First things first, chapeau to England. The best team in the tournament triumphant over the second best team in a pulsating final in front of a record Euro final crowd, one watched at home by the largest numbers for any event this year, sporting or otherwise – full stop. And that full stop is significant.
We overuse terms like historic, game-changing, revolutionary when often we just mean dramatic, exciting or significant. No such accusations with regard to events at Wembley last Sunday. I was lucky enough to be present to witness a tournament finale that’ll have reverberations for our sport and beyond. This was the long overdue normalisation of what many of us have always considered ‘normal’.
Yet for those of us in our middle age, us playing football was seen as, at best, quirky and, at worst, weird and subversive. That’s because the very act of women kicking a ball was a threat to the male monopoly of the game (and much else in society during that 50-year ban on women’s football).
