This piece was originally published by our friends at the excellent Trasferta Magazine, and can be found alongside a couple more just like it here. 

Shortly after England’s extra time win against Slovakia, post kitchen clean up, pre-that weird, horrid hangover you get when you’ve only had a few beers, I picked up my phone and jumped onto twitter.

In the vacuum of my living room, Bellingham’s goal had been a monumental release. A Platt moment for the TikTok generation, a moment that could light the blue touch paper, or at the very least, have justified the last 360 minutes of watching England. That it was followed up by England taking the lead minutes into added time only added to the sense, in my mind at least, that we would all be breathing a sigh of relief and looking on to Switzerland. I think I even expected a tinge of positivity.

Instead, I opened my feed to see pure negativity.

People chastising Bellingham for bickering with the press, complaining about the arrogance of his celebration, and generally moaning about a poor performance from the players.

When was the meeting where we decided as fans to back the press instead of the players actually out there on the pitch? The irony of Shearer of all people talking about England’s underwhelming campaign thus far is astounding.

Whilst we’re on it, when did we decide as a country we don’t like arrogant 10s who can glide in over head kicks? Maybe this is why I’m not a footballer, but if I’d just scored that goal I’d be torn between windmilling wildly at the crowd and retiring on the spot.

I actually thought criticism of Bellingham’s overall performance was a tad harsh. In my mind he’d made a few driving runs into the box and offered an aerial threat every time we got the ball out wide, but this is based on a hazy Budweiser fuelled assessment of the game, so I could be wrong.

The nitty gritty of analysing performances aside, he’s just scored arguably the best (both in terms of quality and importance) goal England have scored in a knockout game in my lifetime.

People keep talking about England needing to find their “spark”. Well, if a 90+5 minute bicycle kick equaliser ain’t doing it for you, it might be time to speak to your doctor about viagra.

The other utterly baffling opinion I saw, and I had to double check that these tweets were sent after the 2 England goals as opposed to before, was that it was “just like Iceland all over again”.

Am I losing my fucking mind here?

The key difference here is that we actually went 1-0 up against Iceland 5 minutes in and then bottled it within the next 20, failing to muster a response.

In this game, we went 1-0 down and battled back to turn it around with an equaliser straight out of Shaolin Soccer. This was the complete opposite of the Iceland game.

Is it 14 years of our country rotting that’s made us all miserable or is my twitter feed just full of people who can’t remember when England being “shit” was us actually losing, not getting out of the group stages at tournaments, or failing to qualify altogether? Have the last 6 years spoiled us a bit? Is England’s relationship with major tournaments comparable to a situationship where we’re all just tired of being strung along, and now we’re just bitter and resentful? Lashing out at those pint chuckers in BoxPark because they remind us of a time when we were actually happy? Maybe we just need some space (failing to qualify) and we can find some optimism again.

I get people’s frustration. I can’t say I’ve enjoyed this euros so far, but that’s what made those 2 moments so special. Finally a moment of magic, of our own to celebrate. A goal out of a parallel universe, akin to one you’ve fashioned yourself on FIFA, made flesh. Yes you could argue “with the players we have we shouldn’t be in that position” and “if we had a different manager then we’d be playing X style football” but it’s like that old saying goes, “If my auntie had wheels she’d be a bike, but she doesn’t, so she isn’t”. We were 1-0 down with 30 seconds to go and we ended up winning. Not even taking it to penalties. Just beating them in extra time with little to no drama. This simply does not to happen to England.

To bring this rant to its conclusion, what’s struck me about the discourse after this game isn’t the criticism of perceived arrogance or the debate about the manager, that’s all par for the course at this point, it’s just the complete lack of any form of positivity to that once in a lifetime goal leading to a once in a lifetime turn around.

I’m not going to beg you all to be nicer to highly paid millionaires living out our dreams, but I am going to ask you all to just remember that football is all about these moments. We still all wax lyrical about Trippier’s free kick against Croatia in 2018, and we ended up losing that. The irony of course is that I’ve been annoyed by how annoyed everyone else is, and now I’m being joyless as well, not even wanting to speak to anyone about the football at work today.

Maybe, just maybe we should all just relax and try and enjoy it. Stop giving so much weight to the opinions of Shearer and Lineker who themselves achieved the square root of nowt in an England shirt, and start finding some joy in supporting the fella who’s just warped space and time to keep us in the Euros, maybe then we can all find some inner peace and a bit of joy…

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