We’re not creative enough: we’re not positive enough.
Sir Trevor Brooking, in the opening moments of this video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96-zW2c8H2o]
Perhaps the only good football song ever written that’s just about football. It says only good things about the Germans that they adopted it for themselves – but neglected to translate it in the process. Of course, it’s 41 years of hurt now.
If you can stand it, there are some interesting reflections to be had by listening to the horrible, mawkish 1998 remix. From the days, so recent yet so long ago, when “war” meant something other than, well, war:
I see they left Sir Trevor out of the remake. An error, in my opinion.
Its funny I remember that summer of 96- it was possibly the last summer in which I had a fully naive view of football- the song isn’t that great but for me it captures a moment of when I was 15 watching those finals and experiencing them raw. For me they were the first proper finals I got into as an adult- and the song really captures the mood for me at least.
Capturing the mood.. I was in London that summer: Euro 96 helped cure me of a broken heart. The instant England beat Spain, a match I watched on a little portable telly in the Porter’s lodge at Chelsea Town Hall, every pub on the Kings Road emptied into the street. What followed took all night to die down. And I watched the Semi-Final against Germany in the company of, amongst others, the woman you met at the MTMG drinks.
England were just at the beginning of their late-90s violent improvement in form, then, and we were all naive. Not always a bad thing to be.