England, and the Brown Squish to Victory
England’s EURO 2025 final win was a TV show which tasted like the feeling of pizza.
One of my favourite lines by one of my favourite writers comes midway through Kae Tempest’s Salt Coast, a moody, uplifting ode to Britain, a love letter to where you’re from when where you’re from is stained by inequality, prejudice, its imperial past: “Six hours into a TV show which tastes like the feeling of pizza”.
Pizza is so present in pop culture without ever playing a starring role, unremarkable in spite of its perfection — or perhaps, because of its perfection. While the complications of a broken heart warrant visiting and re-visiting, the merits of pizza are self-evident. Delicious, humble, easy and quick to make, outshining its peers for its variety of successful combinations. Dressed up or pared down to its beautiful tomato-y basics, pizza has been a constant delight in my life yet I’ve never felt moved to set these thoughts down before.
In this way, England’s EURO 2025 win on Sunday was a TV show which tasted like the feeling of pizza. I’ve spent days waiting for the flat feeling of delight to develop into something with nuance that would be worth writing about. But, as confirms my long-held suspicion that being a fan of Manchester City men's side would be utterly wank, the Lionesses have made winning feel disturbingly normal.
After two white-knuckle rounds of England threatening despair, I wasn’t even permitted to panic when Mariona Caldentey put Spain ahead in the first half. Given the holders’ recent taste for turning things round, maybe Spain manager Montse Tomé did. You wonder what her game plan was — take the lead, then flip the script and be the only guys in Europe who could blunt the sharp edge of the Lionesses’ will?
Throughout the tournament, the mind-numbing recurrence of the phrase ‘executing the game plan’ got me thinking about pizza, again. One of the things I do when I’m not navel-gazing about football is working in a kitchen which serves pizza. Lately, a man popped off when his wife’s Marinara was handed to him, because ‘what the fuck kind of pizza is that?’ This was funny, because yes — what is that? — but it also made me cross because anyone who reads the menu understands what kind of cheeseless nightmare they’re signing themselves up for when they order a marinara.
This is how I feel when I hear players chunter on about executing a game plan, or see all of the life kicked out of sweet little Michelle Agyemang by the media training which prevents her from saying ‘yeah, I was fucking mint wasn't I?’ in her post-match interviews. I’d like to see this, and I’d also like to retain all the kick-bollock-scramble fun of football without seeing England knocked out of a major tournament by a freak own goal like the one by which Laura Bassett sent her team home from the World Cup in 2015? Here I am, getting exactly what I wanted — women’s football, tooketh mighty serious, and then spitting it out when I taste it.
I’m not saying that freak own goals don’t happen in top-level sport, but England’s EURO 2022 win was defined by the slick, predictable composure that comes with professionalisation, whereas this time, everything got a bit non-league and wasn’t it all the more fun for it?
What I am most keen to know, Sarina Wiegman, is what was your game plan? How many varieties of it existed, and which path of the choose-your-own-adventure do you most like to go down, retrospectively, with the trophy wrapped up and on the plane home?
Sarina looked to be enjoying herself in this tournament, cutting loose and taking her players with her — almost from start to finish, with the exception of those periods of anxiety which accompanied some of the Lionesses’ trickier moments. Discipline is the foundation of every great team, but the scattered defence of that opener against France had no touch of Wiegman’s trademark composure. It was bad, so bad. Shocking, really, that that same defence won the Lionesses the title.
Repeating 'executing the game plan' with such urgency, as though by saying it you can speak it into reality, took on a more amusing flavour in the knockouts, where Sarina admitted that knowing when to throw on her deus ex machina substitutes was no more than “a feeling”.
That feeling, for the rest of us: terror, and a brown squish between the legs. For Sarina, simply another 90 minutes hooked up to whatever vibes the universe is concealing from us, the fans, and the manager of every European national team who failed to get past a pretty incomplete England side this summer.
In the light of the hysteria, it was surprising that a well-drilled pack of Lionesses showed up to the final in Basel on Sunday. They didn’t seem panicked by the Caldentey goal, either, and although there was a slight whiff of Lucy Bronze risking it all in the name of saving the day again in that fruitless diving header she made, just on the edge of her box, everything was conducted in a measured manner.
England simply rode out the rest of the first half, not busting a gut to force a quick equaliser (they’d only need one single minute for this, after all), sensibly ensuring a second Spain goal didn’t ‘kill the game’ as is traditionally foretold and then emerging with vigour after the interval.
The best bit of ‘execution’ in this game was Alessia Russo holding firm as Spanish ‘keeper Cata Coll waited with the ball at her feet, hoping to reel her in with a sumptuous invitation to press. Russo sensibly let it be, and it was fitting that her excellent, goal-light tournament culminated in a very sensible headed goal, whose skill was concealed under a thumping cloak of banal.
The front-post clearance header which Irene Paredes failed to make, permitting the equaliser, was the kind of toothless defending which England had confined to the semi-final, cough, I mean the first game and the only true motive for the Spain captain to go on and complain that the game’s outcome was not ‘deserved’.
If Spain really wanted to win the European Championship, they should have finished off one of the several good chances to score they had after the Lionesses equalized. Football works like that — otherwise Italy might have progressed on all of the nearly-England-goals that they impressively prevented, instead of losing out to the actual-England-equaliser which ended their tournament. In the late stages of the 90 and for the duration of extra time, all England had to fear was the stroke of singular talent by which Aitana Bonmati undid Germany in their semi-final.
It’s easy to say, in hindsight, but England’s win was ‘nailed on’ from as early as that Russo leveller before an hour, even, had passed. You could just feel it.
At EURO 2022, Wiegman was Mrs. Regular, starting the same eleven, then generally bringing on the same subs around the same time. At EURO 2025, she switched up the XI, and agonised fans with her last-possible-moment changes. To see Chloe Kelly come on so early in the match was a bit unsettling — would she only function as a last hope, or did she have it in her to prop up more than a whole half of England’s bid to hit back at their recent rivals?
It worked just as it should have, and the Spaniards were rattled to boot. If winning tastes like good old reliable pizza, then a team you don’t like for reasons you largely don’t understand losing is like a seven-course tasting menu, fulfilling, with surprises at each turn. I wish I didn’t, but every time I think of Aitana Bonmati’s penalty getting saved by Hannah Hampton, recently recovered from her own attitude problem, it gives me a little chuckle.
Is this what it means to be English, then? One unlikely win over Sweden looked like old-fashioned luck, a second against Italy exposed Wiegman’s side as one with the wrong game plan — as it must have been, if the one they kept talking about was so difficult to get right. As such, I didn’t know who I wanted to meet in the final — Spain, with their clear, oft-dangerous identity, or Germany, who were doing it our way, and possibly better.
In the end, isn’t it more fun like this? Seeing what happens and trusting that your vibes are good enough to meet whatever challenges the 90 throws you, head on? The game plan of not having a game plan? Quite frankly, if the new national identity for which this tournament is the foundation is defined by Wiegman’s widely-reported sponge-bag slogan, which read “bitches get shit done”, I’d be more than thrilled with that.
What a month. What a life. What a game.