This England team is special - Sunday's Euro 2024 final is a moment that we should all cherish

The thing about grief is that it lingers in all the places you least expect it to. For me, it lurks in the refrain of The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel, stows away in trailers for sprawling medieval-adjacent RPGs that I know he would have been itching to play. It scuttles through the familiar hook of the nose I see in the bathroom mirror, taps on my shoulder when I utter a swear word that he taught me. Mostly, though, it hides in football.

My dad was born in the September of 1966, exactly 44 days after England won the World Cup. He passed away in the March of 2017, 50 years old, and many, many days before the Three Lions would next play in the final of a major international tournament. His was a lifetime of group stage exits, of penalty heartache and Gazza’s tears and the dull, inevitable throb of disappointment.

The very last time we watched England contest a European Championship game together, we sat there numb - me, gangly on the sofa; him, like a displeased monarch in his fiefdom of an armchair - as Iceland came from behind to beat us 2-1. I look back now and it feels fittingly emblematic; an obscenity-laden exercise in false hope deflated, the subsequent inquest, rabid and bemused, descending in ever more unhinged spirals.

And it is for these reasons - after Ollie Watkins found the bottom corner on Wednesday night, and after I picked myself up off the floor, and after England secured their place in a second final in three major tournaments - that I found myself thinking, more than anything else, ‘He would have loved this’.

He would have loved the fraught anticipation and the fairytale melodrama; would have bellowed his lungs out when Jude Bellingham scored that bicycle kick against Slovakia, likely sending the poor dog scarpering for cover in the resulting bedlam; would have maintained smirkingly that it was never in doubt after Jordan Pickford got down low to repel Manuel Akanji’s penalty against the Swiss. He would have adored poring over the TV guide on a morning to see which channel we were being broadcast on, would have revelled in forgetting players’ names and inventing his own fanciful nicknames for them instead, would have delighted in sending me to the corner shop to buy him a bag of giant cola bottles at half time, permitting me exactly one as payment for the legwork. He would have loved it all.

And I would have loved it too. I wanted nothing more than to be able to pick up the phone and ring him on Wednesday, to mull over the bones of another escapologist act as I walked home in the electric dusk. But I couldn’t, and I’ll never be able to again.

Instead, all I can do is promise not to take moments like Sunday’s final for granted. This England team is special, and they have given us so much over the past few years. As ventures into the hallowed depths of tournaments become the norm, and the giddy thrill of novelty wears, if not thin, then thinner, it would be easy to grow careless with our sense of perspective. These pleasures are not promised, and it wasn’t so very long ago that they would have been almost entirely unimaginable. Some people waited a lifetime and never saw them once. So cherish it all; cherish the ravenous yearning, cherish the buildup and the buzz, cherish the people you are witnessing this small, absurd, terrifying piece of history with.

And Dad, wherever you’re watching from, I hope you have a comfy seat. And a bag of giant cola bottles to hand.