SUMMER OF LOVE
You know the story of Euro 96, don’t you? A footballing opera played out against a backdrop of endless summer, accompanied by a timeless theme song, with cameo roles for great goals and that most enduring of central themes: England coming up agonisingly short (even before the tournament began, it was “thirty years of hurt”, and that’s now well into the mid-fifties).
“I WAS IN SWEDEN AND PEOPLE WERE LAUGHING AT US, AT OUR TACTICS,” RECALLED VENABLES
Except, as is so often the case, the pocket opera tells only half of the story. Euro 96 was far more nuanced and more complicated than that. Albeit not on this subject, Charles Dickens penned: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and that was Euro 96. It had its highs, which fed into an oversimplified shorthand; it also had its lows, which did the same. It certainly had stories which struggle to be heard now. Some of what you may know is wrong – even England’s formation. This can be the effect of history’s telescoping as events disappear into the rear-view mirror.
Because many of the dramatis personae still stalk the stage of our football theatre – from Southgate to Shearer and Gazza to G-Nev, not to mention your Baddiels, Skinners and Gallaghers in the audience – it feels like only yesterday. But it isn’t. It’s now further from the present than it was from the Three-Day Week, the Vietnam War, the opening of the Sydney Opera House and the eradication of smallpox.
This was A Different Time. From our vantage point now in what was then the distant future (, featuring its synthetic humans bio-engineered to work on colonies in space, was
