Terry Venables inspired a generation to dream and left England wanting more
Terry Venables was the lost great England manager and, until Gareth Southgate, the last great England manager. The link between Alf Ramsey, for whom he briefly played, and Southgate, who he plucked from Aston Villa and turned into an assured international with seeming ease, Venables may have fashioned the best England team since 1966. And if that verdict comes from the slender evidence of perhaps two-and-a-half games of playing well on home soil – the second 45 minutes against Scotland, the rout of the Netherlands, the semi-final against Germany – Euro ’96 will forever leave a generation with a sense of what might have been.
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