If there’s a documentary, TV or radio, about Euro 96, I’ll watch it. While they always make me cry, make me think ‘what if?’, I can’t get enough. I love it. England didn’t win, but that’s beside the point. I, along with millions of others, had the best summer ever.

England vs Germany, 26^th June, 1996

Ruby Tuesdays, a bar in Nottingham, was packed, mostly with boys my age, taking up any available space in the basement where the football was being shown. Two lads perched on top of some stacked tables in the corner. Occasionally they would touch the ceiling to keep their balance, or punch it like excited chimpanzees. Angled mirrors lined the top of the walls making it appear there were even more people in there. It was already warm and muggy outside. I was wearing white chinos and a red cheesecloth shirt and Adidas Gazelles. My lank curtains stuck to my spotty forehead. I was with my best friend John and Lee, who I’d been mates with since our first year at secondary school. We got our pints and held them close, trying not to spill them as people brushed past. We gawped up at the TVs, as heavy as small fridges, but as small as microwaves. I couldn’t hear a word Des Lynam was saying, before the game, such was the raucous atmosphere. Everyone was confident that this time, we would beat the Germans. Even me. The whole tournament, the misery of the past six years, had been building to this point. It was our time; there was no way it could end in defeat. No chance. We were going to win. And then win in the final. There was no doubt. It felt like a guarantee.

Ahead of the match, John found the only girl in the place and before long was snogging her. Lee had started chatting to some lads to his left, like he’d known them all of his life. All that mattered to me was the match and I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. Maybe if I looked away something would go wrong. After a few minutes, England were ahead. Shearer headed in after a flick from Tony Adams. The place erupted. There were wild, vaulting bodies everywhere, the lads on the stacked tables tumbles forward and lager rained down. Lee embraced the lads he’d met and John briefly stopped kissing the girl. It was the start everyone wanted but maybe it was too early. The best and worst of times to score.

The only commentary I could actually hear was when John Motson, at one point, screamed ‘KUNTZ!’ Not his personal feelings, of course, but the unfortunate name of the German striker. It started chants of ‘KUNTZ! KUNTZ! KUNTZ!’. And almost like he’d heard their mirth, he equalised for Germany. The rest of the 90 minutes I remember feeling tense. It was like watching two bareknuckle boxers just punching each other in the head, within in a ring of haybales. There wasn’t a great deal of respect out there, maybe because of Turin, or for the Germans, because they’d been treated like ‘Allo ‘Allo Nazis, by the tabloids. I wanted to see England win but the press’ build-up to the game had been appalling.   

The atmosphere remained tense into extra-time. It was next goal wins, or golden goal as it was known, so any attack could have resulted, painfully, as game over. An awkward kinship developed in that small, sweaty, space. We were going through hell together; it was certainly as warm as hell. Lee and his new friends had their shirts off. John came up for air, occasionally. Germany scored but it was judged offside. Darren Anderton hit the post and, agonisingly, Gazza couldn’t put away a Shearer cross. I look at that chance today, and I still think he’s going to put it in. Every. Single. Time.

Penalties again. Against the Germans again. But it wouldn’t be the same again… Surely? Sadly, it was. Even after Gareth Southgate missed, I thought Seaman would save us again. But the Germans don’t miss. Andreas Moller, with his eighties mullet, his air of superiority and contempt for anyone that was not Andreas Moller, put his penalty away. Of course, he did. It left the bar in silence, briefly. I looked up at myself in the mirror and saw that I was crying. They weren’t tears of misery and sadness, they were tears of pain, frustration and disappointment. How had it happened again? Others, their arms around each other, stared at the TV. John discarded the girl, who looked dumbfounded, Lee wept with his new pals. The shot on the TV showed Moller posing, triumphantly, mocking, mimicking Gazza’s own celebratory pose. And then all hell broke loose. A lad, with long blonde hair, who had been smiling and exchanging a few words with me, minutes before, walked up to one of the televisions and punched its thick glass screen. Pint glasses and bottles then started to fly and smash into pieces against the wood panelled walls. I gestured for us to get out of there.

Outside, I entered a phone box to call Dad. He could barely speak. It was the first time I’d heard him cry. Over the years he’d hidden his emotions from me, perhaps in an old-fashioned way. Obviously, he was upset the day he and Mum told us they were getting a divorce, but maybe didn’t want to cry in front of us. The experience was tough enough as it was. The way he was, following the match, made me upset too, it was so crushing, there was little to say. However, Lee had entered the phone box next to me to call his mum. I suddenly heard him raise his voice.

“What do you mean, why am I crying?” he said, his voice high-pitched and occasionally cracking.
“England have lost! Aren’t you bothered?”

I could imagine Margaret poking fun at him and telling him not to be daft, it was only football after all. The way Lee reacted made me laugh and, once I explained what was happening next door, it made Dad laugh too. This has been our default reaction ever since, whether it is England or Nottingham Forest, who have messed something up, just laugh it off.

Euro 96 had started three weeks before, on the top floor of a multi-storey car-park in the centre of Nottingham. I was in the city with my dad and my sister, Sarah, to check out the celebrations in Old Market Square, marking Nottingham’s involvement in the competition. As the rain fell, the night before England were due to play Switzerland, at Wembley, I sat in the car with the radio on, while Dad and Sarah peered over the car-park wall waiting for fireworks. Three Lions started to play and as I looked through the windscreen, rivulets of rain obscuring my view, I began to cry. The song stirred the emotions, even before a ball was kicked, but it wasn’t just that. I felt miserable. There were various personal reasons but, perhaps, mainly, I felt England were going to be rubbish in front of the world, again. However, over the course of the tournament, while they had their luck, they proved in spells they could play football.

The football against the Dutch was breath-taking. I watch it now and I feel close to tears, the hairs stand up on my neck. It was like nothing I’d seen from an England team. Gascoigne was at the heart of everything and there was not another more potent strike force than Shearer and Sheringham. Patrick Kluivert scored late on, but it didn’t matter (apart from eliminating the Scots) and suddenly expectations were high, glory was on the table, England were going to win the tournament. Yes, I got carried away. We all did. I was enjoying myself. I was having fun; it was the best time. I was happy. Everyone was. We needed it.

At 12-years-old, I’d fallen in love with the England football team in 1990 when they reached the semi-final. But following that they let me down, badly. Euro 92 was appalling. Failing to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, in the USA, was even worse. After the summer in 1996, it felt like there was talent and promise, and while there was a huge amount of disappointment, I believed the tournament would lead to us winning the World Cup. I was wrong but that was how high the optimism was at the time. Euro 96 also marked the start of a new life for me, the first part in a story that concluded two years later during the World Cup in France, when I fell in love with my wife, Niki. We watched most of the games together and when England crashed out, on penalties again, more importantly I still had her. It was happiest I had been for a long time, a far cry from that night in my dad’s car at the top of a multi-storey car-park in Nottingham.