This is Editor’s Take: during EURO2024, home of the SCOUTED team’s quick-fire thoughts on the tournament as it happens.
The tone of my writing throughout this tournament has been dour. And not just dour because England have been boring. Dour because for the first time since Gareth Southgate’s appointment I have found it difficult to connect to his team.
As I’ve tried to articulate, perhaps it is because his shuffling, turgid form of footballing austerity has reflected too harshly the realities of the country it represents: we have all become sick of being told individual brilliance will save us, that systems are not the answer, that the good will trickle down. Or perhaps it is simply that the novelty of England’s competitiveness has worn off. Expectations have changed. No more is a gruelling slog through lesser teams enough to satiate: after so long, we should do better, be better.
So, for all the joy of England’s penalty-shootout conquering of rigid Switzerland, the taste was still mute. But it left traces of something. In the days since, that something has proven difficult to untangle.
Yes, there was change. Not radical, not brave, not progressive, but change all the same. A back three. Wingers high and wide. Two genius tens, roaming the world’s most prolific centre-forward. Against Switzerland, England finally assembled a system traced around the outline of its composite parts. It was hardly the progressive rebirth our naive hearts longed for, but it was change. Sensible change, pragmatic change. The adults are in charge.
And the adults, to the bewilderment of an entire Twitter timeline, deemed Kieran Trippier the sensible choice to start as a flying winger. He was England’s most advanced player in possession, an obelisk to sit on the left touchline and deflect balls back infield. Meanwhile, the opposite flank was a blur of white and blue as Bukayo Saka twisted and turned Michel Aebischer into red fusilli. Aebischer had, to that point, been a key cog in Murat Yakin’s calculated master plan. Saka pinned him in place and used him like a training dummy. Aebischer won one of his eight ground duels. He was dribbled past six times. Leave Saka alone with any full-back on earth and you’re accessory to murder.
But there it is again. The trickle down. It doesn’t matter the left side is as effective as a marshmellow sledgehammer - someone will bail England out. Switzerland scored because they deserved to, but also because desperation seems to be England’s superpower: it is the only reliable trigger to activate heroball.
Who else, Jude Bellingham screamed last week. On Saturday, we got an answer: a kid from Hale End. Who will it be next?
On Saturday, England could find no other hero. And so it arrived, once again, inevitably: the dreaded walk to the hangman’s noose. Penalties. The old enemy. And with it the awful, haunting image of a young man, head bowed, walking alone under the jeers of thousands and the spectre of millions. It’s become an image synonymous with English heartbreak. The obsession has grown close to trauma, picked at like a scab until it bleeds again. So many golden generations, each fallen at the hurdle of twelve yards. And that image, of a man alone in the noise, shame so heavy on his shoulders.

In the shootout with Switzerland, that image didn’t appear once. Not just because England scored all five penalties, but because they made it an impossibility. They erased it from their future.
When Cole Palmer slotted away the first with his trademark nonchalance, he turned and walked back to the group, nine players assembled in an odd, loose jumble on the halfway line. Except he didn’t walk alone. He was met midway by Kyle Walker. The two grasped with a hug and smile, and Walker guided his junior teammate back to the fold. They walked those same steps that destroyed so many Englishmen before, but they walked them together.

Jude Bellingham was met by Luke Shaw. Bukayo Saka was pulled into a hug by John Stones. Ivan Toney was shepherded by Declan Rice. And Trent Alexander-Arnold was met by all of them, pelting across the turf as he grabbed his match-winning ball and booted it into the stands, screaming his triumph.
These intricacies and more were detailed in a fascinating thread by Geir Jordet, a football psychologist and author of Pressure. England did not interlock arms on the halfway line, as is the custom - instead they stood loosely, ready to comfort each other as needed. Jordan Pickford snuck into the box as often as his sleazy charm could get away with, to outnumber Yann Sommer two to one. Southgate assigned his takers and their buddies with a newfound clarity.
When they’ve played together, England have never looked more alone. And yet, in this penalty shootout - the most crushingly lonely moment this sport can curate - they walked together.
If this England journey is to be built on individual brilliance, on heroball and nothing else, we must make our peace. In the days since Saturday, as I’ve tried to untangle what the shootout left me with, I have found myself unexpectedly moved. I think this is what I’ve been waiting for, all I’ve really wanted: a unity, an identity, a team I could be proud to love. A truly collective purpose.
And if the individual stories include those like which Bukayo Saka is writing, I can live with that. Nineteen and alone. Crushed. Abused. He has reclaimed his own narrative but he hasn’t done it alone; he is a synthesis of the unconditional love of Hale End, Mikel Arteta, Gareth Southgate, and his own irrepressible talent. There’s so much complex baggage in having a relationship to England but Saka makes it easy. He’s emblematic of everything to love about this country - the son of immigrants, an endless joy, a man determined to make his own fate from the materials afforded to him.
We are all, in the end, products of our environment, in football even more so. England’s approach to penalties finally proved they understood that. 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.
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