Euro 2016: Bring on a tournament to set hearts racing where club football can fail

Excitement lies in the organic quality of international teams

Daniel Sturridge offers encouragement to England in an attacking sense (Getty)

International football is back. After years playing second fiddle to the Champions League, the prospect of a major tournament in high summer is one that excites like it was 1996.

If we set aside the torpor of the Portuguese send off, you never know, Roy Hodgson might yet morph into a song and dance man. It is not just an England team replete with youth and ambition that has the potential to get us to our feet. Anticipation is also fired by the quality of the mix.

Unlike the achingly dull Champions League, where the same teams appear in the knockout stages as if schemed by timetable, there are no obvious winners in France over the coming four weeks. It might be that Germany, France. Spain or even England make up the last four but how they might achieve that remains a matter of doubt.

And it could be that anyone of the usual suspects takes the kind of tumble Spain took in Brazil, or indeed the hosts themselves in the most unforeseen of circumstances in the semi-finals. That 7-1 pounding of Brazil by Germany, and before that Holland’s resounding victory over Spain were two examples of the shift in dynamic at the top of the game.

The very concept of international football seemed under threat. It was thought that the action was in club football, in particular the Champions League, which is essentially a gathering of the world’s best players spread across the big European clubs. The international friendly had become as welcome as homework to a child.That still pertains, but not the sense of ennui that had come to accompany the biennial international fiestas.

There is an organic quality about international teams that the major club sides have lost. Hodgson and his counterparts cannot go out and buy the answer to their problems at the back or up front, they must make do with what they have, and what they have is determined by birth certificate.

There is potential aplenty in Raheem Sterling (Getty)

Thus there is in the international game a sense of community that used to find expression in club football when teams were more at one with the cities and towns they represented. It seems absurd now to connect Manchester City with Manchester in a way we could when they ran out at Maine Road in front of the Kippax. This goes for City’s neighbours United and other big city institutions, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea et al.

Over the years identity had of course become less and less a matter of fielding home grown players, but there remained enough cultural ballast to connect clubs to the time when teams did field a core of players born within a corner kick of the ground. With foreign ownership and squads dominated by imports there is little to distinguish one club side from another save for the colour of the kit.

Into the community gap steps the national side, a team full of players that connect the whole in an homogenous way. England are now the club side of the nation, our team come hell or high water. And the same goes for our neighbours. This is not a celebration of xenophobia, rather of shared experience, shared values, habits, culture, community.

There is another dimension to this in our sceptered isle. For Britons sport offers a way to celebrate nationhood. In the geopolitical sphere we are British. When we travel abroad our passports tell us we are citizens of Great Britain. When we play football we are English, Scottish and Welsh. Sport is then both trivial and profound. It also helps that in this moment, it feels like England have half a chance, Hodgson’s innate caution notwithstanding..

This is the youngest squad since the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. The emphasis is on attack not defence. Reservations about how well we keep the ball remain valid, but the inclusion of rapiers of the calibre of Harry Kane, Daniel Sturridge and Jamie Vardy plus teenage supernova Marcus Rashford and a reconstituted Wayne Rooney offers reason to believe.

There is potential too in Ross Barkley, Adam Lallana and Raheem Sterling, anyone of whom can conjure the unexpected and change in an instant the complexion of a game if Hodgson wills it so. So reach for your klaxons and your flags, and hope that on July 10 the bunting comes out.