Comedian David Baddiel celebrates Three Lions success and says ‘it really is coming home’
AT 2.15pm on Saturday, my guinea pig died. I took this as a bad omen.
And yet, as I sat in Frank Skinner’s living room watching England play Sweden I started to experience a strange new feeling.
It’s been, though, a strange week.
Since we beat Colombia, a song that Frank, Ian Broudie and I wrote 22 years ago has become — well — what it was 22 years ago.
But this time multiplied by ten.
Three Lions expresses vulnerability and uncertainty and the memory of disappointment, but it also channels, through all that, hope.
This time round, more than ever. When we wrote the song, the refrain “football’s coming home” referred both to the fact the tournament was being held in England, and to the more mystical idea that we might win.
But now the song seems to mean only we might win, and as the week went on, and the jubilation rose, yes, we are going to win.
Even as the co-writer of that lyric, that was beginning to worry me.
Football, particularly any involving the England team — as the song indeed warns you — is not a game in which you should count your chickens before they’re hatched.
Even when we won against Colombia I went for “it’s still just about coming home”.
But then the Sweden game started and we scored, twice.
England were not just winning: they weren’t even putting us through the wringer. This has never happened before in my living memory.
This was the new feeling, a sense of expectations met.
It was like being Germany, but without the sense of entitlement.
So now I am daring to hope. Even though some very good teams still lie ahead of us, even though we have got to semi-finals before and been disappointed.
I am daring to hope because I think this is a team marked by joy and newness and youth and Gareth Southgate’s deep emotional intelligence.
We have shrugged off, for the moment, the suffocating burdens of our history.
Let’s go further, to belief. We still believe, says Three Lions ’98, so yes, all right, I believe — it’s coming home.
So much so that by the time I was walking home from Frank’s, I was convinced my guinea pig’s death was, clearly, a good omen, because his name was Bjorn.
The Sunday Times/ News Licensing
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