This is Editor’s Take: during EURO2024, home of the SCOUTED team’s quick-fire thoughts on the tournament as it happens.
90:00.
The ball passed the line on exactly 90 minutes.
It was a finish of perfect angles, of exact science, of curated architecture. Over and over and over has Ollie Watkins done that, that exact movement, moving his leg along that specific path through the air. It threaded Stefan de Vrij’s legs and breathed inside the post the same way a snooker player brushes the cushion. Pocket. A million outcomes condensed by a million repetitions; a geometric dilemma solved by instinct.
“Ollie Watkins,” Paul Tisdale told SCOUTED in March, “was a real piece of engineering.” Tisdale brought Watkins through at Exeter City in League Two. “He had the talent, he had the personality […] but he didn’t see the game correctly. It took us two or three years to break that down. The more you spoke about process, the worse it got.”
You can now draw a direct line between the years Tisdale spent with Watkins to England reaching a European Championship Final. Years drilling his instinct, removing his doubts, cleaning his vision. Head empty, just shoot. Know the angles, feel them. History, engineered.
It was a moment England deserved. For the first time this tournament, against the Netherlands they were clearly the better side; for the first time this tournament they met an opponent worse without the ball then they are. The tattered Dutch midfield was overrun by a singsong quartet of Phil Foden, Kobbie Mainoo, Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham. Mainoo and Foden in particular were majestic. This was the butterfly effect of Teun Koopmeiners’ and Frenkie de Jong’s absence writ large: a gaping hole into which two of Manchester’s most gifted technicians gladly waltzed.
Yes, it took a contentious penalty to draw England level, but it’s hard to imagine them losing over ninety minutes regardless. Desperation has proven a superpower, a reliable trigger to activate the dormant heroball of Bellingham and Bukayo Saka. England were good but miles from great. Grounding the electricity of Spain seems almost impossible. But they will have a chance. It’s a final. Anything can happen. And touching history through contentious means has its own kind of poetry.
A defining moment of my youth, and I’d guess many of yours, too, was England’s 4-1 defeat to Germany in Cape Town, 2010. Joachim Löw’s side was youthful, vibrant, and technically years ahead. The angles that day were not in England’s favour; Frank Lampard struck the bar and clearly scored, but the linesman thought otherwise.
What emerged was not a toxic sense of injustice but a clear-eyed admission of England’s failure. They did not lose because of a poor decision - they lost because Germany had produced Mesut Özil and Thomas Müller in the same generation. Fuelled by a heady mixture of jealousy, disappointment and a determination to purge decades of underachievement, a grassroots revolution began.
Like me, Ollie Watkins was 14 years old in 2010 and, like me, was probably sat watching at home, a child completely unaware of the role he would play in England’s redemption (I played no such role). But he had already spent years at Exeter’s academy. The work had already begun. Four years later, Tisdale handed him a debut. The years that followed will be held in time forever, coalesced into that single, perfect swing of a right boot. It was Brentford, in the Championship, who saw a number nine hiding inside the winger. It was Brentford who set it free. In football, it takes all these hands to sculpt a masterpiece.
I ended my last column with this: “We are all, in the end, products of our environment, in football even more so […] If individualism is to be the way, perhaps we can hold onto the knowledge that England produced Bukayo Saka, Jude Bellingham, and whoever’s called upon to be hero next. Yes, perhaps I can believe in that.”
Well, now I know. I do believe. In the end, England have not reached a final because of tactical excellence or progressive style. They have done it on the back of fourteen years of careful, caring tutelage by coaches across the country. England’s football pyramid has always been its beating heart, the one thing we can point to with pride as better than anywhere else in the world. Now it’s delivered history. Individualism, yes - but individuals gently guided by the hands of the many, the unseen, the unheralded.
Their fingerprints are all over England. Jarrod Bowen was reared at non-league Hereford. Ivan Toney at Northampton Town. Jude Bellingham at Birmingham City. Konsa and Gomez at Charlton; Wharton at Blackburn; Eze at QPR after endless rejection; Stones at Barnsley. In fact, it’s easier to list those who haven’t played in the English Football League or lower - there’s just seven.
So I was wrong. Collectivism has been at the heart of this England campaign all along, it’s just been hidden. Now we must turn the spotlight towards it.
Especially because, as we celebrate a truly golden era of English football, half of that triumph lies in shade. Not only have the women of England’s Lionesses gone one further than the men and actually won something, they have set the pace for these halcyon years. The blueprint was proven long before today. And now, as the men get their flowers, those women must sit and read headlines about Reading FC’s team being demoted because of an owner’s incompetence, or Manchester United’s team evicted from their facilities in favour of the men.
This moment is fragile and the work that built it can be undone. We will remember Jude Bellingham, Ollie Watkins and Chloe Kelly forever. We would be fools to ignore the shoulders they stood upon. Enshrine their triumph as singular, as God-given talent that destiny could not deny, and it will all fall apart. They deliver their moments alone but are walked to the stage by systems and people unseen.
For this weekend only, and perhaps Monday too, we can luxuriate in this story of perfect angles and engineered euphoria. Then the coaches will go back to work. Schools will reopen. Children across the country will pull on their boots and dream the Watkins dream. Whatever happens on Sunday, England’s grassroots will not stop in the quest to do this all over again. That’s a perfect, precious thing. Something to believe in. Something to protect.
After the drama of that semi-final, unwind with this epic analysis of Gian Piero Gasperini’s unprecedented success at Atalanta. It’s free for everyone to read, just like this Editor’s Take is. Subscribe now to keep stuff like this coming.
The best way to spread the good word of SCOUTED is by telling everyone you know — and liking this post if, indeed, you did like it. We’d appreciate that.