarm of replica England shirts on e-scooters, gathering for the trek to this mega-drome in the western suburbs.
The Olympiastadion is an extraordinary thing, built in a Roman style, and simultaneously beautiful, open, clean and unavoidably sinister. Before kick-off the stands rang with a very English kind of call and response, the agreeable weirdness in thousands of English people singing Wonderwall on a lovely summer evening inside Werner March and Albert Speer’s athletic emporium of the Third Reich.
The whole occasion felt epic, wreathed in firework smoke and crackling with event glamour. For England Luke Shaw, who last started a game five months ago, was in on the left where he faced the brilliant Lamine Yamal, just turned 17, a player with the ability to veer from foot to foot like a pond-skater.
Early on, as Spain dominated the ball, it was hard to know if England were playing well or badly. There was no data. They were basically watching someone else take part in a sporting event, interested spectators to Spain’s passing patterns.
Southgate had emerged by now strolling around his vast chalked rectangle in classic textured cream polo shirt golf club barbecue chic, a little concerned. England had completed 17 passes by the time Spain hit a hundred. They were gasping a little for air, strangled by that red and blue knot. In a game like this just staying on your feet is a virtue.
Spain in this mood are like watching a team of hyper competitive formation basket-weavers. They just kept winning possession back in the duels or at every loose touch, so much happier in possession of that often overlooked item, the ball.
after newsletter promotion
Through it the England fans sang. “Phil Foden’s on fire.” “We’re on our way, on our way.” “Don’t take me home.”
And in between England struggled to find a rhythm of their own. One of their most exciting moments of the first half was Kyle Walker’s recovery sprint just before half-time, arms pumping cheeks puffed, as he chased down Nico Williams like a super competitive PE teacher insisting on beating the sixth form in a series of shuttle sprints.
In England’s attack Harry Kane had offered all the mobility, touch and spring of a rain-sodden hay bale. And within a minute and 15 seconds of the restart they were behind, the goal laid on by a precise flick from Lamine Yamal, and scored by the electric Williams, surging on on the left to tuck the ball into the far corner. Spain’s wingers have been the story of this tournament, two wonderfully gifted, super smart young men, 17 and 21, who have basically cut a clean path through Europe’s elite teams.
England have recovered from these positions in Germany. But Spain are a different entity, a genuinely high-class team that can just take the ball away from you.
At which point Southgate took hold of this game. The substitutions did the job. Kane was removed. Cole Palmer came on, and it was Palmer who scored a sublime equaliser, after a move involving Bukayo Saka and Jude Bellingham. The ball fell to Palmer on his left foot, in space 20 yards from goal, and he simply eased it into the far corner past Unai Simón’s dive. As the ball whiffled the net the England half of the stadium exploded in a shout of joy and disbelief, the bodies seething in the concrete aisles, falling over one another in the seats.
That was England’s high. The reality will hurt. But Spain deserved over four weeks to leave the stage last.