Well, that's another Euros in the bag. I wasn't positive about Italy's chances going into the final, since they'd be playing an England team that had been looking ever more unstoppable, and they'd be playing at Wembley, where the home support would be the twelfth man. My fears were confirmed (apparently) when Luke Shaw scored in the second minute of the game, but I was pleased that Italy regrouped, held on through a difficult first half, and then came back into it in the second.
I also had a bad feeling about penalties, but that fear was also dispelled when three of England's players missed or failed to beat the Italy keeper. I'm just sad to see that the ones who missed were all black, and my prediction that they'd come in for racist abuse has unfortunately come true.
There's been a lot of talk about racism swirling around this game for the last few days, both at an overall societal level and at a personal level, i.e. in my Facebook Messenger chats with friends before and after the match. What kicked it off was the England fans booing the Danish national anthem in the semi-final, and then doing it again to the Italian anthem this time, one of several acts that got the FA fined. English friends have predictably pointed to Italian fans booing black players in Serie A or throwing bananas at them, which is of course worse... but as we've seen for a few years, certain elements of English fandom are happy to go after black players if they're not performing to the required level, or if they're simply too "bling", which is racist code for buying themselves the stuff they were deprived of growing up.
My distaste for the anthem-booing also stemmed more from the unsporting nature of the thing, than any thought of racism, and from the lecturing that the rest of the world always gets from the English on how unsporting us foreign-types are. Yet certain subsets of the English fans seem to think that these sporting rules don't apply to them, or possibly that if they're doing something it can't be unsporting (see also diving to earn penalties).
But let's get back to the football, since it's what brought us here in the first place. I've talked about the ebb and flow of the game, how England were on top for the start, then Italy battled back and the game stayed level through extra time. It wasn't, perhaps, a game for the ages but it also wasn't a disappointing match; in fact you could say that this is the only result that made sense, since I felt the two teams were very well matched, and indeed the two best teams of the tournament.
It was also a fitting final to a tournament that I believe has been particularly fun. I've mentioned before how many more goals we've had than last time, which is one (imperfect) indicator of how teams are playing. I believe I've also talked about how this tournament has felt like a necessary catharsis for Europe after suffering so heavily from the pandemic - Italy and the UK have been overtaking each other for most deaths from Covid-19 for about a year, and essentially every country in Europe has had trouble getting it under control, or rolling out vaccines, or something else.
This is why I believe that holding the tournament across the continent wasn't the foolishness that the podcasts I listen to claim it is. That doesn't take into account the pandemic, though it doesn't seem as if it's spread particularly rapidly other than through England matches - I can certainly imagine that having 24 sets of fans converging on one location and then bringing it back to their own countries would have been worse.
From a footballing perspective, though, I think that holding the games in some of Europe's greatest stadia was a wonderful idea, because it spread the festivities around. My mom and my sister, who are currently in Rome and London respectively, could each attest to the carnival atmosphere in their cities, which they wouldn't have had if there hadn't been games in those cities. My one objection was the amount of travel that some teams were subjected to, particularly those that had to go back and forth from Baku, Azerbaijan.
Perhaps a more sensible approach would have been to award the group stages to six different countries, and then held the knockout rounds in a decreasing number of venues until we got to the final at Wembley (which I think we can all agree is probably the most iconic football stadium in Europe). Certainly it would have cut down on player fatigue, air-travel emissions and (by not holding games in Baku) authoritarian fuckery.
Still, all in all, I think this has been a great tournament, even beyond Italy winning it. It started inauspiciously, with Christian Eriksen's collapse in Denmark's first game, but fortunately he recovered, and that incident brought the Denmark team together in such a way that made them a second-favorite for many neutrals.
The football was good, and characterized by team cohesion rather than individual heroics. I just hope I can be in Europe for the next one.
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