London: When I was much younger, a soccer anthem called "Three Lions" offered an exuberant cry. "Football's coming home," the lyrics went, after "30 years of hurt." That was a quarter century ago. Thirty years of hurt have become 55. And I have suffered all of them.
My earliest sporting memory: my dad and my much older half-brother shouting at the TV screen as West Germany came back from a two-goal deficit to beat England in extra time in the quarterfinals at Mexico 1970.
I was too young to understand the enormity. Three years later, when England fell to Poland at Wembley and didn't even qualify for Germany 74, it was abject heartbreak for a soccer-mad 10-year-old.
I still recall the despair, made worse by a contrarian older sister who for some reason supported Poland. You have to remember that seven years previous England had been World Champions, so to not qualify was a national disaster. Another failure to qualify for Argentina '78 was made even harder because, for the second World Cup running, Scotland qualified and took great pleasure to remind the auld enemy of that. I remained obsessed, with an encyclopedic knowledge of facts and statistics. And even without England present in 1978, I feigned illness to get a week off school and watch the live matches on telly.
The 1980s were only a little better. At least we qualified.
Unlike some of my fellow England sufferers, I was always realistic. I rarely said they were the best team in the world. But I expected more. We were, after all, the nation that gave the world the beautiful game. And for substantial chunks of these 55 years of failure, English teams dominated club soccer at the highest level and, from the inception of the Premiership, became the most financially lucrative league in the world.
I graduated in 1990. Two days after my final exam, I asked my mum to borrow her car. She never asked me where I was going. If I had said Italy, she might well have ended that great adventure before it had even started. I stayed for three weeks, driving around watching matches with tickets purchased outside the grounds.
The team gave us something to cheer. Last-minute winners against Belgium and the emergence of Gazza, probably English soccer's most gifted player, gave us hope. But once again, at the hands of the Germans, it ended in tears Gazza's and
my own.