SPACEPHILLER with Phil Creighton
DO YOU ever wish you had a time machine so you could go back to the past and slap yourself around the chops and tell yourself not to be so stupid?
There’s numerous moments – those times when you say no when you mean yes and miss out on some amazing experiences as a result.
It would be nice to say je ne regrette rien but life is not quite like that. There’s always dropped stitches in life’s rich tapestry, and it’s up to us to smooth over that dodgy needlework so that no one else notices.
England play their first game in the Euro 2020 tournament on Sunday and regular as clockwork there’s a re-release of Baddiel and Skinner’s seminal team-up with The Lightning Seeds: Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home).
It is one of those songs that really was lightning in a bottle, and it was 25 years ago this year.
Euro 96 truly was a great moment – for a short while, people really did believe that football was coming home, and the Spice Girls were weeks away from unleashing girl power on the world.
England played a blinder in the tournament that took place on home turf and, if only for a few brief weeks, there was belief that the squad could go on to win its first silverware since 1966.
Sadly, there’s been more chance of Pickles the dog’s great great great grandpup getting their paws on a trophy since then, but hey, didn’t stop me dreaming.
Watching the Euros this year will be a very different experience to 1996.
The tellies I’ll be watching on are wider and thinner, but I’m just fatter and wider. Can’t have everything I suppose.
And due to covid, most of the action will be seen at home. The telly aerial is broken and you can’t cast the ITV Hub, so any England games on the other side will be watched on a phone rather than the idiot’s lantern.
Just imagine telling that to your 1996 self, let alone a 1966 one… colour? On a phone you can watch anywhere? Tis witchcraft.
Back in 1996, every game was watched down my local.
At the time that was my home city of Canterbury, and a delightful backstreet boozer called The Bat and Ball. It got its name from its proximity to Kent’s cricket ground – yes, the one with that tree.
It was a rather wonderful little place where the weird and wonderful mixed. Winner stayed on at the pool table, the landlord’s dog was rather friendly if you had a packet of crisps and it was one of the first to have tellies on the wall so we could watch the novelty that then was Sky Sports.
Normally, we could get a seat no problem but for the Euros it became rather popular. And as it got to that fateful semi-final, it was a miracle anyone could raise their pint glass to their mouth such was the squeeze.
As this was pre-smoking ban, goodness knows how anyone multi-tasked with fag and a beer glass at the same time.
There is something magical about watching a game collectively. The oohhs and ahhs as the team takes you on a roller coaster of emotions – winning one moment to seeing the hand of god take it away the next, there is nothing that can beat the shared experience.
And so it was here. England knocked out on penalties, 30 years of hurt to hurt a bit longer.
It’s not coming home anymore.
Three years later, the same last gasp heartache at Wembley Stadium as my beloved Gillingham lose a play-off final to Man City well after injury time should have ended.
I’m still bitter about that.
But here we are, 55 years of hurt never stops me dreaming.
So what of that time machine?
Well, 1996 was a wonderful moment.
That summer, I was young, carefree and weeks away from starting university. But idiot that I was I wasn’t dreaming.
Of anything.
Now I’ve got those oh-so-nears, wearing
me down through the years.
Ah well. There’s always Fat Les’ Vindaloo. What do you mean you’ve never heard of it?
Well, that’s another story…
