They have built two giant posts and a crossbar in front of the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of the German capital and turned the old monument, which was marooned in a barbed wire wilderness between East and West during the Cold War, into a giant goal.
It has been transformed into a bustling place of Euro 2024 fan zones and food stalls. It is a bleak place no longer. So much has changed but one thing has remained the same — England are still trying to escape football’s no man’s land.
When they walk out at the Olympiastadion on Sunday night to play Spain in the European Championship final, Gareth Southgate and his England players will be followed down the tunnel by 58 years of longing and pain and recrimination and near misses and heroic failures and ridicule and regret and an unslaked thirst for redemption.
Southgate said at England’s base at Blankenhain on Friday that he wanted to win the Euros ‘so badly it hurts’. Generations of England fans are echoing that prayer. Please, this time, let us get over the line.
Only Sir Geoff Hurst survives now from that golden side who won the 1966 World Cup but in our memories, those men who were his team-mates have never grown old. They live on, immortalised by what they achieved and what no other England team have ever been able to emulate.
England’s futile attempts to recreate that glorious day from decade to decade and tournament to tournament have gained a kind of inevitability so that they appear to us now in the third decade of the 21st century like a tragi-comedy with scenes that we know off by heart.
If you are an England fan, the same images haunt you: Bobby Charlton being substituted against West Germany in 1970 when England had a lead, Gunter Netzer putting England to the sword in 1972, Jan Tomaszewski making save after brilliant save for Poland at Wembley in 1973 to stop England even qualifying for the 1974 World Cup.
Kevin Keegan missing a late flying header and England being eliminated from the 1982 World Cup without losing a game, Diego Maradona’s Hand of God in 1986, Chris Waddle’s moon-shot penalty in 1990, Graham Taylor shouting ‘What sort of thing is happening here?’ when Ronald Koeman escaped a red card and England failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup.
Southgate’s missed penalty at Euro 96, David Beckham’s red card in St Etienne in 1998, Phil Neville’s foul on Viorel Moldovan at Euro 2000, Ronaldinho and David Seaman in 2002, Wayne Rooney’s broken metatarsal in 2004, Rooney’s stamp on Ricardo Carvalho in 2006, the Wally with the Brolly in 2007.
And then the most recent body of work: Frank Lampard’s goal that never was in Bloemfontein in 2010, Andrea Pirlo’s Panenka penalty at Euro 2012, knocked out of the Brazil World Cup in six days, losing to Iceland in 2016, Luka Modric taking control in 2018, Bukayo Saka’s agony at Euro 2020, and Harry Kane blazing that penalty over the bar in the Qatar desert in 2022.
Count them up, the moments of frustration and misery and stoicism and anger and scapegoating, and you could be forgiven for thinking that, more than playing in a football match, Southgate and his team are participating in an act of atonement.
The failure of the men’s team to win a tournament for 58 years has become one of the most notorious droughts in sporting history. The Boston Red Sox overcame the Curse of the Bambino eventually, a British man won the singles at Wimbledon after a 77-year hiatus and Bayer Leverkusen won the Bundesliga title last season for the first time in their 120-year history. England’s curse, though, lingers on.
The sins of their footballing fathers are nothing to do with the Boys of ’24, who will walk out into the stadium that hosted the 1936 Olympics and try to snap a losing streak that has shaped our national psyche. But, still, they are paying for those sins in our collective desperation to beat Spain and bring the pain to an end.
The history of the men’s team in the last 58 years is a history of constant sorrow. It is a decline that shadows the end of empire and the sullen anger at the country’s loss of its pre-eminent place in the world order. No fans bring more national flags to matches than England fans.
We are trying to reclaim more than just our pride in our football team.
All this and more hangs round the necks of Kane and Saka and Jude Bellingham and Phil Foden and John Stones and Kyle Walker and, of course, Southgate as they prepare to face Spain. So much is at stake, so much joy is within reach, that it hardly bears thinking about. We are talking about the prospect of overthrowing an inferiority complex in our national sport.
It was only a couple of weeks ago, don’t forget, that a few morons threw cups of beer at Southgate in Cologne after England had drawn with Slovenia and finished top of their group. Yes, you remembered that right. It is only a couple of weeks ago that Gary Lineker, the BBC’s leading sports presenter, called Southgate’s team ‘s**t’.
‘We live in an angry country,’ Southgate told newspapers on Friday, ‘and I’d love that to be different, so hopefully we can bring some temporary happiness. But we’re not going to change our country, we can just try to deliver some good examples.’
They are facing all this, Southgate’s redoubtable team. And that is before we have even talked about Spain, the best team in the tournament so far, a side who have beaten the best two other teams at these Euros, Germany and France, on their march to Berlin.
On Sunday night, everyone expects the Spanish inquisition. Spain have lit up the tournament. Lamine Yamal, their 17-year-old winger, who scored a wonder goal against the French, is a prodigious talent who makes men four times his age leap off their seats with his skill.
Rodri and Fabian Ruiz are a sublime midfield pairing, Nico Williams’s pace leaves scorched earth in his wake and Dani Olmo’s awareness and vision has allowed Spain to continue to thrive even after Germany kicked Pedri out of the tournament.
The Spanish have got a half-decent record on occasions such as this, too. The national team and assorted Spanish club sides have won their last 26 finals in a row. Spain may not have won a tournament since Euro 2012 but their players know how to get the job done.
I’m sorry. Am I bringing you down? I don’t mean to. Actually, all of this adversity, all of this history, might work in England’s favour. I think they’ll use it and they’ll harness it and they’ll draw inspiration from it. They know they’re the underdogs and it’s the way they like it. It has already liberated them.
That, after all, has been the story so far. They have been doubted and disrespected and laughed at from their opening game against Serbia right up until the semi-final against the Netherlands.
And they have kept coming back. And they have kept getting back up again. And they have kept proving the doubters wrong. And they have kept defying the odds. And they have kept scoring late goals. And they have kept their nerve. And they have kept refusing to lose.
They may not have played the best football in this tournament but they have got the best team spirit. And they have refused to conform to the norm of heroic failure that England teams have succumbed to again and again and again.
If any group of players is built to dismantle the England curse, it is this group and this manager. They may have started the tournament with the web of expectation fastening their ankles to a stone but they have cast it off and grown with every game.
With the unity he has created, the spirit of the collective that he has fostered, the way he has empowered so many of his squad to make themselves the headline act, Southgate has built a team environment that has been the key to making him the most successful England manager since Sir Alf Ramsey.
Southgate has dismantled so many of the psychological blocks that have long stood in England’s way. This is their second Euros final in three years, and the third time in six years they have made it to the semi-finals or better. He has chipped away at the culture of fear and the history of sorrow and now the moment of truth is here.
‘Tournaments take you in strange places and difficult routes,’ Southgate said after Bellingham’s brilliant last-gasp bicycle- kick equaliser against Slovakia in Gelsenkirchen in the round of 16.
The route has brought him and his never-say-die team to Berlin, where they will confront all those decades of past failures and the present brilliance of Spain, and where a glance at that giant goalpost in front of the Brandenburg Gate is enough to tell you that, sometimes, the barbed wire is taken away and no man’s land looses its bonds.