GP: In late 2019, as an unknowing world prepared for what it assumed would remain Euro 2020, FourFourTwo asked me to write a lengthy look back at Euro 96. I happily did so, providing about 6,000 words for the February 2020 cover story. The folks at FFT planned to reuse the sections online during the tournament – but a pandemic brought that plan forward, at the same time as pushing back Euro 2020 to Euro 2021. Maybe I’ll write about that tournament in 2045.

If and when the UK breaks up, historians will look back to key dates: the 1535 and 1542 acts that brought Wales under London’s legal system, the 1707 union of England and Scotland into Great Britain, the 1801 addition of Ireland into a United Kingdom and that island’s subsequent partition in 1921, the limited devolutions of Scotland and Wales from 1997 and all manner of referenda. They might also mention June 1996.

Let us be clear: like a lot of ancient nations, England has been guilty of, and hated for, multiple crimes across its history. With all due respect to the victims of imperialism, the Scottish, Welsh and Irish have more reason than most to harbour an anti-English feeling that rarely strayed far from the surface, even if benignly expressed as individual patriotism for the UK’s constituent countries. 

By contrast, in the post-imperial half of the 20th century, the English largely wore an apologetic air and what Bryan Appleyard, writing in The Independent in June 1996, called a “chain of guilt that has been hung around the English neck… Think how hard it now is to be patriotically English. Professional Scots, Welsh, Irish, French and Americans are everywhere, flaunting their idiosyncrasies, but the English cower, occasionally making fun of themselves.” For many in England, waving a flag was an embarrassing relic of colonialism or hooliganism – until Euro 96, and a seismic Saturday in the Wembley sunshine. 

Tel’s tactical tweak

The week didn’t start well for England. After the Switzerland draw, the press piled in and as late as Tuesday, papers were printing pap shots of Teddy Sheringham, Jamie Redknapp and Sol Campbell imbibing in an Essex nightclub. As England’s Bisham Abbey HQ, Venables upped the verbal ante, accusing England’s critics of treason.

“It's awful but we're getting hardened to it,” he told the press pack. “We just don’t understand why it's necessary to do what you're doing - some of you feel like traitors to us. They’re turning the public against the players which can turn them against us in the stadium. 

“We’d like them to help us win the games which can take us through, but it seems everything is very negative against the players. What’s the aim in turning the public against the team?” Paul Gascoigne summed up England’s attitude to the media by punting a camera crew’s football into the middle of a Bisham Abbey lake. 

Having sided with his players, Venables was also making crucial tactical decisions. He’d played a back three in some of the friendlies and after the false start of the Swiss game, was ready to make a switch that had been a long time in the planning. 

“He definitely changed things up when looking at what England teams had done in the past,” Bryan Robson tells FourFourTwo. “We had a meeting with all the staff and he said that we could play like Holland played and how they set up. Don Howe was a little bit nervous about that but myself and [goalkeeping coach] Mike Kelly said ‘Yes, we have the players to do that.’”

By now in his sixties, elder statesman Howe had been in football since 1950 but had long been associated with tactical nous: he was the brains behind Arsenal’s 1971 Double and Wimbledon’s 1989 FA Cup final win over mighty Liverpool. He may not have shared Venables’ confidence, but he certainly explained the plan to the players. 

“Don was excellent at going out on the training pitch and setting everyone up and saying ‘This is the way we need to play,’” remembers Robson. “That was a massive learning process for me, just watching the way the lads adopted and soaked it all in.”

Not that Venables left it all to Howe. Paul Ince admired Venables’ distillation of complex tactics into simple instructions. “Players haven’t got a great concentration span but what he’d do was simplify it for each player,” he tells FFT. “While the session was going on, he’d just walk round to the full-back and say ‘Listen, this is where we want you - do that, perfect’. He’d leave them, then he’d come to the midfield player and he’d just go round to you individually, and say ‘You work with him’.”

Robson agrees: “He was great on the training pitch, the way he set out the players and the formations he wanted to play.” “You knew your jobs when you got out onto the pitch,” explains Ince. “They weren’t complicated but he gave you the confidence and belief that if you did what he was telling you to do, as each individual, collectively in the team, if you all did your jobs, we’d win the game. That was what he was great at.”

A back three wasn’t a new concept – it was still the default system for Germany, whose Euro 96 sweeper Matthias Sammer perhaps came as close as anyone to emulating the incomparable Franz Beckenbauer. Even Graham Taylor tried it, disastrously, losing a key USA 94 qualifier in Norway with a back three of Tony Adams, Des Walker and Gary Pallister. Venables’ approach was less clod-hopping. 

“Terry was clever,” explains Ince. “He could play Gary Neville as the right centre-half, because he was used to going out to the right wing because he was a right-back. The same with Stuart Pearce on the left. Terry was so intelligent about the game.”

“The three central defenders were comfortable playing close together,” explained Venables, “and if one of the flank men had to move out and deal with danger, Paul Ince dropped back into the space. We had Teddy Sheringham in a position where he could make up the numbers in midfield but still stay in touch with Alan Shearer.”

Venables’ first back England three, against Croatia in April 1996, had Pearce and Neville sandwiching Mark Wright. The Liverpool sweeper’s knee injury in the subsequent friendly against Hungary created an opening for a fresh-faced Gareth Southgate; by the far-east friendlies, Tony Adams had returned to a back four alongside Southgate, who could also push on into midfield. The decision was made: Scotland would face a back three who had never played together before. 

Media madness

Thirty miles east of Bisham Abbey, Fleet Street had its own tactics to tweak. The press had pilloried the players, but by midweek the English public was preparing for a derby. Suddenly the papers switched to their own version of patriotism, namely nationalism bordering on jingoism. The burgeoning academic field of media studies received an unexpected boost as the media’s more cartoonish elements reverted to tired tropes about warfare and stereotypes, boosting a thousand dissertations as they did so. 

The tabloids were knee-deep in references to centuries-old skirmishes, recently brought back into focus by Mel Gibson’s historically extravagant 1995 film Braveheart. Bannockburn and Culloden were evoked; Gascoigne was portrayed as Henry V to Gary McAllister’s William Wallace in a face-off that would require one or both to enjoy time-travel. 

Even the broadsheets weren’t exempt from stirring the pot, with the Guardian’s Frank Keating daring to evoke a line from Flower of Scotland by predicting the “blueshirts” would “be sent home to their grim glens, cold crofts and chilblained lives ‘tae think again’.” No wonder The Herald’s James Traynor spluttered “The manner in which... just about every English-based newspaper has been approaching these finals makes it virtually impossible to harbour good neighbourly thoughts. Frankly, I hope they get stuffed.”

Striving for better balance, the BBC coverage paired Tartan Army hate-figure Jimmy Hill with Alan Hansen, 10 months after his assertion that Alex Ferguson wouldn’t “win anything with kids”. Alongside them, new Chelsea manager Ruud Gullit eschewed their staid suits in favour of a polo shirt, but even Ruud was never going to be the coolest man in the studio when proceedings were anchored by Des Lynam, whose heart-rate was said to drop when he was on camera. Up in the gantry, Trevor Brooking displayed a failure of imagination by saying “I can’t think of a bigger game any of these players could play in.”

In the first half, England stuck to Venables’ carefully proscribed Plan B… and it didn’t really work. With Southgate patrolling in front of the back three, Ince had licence to push further on, but the Scots understandably had other ideas and, indeed, the better chances of a stale first half. 

Towards half-time, Southgate clattered Gordon Durie with an elbow, leaving the Scot covered in blood; while he was getting patched up – no chance of the former Chelsea and Spurs player coming off in this game – a disappointing Paul Gascoigne changed his studs as Venables pondered a bigger change. The teams went down the tunnel to a large Scottish roar. 

“It wasn’t much of a game in the first half,” Scotland midfielder Stuart McCall admits to FFT. “We gave as good as we got, and England fans weren’t too happy at half-time because they were big favourites. We were going down the tunnel and I heard metal studs clanking behind me. I turned around and there was [Rangers team-mate] Gazza, running topless. He handed over his shirt, said, ‘That’s for your daughter’, and ran off to the dressing room. I’d done a TV interview the night before and said she loved Gazza, and hoped the match would finish 3-3 with hat-tricks for Paul and me. He must have seen that. It was amazing.” 

Reconstruction time again

At the break, the BBC’s pundits piled in. Gullit said England “just kicked it long”, while Hill was blazing: “Gascoigne doesn't look physically right, he doesn't look emotionally right... Steve McManaman is never happy on the left, Darren Anderton is in a semi coma... England don’t look like an international team.” If you can imagine such a thing, Hansen was happier: “Scotland have done really well… the only thing missing was a goal.” In the press box, someone asked “How can a coach with Venables' reputation manage to make the team look worse?”

In the England dressing room, Venables was unveiling Plan C: bringing on Liverpool midfielder Jamie Redknapp for a creativity boost. “When I got on at half-time I was walking on air,” Redknapp later told FFT. But would he replace the fading Gascoigne? Southgate? One of the wingers tucked into England’s attacking midfield three?

Instead, Venables took off Pearce and dropped Southgate into the back three, with Redknapp dropping alongside Ince as a quarter-back. Just for good measure, Steve McManaman and Darren Anderton swapped wings. After Venables explained his changes, it can’t have been easy for the 22-year-old to see the man he replaced, the 34-year-old popularly known as Psycho, rumble towards him across the dressing room. But he needn’t have feared… sort of: Pearce merely “gave me a bear-hug and almost strangled me.”

On the way back up the tunnel, Venables displayed his knack for simply explanations by neatly outlining his changes down a BBC microphone. “We’re not keeping the ball as well as we would like, so I've put Jamie Redknapp in there to help us do that,” said TV on TV. “We’re looking to get crosses in quicker and keep our shape better. We have to stick to what we believe in. We have three quarters of an hour to go yet...”

It didn’t take that long. England upped the tempo, took their game upfield and on 53 minutes Shearer nodded in Neville’s cross at the back post. Sheringham should have made it two but Scotland came back into it, with Ince and Shearer booked for eye-waterers before the two minutes that decided the game.

First, Tony Adams pointlessly pole-axed Gordon Durie in the box, to once more give their opponents the chance of a late leveller from the spot. As Gary McAllister ran up, the ball moved fractionally but McAllister still made meaty contact to hammer it goalwards – making David Seaman’s reactive upward fling of his left arm to push it over all the more remarkable. But nothing compared to what happened a minute later.

“Not a lot of people knew at the time, but we could see, just as we were winning the penalty, that England were preparing to take Gascoigne off,” reveals McCall. “I felt sure that if Seaman hadn’t saved Gary Mac’s penalty, he [Gazza] was going to be substituted. Of course, the inevitable then happened…” 

From the resulting corner, Scotland gave up a free-kick, and as Seaman’s clearance was controlled by Sheringham, Gascoigne was already haring past him towards the box. Sheringham knocked it left for Anderton, who cushioned it towards goal for the Geordie to let it bounce, flick it left-footed over Colin Hendry and half-volley it right-footed past his Rangers clubmate Andy Goram. 

Gascoigne’s goal was the perfect balance of coaching and talent: he’d been taught to make the run, but thereafter it was instinct. John Motson’s commentary summed up every England fan’s reaction, perhaps with fewer swearwords: “Here’s Gascoigne! Oh, brilliant! Oh yes! Ohh, yes!” followed by seven seconds of microphone silence in which the player reclined on the tunnel-end turf to recreate the dentist’s chair with gleeful team-mates. As he did so, Motson recovered his composure enough to summarise: “What a wonderful goal by Gascoigne, what a pertinent answer to all his critics, and Terry Venables vindicated!”

A new future

The goal merely extended England’s lead from 1-0 to 2-0. Materially, it meant nothing. Emotionally, it meant everything. For Gascoigne, for Venables, for the squad, it was - to use Motson’s entirely correct word - vindication, from the Latin meaning to avenge, claim or set free. Gascoigne avenged himself on his media critics with a celebration at once self-deprecating and defiant; as Sheringham told FFT, “That celebration was perfect: it lifted the mood and the doubts stopped. We could laugh about what had gone on. That’s the English mentality, to laugh at ourselves, and it was great to take the piss out of it.” 

And by doing so, Gascoigne set his persecutors free to perform a humiliating volte-face into fully supporting England. Monday’s Mirror genuflected into self-flagellatory correction with a piece headlined “Mr Gascoigne: An Apology”: “Gazza is no longer a fat, drunken imbecile. He is in fact a football genius.” The Sun went for faux-history: “General Sir Gazblaster Gazza of Gascoigne led a one-man onslaught on the Tartan defences, which routed them once and for all.” From here on in, barely a word of criticism would be published, and England’s players began to believe in themselves: Paul Ince tells FFT “The pivotal game was the Scotland game. That was the one.”

Within minutes of the whistle, the public address operator made the inspired decision to play a tournament song: not the official Simply Red dirge but a relatively unheralded joint venture between two comedians and a Scouse songsmith. As Three Lions’ effortlessly catchy refrains were taken up by the crowd, so were its humble hope and fragile optimism: “Thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming…”

The final root meaning of vindication is to lay claim, and somewhere, somehow in that Wembley afternoon England started to rediscover its Englishness, as discrete from its Britishness. Previous tournaments had seen England fans waving Union Jacks as well as George Crosses; the 1966 mascot World Cup Willie even had a Union Jack shirt, and since then the flag had been co-opted by the National Front. 

But here, the George Cross had been extricated from the Union Jack, and never mind that it’s named after a Syrian and was initially adopted here by a French king. Identity is complex, and facing the Scots in a tournament for the first time allowed the English to rediscover a separate self. Beating them in honest competition without violence – there were some scuffles in Trafalgar Square (which, let’s face it, is named after a battle) but there were also handshakes between fans at Wembley, and numerous accounts of pleasantly boozy bonhomie – allowed them to do so while feeling good about themselves. 

With the increasingly inevitable next prime minister Tony Blair promising devolution referenda, England was looking to let go of its domestic dominion. After a first Euro finals win in 16 years, could its football team go on to compete with pride on the European stage?

Originally published as part of the cover story of FourFourTwo’s February 2020 issue, then online.