Lightning does, in fact, strike twice. In February, a combination of a Sydney storm and Wellington airport’s curfew delayed our arrival in New Zealand by 24 hours, complicating a holiday of a lifetime. On Friday night, similar weather, with the airport affected this time being Munich’s, threatened to ruin the journey of a lifetime – or at least one that had been going on for well over 30 years.
My first England game: March 1985, a friendly win at Wembley over the Republic of Ireland, with Leicester’s Gary Lineker scoring his first international goal. My first away game: November 1991 in Poland, Tottenham’s Gary Lineker scoring his last competitive goal. Now, at my 12th tournament following the men’s team, I had a ticket to watch them play in their first final on foreign soil.
Only one problem: when my bus left Munich for Berlin on Saturday morning, I was still at Gatwick. The friends and their teenage sons on a money-back-if-we-don’t-qualify charter flight were going to be at the match without me if I didn’t sort something out quickly.
It’s not just about England. I’m a tournament addict, going in 1994 and 2008 when England were non-qualifiers. If you love football for its unscripted drama, not just for your own team, then nothing beats a month immersed in this chaotic party. I tried to boycott Russia 2018, succumbing only when we reached the semi-finals; the delayed, Covid-affected Euro 2020 was Wembley only; I stuck fast to boycotting Qatar.
After eight years without a tournament to savour, I planned on going to Berlin, with or without Bukayo Saka or a ticket, booking the cheap trip via Munich in January. Thanks to Ollie Watkins, the final was set to be my eighth match of Euro 2024, plus many others watched in bars and fan zones.
Credit the captain of the cancelled Munich trip: he came out to make the announcement personally. You are entitled to a place on the next available flight, but when every plane to Germany is booked solid that is little help. I have to start again. Haggling over compensation and insurance will have to wait.
Amsterdam, Switzerland and Poland are booked solid. But there’s a flight to Paris at 8am for £125. OK, how can I get from Paris to Berlin? Deutsche Bahn says yes, there’s a train for about €130 (£109). Brilliant.
I book the flight and click to book the train. But not for the first time, DB lets me down: the seat picker offers me options when I try to complete the transaction on a compulsory-reservation train, but at the last moment it says the trip is not possible. I try again, but this journey, other “available” services, other websites play the same trick.
I have paid to get to Paris. Gareth Southgate has already cost me a fortune; the top-of-the-head calculation is that this tournament has delayed my retirement by a month. I am perpetually grateful to him for the need to attack my bank balance, but surely I can’t restart with another flight. So what next?
There are buses from Zurich to Berlin; I know this because two months after I booked my original bus from Munich, the same company, on the same motorway near Leipzig, had a crash, on a service from the Swiss city. Still, there is an affordable – under the circumstances – train from Paris to Basel, with plenty of time to reach Zurich for a 9.25pm direct, 12-hour bus. One isolated crash is not sufficient reason to reject the opening. After all, lightning doesn’t strike twice …
Nor did it, this time, in any shape. The flight to Paris was 40 minutes late, each pause as we taxied out raising my stress levels, but I had allowed four hours to get to the Gare de Lyon. I arrived in Zurich with more than two hours to spare. The unexpected addition of a ferry across Lake Constance did not upset the plane, trains and double-decker automobile journey. I was at least twice the age of 90% of the passengers but staggered off the bus at Wannsee at 9.30am, then on to Potsdam to recover in my hotel.
Fifteen hours later, the question was, had it been worth it? Some sort of answer came from an unlikely source on the train back to Potsdam, from a couple of England fans in their 20s. One, the worse for more than just the result, mistook my yellow Dortmund Euros shirt for that of the Oranje: “Oi, the Dutch have already gone home.”
I was not in the mood to take it silently. I pointed out the wording; that it was not orange but Dortmund yellow and that this was my eighth European Championship with England. I was definitely not a Netherlands fan. In 30 seconds I recited the seven previous exits. Peace was declared and they asked how this compared.
The journey, I explained, had been the worst. But however agonising it had been to lose a second straight final, the six defeats where we had failed to reach the last two, where the winners never had to reckon with us, stung far more.
I do everything I can to make the trips affordable. In February, we were in the check-in queue to fly to Australia when the autumn’s Nations League fixtures were announced. By the time we handed over our luggage I had return flights to Dublin and a hotel for September, plus a trip to Helsinki via Tallinn for October, complete with ferry crossing, all booked on my phone, largely one-handed, before the prices shot up.
It’s not 58 years of hurt – I’m only 56. With or without Southgate, the journey of a lifetime continues, starting in Dublin.
