I wrote a piece about the match, and I did not compare it (in any detail) to colonic irrigation, which I think was a relief to all concerned. But I did not start to love football at this moment. Over the following couple of days I watched umpteen group-stage matches on the TV, in fact, and lost the will to live. I found that I started doing other tasks at the same time as the footie - tasks which grew in complexity as the days went by. For example, during Germany v Czech Republic (on the Sunday) I did some dusting; during Romania v France (Monday) I made some curtains, and during Switzerland v The Netherlands (Thursday) I translated Kierkegaard from the Danish. It did not help that this was a particularly low-scoring tournament taking place in weirdly half-empty stadiums. Nor did it help that none of these foreign players was a household name in my particular household. When I now look at old footage of Euro 96, I see Dennis Bergkamp and the teenaged Patrick Kluivert, Luis Figo and Zinedane Zidane (with hair), Fabrizio Ravanelli and Gianfranco Zola, Jürgen Klinsmann and even Ally McCoist. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and so on. But to me in 1996, all these blokes were just talented exotics, some of them with unexplained Elastoplasts stuck across their noses.
Meanwhile, the commentators said bizarre things like, ‘That was a bread and butter ball,’ and I’d get distracted thinking about types of open sandwich. The sound from my living room had become the sound from millions of other living rooms, of the droning, ‘Here’s Grumpy…to Dopey …back to Grumpy…good run from Sleepy, oh, Bashful’s found some clearance!’ All against the repeated background crowd noise of ‘Ooh’ (indicating a shot off target). I was wondering whether I should give up footie before it was too late. After all, I had a novel coming out in a month’s time; I had a lovely regular job reviewing television; my nice boyfriend liked to see me happy but he really wasn’t interested in football; my best friend actually preferred Sheffield Wednesday to this Euro stuff. Perhaps I should call it off.
So my bosses decided to get me out of the house again. Bizarrely, they sent me to Macclesfield to watch the Germans make peace with the local community - but it was nevertheless a clever move. As a television critic I led a life that rarely required me to put on outdoor shoes: the mere idea of stepping outside my front door and shutting it behind me twice in one week was alone enough to thrill my senses. Good heavens, I would have to catch a train and then reclaim the fare; indeed, I would have to find out where Macclesfield was. It was explained to me that the German team, under coach ‘Bertie’ Vogts, had been billeted to this Cheshire market town, you see (birthplace of the Hovis loaf ), possibly as some sort of punishment for being too good at football. Naturally, they complained. In particular, they caused a local uproar by claiming that their practice pitch at the Moss Rose (nice name) had stones and bits of glass in it. By the time I got there, they had apologised for any distress caused, and the Macclesfield Express Advertiser carried the headline, ‘VOGTS BACKS DOWN IN FACE OF FAN’S FURY’ - the placing of the apostrophe suggesting, unfortunately, that Macclesfield Town FC had just the one fan.
The point of sending me, I think, was that the Germans had decided to do some open training, so the locals could watch, and I could get all excited seeing the charming and popular Klinsmann at close quarters; so it was a shame that I didn’t know what he looked like - a Macclesfield teenager eating chips on a dismal concrete terrace had to point him out as a blond-headed dot in the distance. As a pr stunt, the whole thing did lack something. ‘Are there going to be any autographs?’ asked the kids. ‘Nein,’ was the reply. As a way of deepening my interest in the tournament, the press conference (in German) wasn’t much better. They gave me a T-shirt with ‘Say no to drugs’ in German on it, but I realised I couldn’t wear it with any conviction. Drugs were starting to seem quite attractive, compared with Euro 96. I liked all this getting out and about, but the football? I watched a bunch of Germans in the distance play another bunch of Germans, with a German referee. I wondered if I was looking at the future. And the experience taught me something else: that the downside to travelling halfway up the country with a bit of footie hope in your heart is that, afterwards, you have to travel halfway down the country back again with nothing to console you for all those wasted hours.
So the only thing keeping me going, at this stage, was the BT pager, which had started off the tournament delivering quite terse and factual reports (‘England 1, Switzerland 0, Shearer 22 mins’), but by midweek was employing interesting value judgements and adjectives. It was fascinating. I loved it. I hung on its every word. It described team performances as ‘spirited’, and so on. ‘Dutch substitution de Kock for Seedorf (lucky not to be sent off )’. The worst thing was, I loved the way it went off at unexpected moments: it made me feel all connected and indispensable. I was at the checkout in Waitrose at 6.30 on the Thursday evening (packing cat food) when the balloon went up, and I had no choice: I stopped everything I was doing, grabbed the pager, and held it in front of my furrowed face, pressing its buttons. The checkout lady was impressed. She probably thought I’d be performing a kidney transplant within the hour. The message read, ‘Please keep posted for tonight’s crunch match between The Netherlands and the Swiss - goals, etc.’ Unable to pass this on, I solemnly pursed my lips and waved a hand over the groceries as if to say, ‘Well, it puts all this in perspective.’ (Which was true.)
Then came England v Scotland. This time, the paper wanted me to watch footie in a local Brighton pub - and, as I write those words, I do start to think it was all a plot to destroy me, after all. They gave me some spending money in an envelope, and suggested a small, murky pub, forgetting to tell me that I needed to start camping out in front of its giant screen on Friday night if I wanted to have any chance of a seat for the match on Saturday afternoon. Robert and I arrived 90 minutes before the match, and the bar with the TV was already crowded with professional layabouts ordering beer in enormous pitchers and crisps by the box. All the seats were taken, and most of the floor space was taken, too. It was hard to see the attraction of watching footie in a pub - especially when the match was being broadcast on terrestrial television and therefore available in one’s own home. The only interesting novelty in the experience, as far as I could tell, was the stickiness of the floor, which meant that, however roughly one was barged from the side, one could always regain the vertical. The screen was dreadful - a blurry, washed-out picture; meanwhile the half-light was a pickpockets’ charter, the crowding was ghastly, the air was full of cigarette smoke, people were already quite rowdy, and worst of all, you couldn’t hear the telly. How was I supposed to take detailed notes in these conditions? Someone really hadn’t thought this through.
But there was something behind my grumbling, I realised. Something unexpected. I was tense about the football. A match was about to take place, the outcome of which might be decisive for England’s progress through the tournament. Suddenly the previous Saturday’s 1-1 result against Switzerland looked like a wasted opportunity: why hadn’t England played better, tried harder, got more goals? Hadn’t they understood what was at stake? Hadn’t they had a couple of years to prepare for that match? With an hour to go before England v Scotland, I felt sick. The pager had sent me a message on the Friday with, ‘Pressure on England and Scotland to win tomorrow’, and I had thought this a bit superfluous, but now, as I waited grimly for kick-off at 3 p.m., I hated the fact that, yes, both teams really needed to win this if they were to survive the group stage of the competition. Scotland had only one point; England had only one point; The Netherlands had three. England was to meet The Netherlands the following Thursday at Wembley, and that was the last of the group matches. In less than a week’s time, before the knockout stage started, England might actually be out. ‘Come on, England!’ someone shouted across the pub - and this was half an hour before the match, you understand. But it didn’t seem such a banal thing to say, all of a sudden. ‘Come on, England!’ does sum up one’s feelings in this situation pretty well. I tried to unclench my jaw,