Euro 2020 - England United: Wembley no longer a house of pain as history beckons against Italy

Gary Neville once took a swing at Wembley with more force than the wrecking ball they used to demolish the old Empire Stadium. It was, said England’s right-back, a horrible place to play.

“There would be groups of West Ham and Chelsea supporters, lads who had come not to cheer England but to get pissed and hammer a few United players on a Wednesday night,” Neville wrote in his autobiography, Red. “I’d be running up and down the touchline, playing my guts out for my country, then I’d go to pick up the ball for a throw-in and hear a shout of ‘F*** off, Neville, you’re s***!' I was delighted when that tired old ground, with its c*** facilities and its pockets of bitter fans, got smashed into little pieces. I never mourned the Twin Towers, not for a minute.”

Cut to the new opulent Wembley for the Denmark semi-final. There, in place of the house of pain, is an alternative Glastonbury, three-quarters full with fans whose support wasn’t just passionate but fierce, unwavering, unrelenting. Absent was the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, conditional backing, borne of 55 years of watching the team not reach tournament finals.

The sepia painted over England winning the Jules Rimet Trophy 55 years ago could be replaced on Sunday night by a modern digital rebirth. Harry Kane could be on the shoulders of his comrades as Bobby Moore was in 1966. The stoney look worn by Jimmy Greaves, who was left out in the final, might give way to the happiness of substitutes who’ve willingly accepted a back-up role in Gareth Southgate’s collective (as far as we know).

Watching the Italy game will be Sir Geoff Hurst, part of the West Ham trinity who drove the ‘66 win. Declan Rice carries the claret and blue flag this time. Sir Bobby Charlton, Roger Hunt and George Cohen have been ruled out for health and logistical reasons but Hurst is their ambassador. Fifty-five years is long enough to deprive the English game of seven of Alf Ramsey’s world champions. But the connecting strand remains, through Hurst, and through a sense of place: Wembley, which Raheem Sterling watched rise again from rubble in his childhood in Brent.

Ramsey, uncomfortable with displays of emotion, retreated from the trophy celebrations. Southgate, who has already purged the demon of his missed penalty at Euro 96, will take his place, one would expect, in any rejoicing. His conception of the social role of the team goes far beyond Ramsey’s view of what an England team was for, though ‘Sir Alf’ had his own, older code of patriotism.

The energy and positivity of the 60,000 crowd on Wednesday night - the best in my three decades of covering England - was partly a product of Covid: the atomisation of social contact, the isolation and loss of shared experiences that comes with 16 months of lockdowns. A social behaviourist would have found much to digest in the almost ravey atmosphere. The reforming of bonds was oiled by copious imbibing in the hours leading up to the game.

But there was something more than lockdown syndrome at play. Finally, the new luxury Wembley has come of age as the spiritual headquarters of the English game, the national team and the unruly urges of English patriotism: much of it benign, some of it hostile, rude and inward-looking.

The house of pain that many England players and managers recall will complete its transformation in Sunday’s final, to a more communal setting, where the team reflects the audience and vice-versa. You can overthink this - as some columnists have. These lightbulb moments are often brief. The claim that France’s multi-ethnic 1998 World Cup World Cup winning team would rewrite the racial politics of the country has turned out to be hyperbolic - though incremental progress may have been made.

Yet, against Italy, Southgate will lead his side into a space where previous England managers were spat at as they walked down the tunnel, where Manchester United or Liverpool players were harangued by fans of London clubs, and where top international players in the 1970s wished England could be taken on the road to escape the national stadium’s “negativity.”

In its early days the new ground was variously denounced as a grotesque extravagance, a £757m crime against grass-roots football, an exercise in branding and a mansion far too grand for cup finals, league play-offs and international qualifiers. At last it’s fulfilling its ultimate purpose as a stage for an England team in a final.

Southgate had two reasons to hate Wembley: the Euro 96 semi, and the dismal 1-0 defeat to Germany in the last game at the old stadium in October 2000, when Kevin Keegan picked him in central midfield and then resigned in the toilets.

But one of the lessons of Southgate’s management has been that the past isn’t a life sentence; that people and teams can start again; that England aren’t condemned to repeat a saddening history. And as the players take their place in the last match of Euro 2020, architecture, history, team and crowd can be as one.