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Euro 96 rewind news
In these troubled times let Rob O'Connor take you back to the glorious summer of 1996, when 11 days changed football in England forever- According to the website free soccer tips page!
It’s a welcome fact of life that something so brief can leave a legacy that lasts forever. It helps take the pressure off when we feel as though we have too little time. There were only 11 days between England’s 2-0 win against Scotland at Euro ‘96 – the day the tournament came alive in the host country – and their semi-final defeat to Germany, days which have stayed imprinted on English culture forever.
Before Euro ’96, football in this country was already well into it’s recovery from the darkness of Heysel, Hillsborough, Valley Parade and the decades of institutional mismanagement that those disasters were the product of. The Premier League had begun its work of de-stigmatizing or in some way re-molding the football-going experience in England; safer, more comfortable stadiums charging higher ticket prices and attracting a different demographic of supporter, hand-picking tropes from an American sports culture that afforded a reduced significance lớn partisan fan culture and made audiences out of supporters.
Football had cleaned up, its terraces lined in neat plastic seating that made former arenas of violence into mainstream, acceptable spaces for families to gather and enjoy and afternoon out. You can refer to the soccer tips group share with us!
Italia ’90 six years earlier had been an important early marker in that transformation. Indeed it’s difficult now lớn place Italy’s World Cup in such proximity to Hillsborough – only 14 months separated Liverpool’s FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest from the opening ceremony – and in a country still traumatized by the deaths of 39 Juventus supporters at Heysel in 1985. Now, at a time when football has been relegated lớn an afterthought by the drama and pace of world events, it’s almost hard to imagine that the game picked itself up so quickly and carried on after those two seismic events.
The World Cup in Italy was the thin end of a revolution, the quiet crackling before the pop. The BBC’s use of Pavarotti’s Nessun Dorma in its coverage awakened tivi producers lớn the dramatic potential of music and visual art in lending football a theatrical edge, and at just the moment when Sky were about to sign off on a contract to bring hundreds more broadcast hours lớn our screens in which lớn experiment with the new form.
Euro ’96 built on that innovation. The success of Three Lions, itself a spin-off of the culture channeled by Baddiel and Skinner’s Fantasy Football, a close cousin of Britpop, showed how far football was bleeding outwards from the stadiums, where until 1992 it had been largely contained. The rousing sights and sounds of Wembley pounding out the country’s unofficial national anthem ahead of those games against the Netherlands and Germany was a precursor to the transporting power of the sports broadcast, the child of which can be seen in the Anfield RoarTM in 2020 as experienced hundreds or thousands of miles away on tivi.
By the summer of 1996, much of the goodwill the England team had won from the nation during the run to the Italia ’90 semi-final had been rubbed away, first by a dismal showing at Euro ’92, then the unforgivable failure to qualify for the USA World Cup two years later. The team hadn’t played a competitive fixture since November 1993. Alan Shearer hadn’t scored an international goal for 21 months.
Then, on the eve of the tournament, the team’s conduct on a boozy night in Hong Kong landed ungraciously on the front pages back in England. Centre-stage in the chaos was Paul Gascoigne, lambasted in the press as the epitome of England’s loutish tendency for self-destruction. The relationship between the team and the nation had rarely been more strained than in the days leading up lớn the start of Euro ’96.
Then came the opening game, the most hotly anticipated Three Lions game in 30 years. Against Roy Hodgson’s Switzerland at Wembley, England flopped, struck by stage fright on the biggest football occasion for a generation. After the Swiss nicked a deserved 1-1 draw, the press went for the kill, with Gascoigne again the prime target in the crosshair.
The tournament, then, was a restorative moment for England. After the 2-0 win against Scotland, the Daily Mirror published an apology addressed to Gascoigne, the player that had been lambasted for weeks but now, for one moment’s genius at Wembley when he flicked the ball over Colin Hendry and volleyed past Andy Goram, they raised him up a saint.
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