I can remember it easily: jumping up and down, beer spilling out of my glass, celebrating with strangers. If I close my eyes, I can see the pub unfolding as we walk in. We came early to get a good spot. We chatted, nestling the beer I thought we wouldn’t get served, watching the highlights of the previous match over our shoulders. I can feel the nervousness in my stomach before kick-off. Would we score? Could we stop them scoring? Would I get served another beer? I was sixteen: old enough to sneak into a pub and young enough to believe England could win the European Championship. It was all we talked about that summer. When we weren’t revising for our exams, we dreamt of England winning the trophy.
We weren’t the only ones. Media interest was intense. England had not hosted a major football tournament for thirty years. The tabloids were making up for lost time. Even the pop charts had surrendered, with the official England song camped at No. 1. Keen to escape the pressure, the England team departed on a pre-tournament tour of the Far East. Away from the media, the players would have a chance to get to know each other on the pitch with a couple of friendly games, and off the pitch with a couple of drinks. Except that it wasn’t just a couple of drinks.
Six days before the first game, the front page of the UK’s best-read newspaper told the world that the England team had drunk so much before flying home that they’d wrecked the plane. A bill had been sent to the team for damage caused to seats and TV screens. A day later, photos followed. Here were the players: drunk, swaying in a Hong Kong nightclub, their clothes covered in rips. The headline printed above a picture of the team’s most famous player, Paul Gascoigne, simply read: ‘DisgraceFOOL’. The rest of the media piled in. One newspaper printed photos of drunken England players next to convicted hooligans and asked its readers to spot which was which.
England’s opponents took a different approach. The Dutch had a superb team and were favourites to win. They’d reached the semi-finals at the last European Championships, and won the tournament before. That spring, the majority of their players had represented perennial Dutch Champions Ajax in the final of the biggest club competition in Europe. Unlike England, they had world-class players in nearly every position. Unlike England, their team preparations exuded confident professionalism – as this photo below, with their manager Guus Hiddink standing among them, suggests. As the match kicked off, my heart hoped for a draw, but my head feared a drubbing.
I still can’t listen to the commentary or watch England’s four goals without the hair standing up on the back of my neck. And what goals! It was a drubbing – but England were the ones handing it out. As we cheered every goal, the commentator caught the mood of a nation. ‘It gets better and better,’ he said. My friends and I left the pub that evening on top of the world.
How had it happened? It would be neat to say that it was down to English talent, ingenuity and guts. But the real story of that night was the Dutch. The explanation starts with that photo. Amid the sophistication, class and good food, is another story altogether – one that becomes clear when we spot the difference between the table at the back, on the left, and the other two.
The Dutch team was mostly White, with a small group of highly talented Black, Surinamese players. That group – Michael Reiziger, Edgar Davids, Patrick Kluivert and Clarence Seedorf – felt like members of a different team. Reiziger told the press: ‘The four of us form a separate group. We talk easily with each other, because we think the same way, come from the same culture, and make the same jokes.’ Before long, the Dutch press had a name for them – ‘the Cabal’ – and were reporting that the Cabal were not happy. They felt under-appreciated by a manager who thought they should talk less and listen more; undervalued by an Ajax team that had accidentally revealed that their White teammates were being paid up to six times more than them; and underused by tactics that left them watching more games than they played. Edgar Davids was a superb player, who dominated Ajax’s midfield. Unselected for the first game against Switzerland, he fumed from the bench and watched in amazement as another of ‘the Cabal’ was substituted off just a third of the way into the match. When the game ended in a draw, Davids exploded. Accosting a delighted Swiss journalist, he declared that the problem was the manager, Gus Hiddink, who was clearly in thrall to the older White players. The only solution was for him to ‘get his head out of players’ asses so he can see better’. That outburst sealed his fate. Hiddink immediately sent Davids home. The Dutch team fell apart. They had fractured well before the game against England.
Why wasn’t the English team similarly divided? It was no less diverse, being composed of Black and White players from different clubs on very different wages who just weeks before had been competing passionately against one another. For days since the aeroplane debacle, they’d faced relentless attacks from the English tabloid press, high on moral indignation; the disapproval of a public readying themselves for disappointment; and even the censure of Parliament, with some MPs demanding players’ resignations. But their booze-fuelled antics and the constant criticism that followed did not divide the England team. It brought it together. The players refused to identify who had caused the damage on the plane – despite it being down almost entirely to mercurial midfielder Paul Gascoigne. Instead, they all paid the bill and asked their spokesman to tell the press that they accepted ‘collective responsibility’. Years later, Teddy Sheringham, the scorer of the fourth England goal that night, told a reporter: ‘We had so much stick going into the Euros in 1996. All we did was make it work for us. There were no real divisions among the squad … the feeling was that we were one unit.’
What weakened the Dutch team wasn’t a lack of talent – they were more skilled than the English. It wasn’t their differences – the English were just as diverse. What the Dutch lacked was a moment that could overcome those differences; a shared experience that created a sense of being ‘us’. What started as a national scandal became a period of intense adversity that unified the team. In the words of England’s manager Terry Venables, it ‘made all the difference’.
You have just read the prologue of my new book Fractured. If you liked it, you’ll like the book. Find our more here.