For some reason, as Chloe Kelly’s penalty hits the net and the England players explode across the pitch like streaks of white light, as Sarina Wiegman and Arjan Veurink embrace on the touchline, as England fans clutch each other in the stands, the eye is drawn to Khiara Keating of Manchester City.
Keating has not played a minute for England at this tournament. In fact, she has never played a minute for England at all. In fact, there was not the remotest possibility that she would play a minute for England at this tournament, and she knew this all along. Her entire Euros has consisted of training, travel and watching football from a hard bench. And yet at the moment of victory, nobody celebrates harder than England’s third goalkeeper.
It’s Keating who is one of the first of the substitutes to reach the ecstatic huddle of white shirts on the pitch, Keating being hoisted aloft by the second-choice goalkeeper Anna Moorhouse, Keating doing a funky dance in front of the England fans, Keating beaming behind Leah Williamson and Keira Walsh as the trophy is lifted amid a fanfare of ticker tape and smoke.
This is very clearly a triumph in which she feels just as invested and included as any other player, a triumph that is hers too, as surely as if she had saved the match-winning penalty. And as the dust settles on Sunday’s epic final, perhaps this little snapshot of perfect unity gives an insight into just how England managed to triumph over the odds.
“This team shows exactly what it’s like to be English,” Kelly said after the final on Sunday, riffing on a theme that many of her teammates have also taken up in recent weeks. And while the temptation is simply to nod along, surely it’s worth taking a moment to interrogate which part exactly Kelly was referring to. The winning? The close finish? The physicality? The fighting spirit? The calm under pressure? The togetherness? Would a nonchalant 5-1 victory with a late Spanish consolation goal still qualify?
This notion of “proper England”, a phrase first deployed after the 1-0 win against Spain in February and a recurring trope since, seems to vary depending on who you ask. “It’s that we give everything, we run ourselves into the ground,” Walsh said. For Alessia Russo it means “we’ll stick together”. For Lucy Bronze it means “if push comes to shove, we can win in any means possible”. For Sarina Wiegman, it means “passing with purpose”.
But of course the Englishness Kelly and her colleagues are referring to here is not really a dictum, far less a tactical blueprint. “Proper England” can mean passing a team off the park or lumping long balls to a big No 9 (the “Hit ’Less” strategy employed against Sweden). Rather – and much like the fluid nature of nationality itself – it is an energy, an ethos, an unspoken creed, a pure vibe. Proper England is playing an entire tournament with a fractured tibia. Proper England is Jill Scott swearing at some German who probably had it coming.
And of course the method of England’s victories at this tournament is very much of a piece with what we like to imagine as the classic English sporting triumph, from Kelly Holmes coming back from last place at the 2004 Olympics, to Jonny Wilkinson winning the World Cup with the final kick, to the pandemonium of the 2019 Cricket World Cup final. Victory is no prerequisite – there is also a solid place in the liturgy for the heroic failure of Derek Redmond and Frank Bruno. What matters is the intent, the full and undiluted commitment, the sporting equivalent of going “out out”.
“Proper England” is just the latest attempt by an English sporting team to articulate just what, exactly, makes it English. Bazball, the dogma of the men’s cricket team, is fundamentally a marketing strategy, a doctrine of spellbinding nihilism wrapped up in nonsense slogans and daddy issues. Gareth Southgate’s concept of Englishness, meanwhile, was best expressed in his famous Dear England essay of 2021, a patchwork quilt of competing influences that nobody really seemed to realise were competing at the time.
So along with the idea of sport as a vessel for fairness, protest and social justice, Southgate also appeals to the traditions of “queen and country … military and service”. This is an England of humility and passive tolerance, a quietly conservative England in which every man swears to do his duty, as long as you don’t put too many noses out of joint. Protesting against racist abuse: fine. Protesting against a Qatar World Cup: oof, bit much.
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And so of course by trying to navigate the culture wars Southgate’s team ended up being co-opted into them, and ultimately resiling from them. The women’s team, by contrast, are a group far more engaged with the outside world, more urgently aware of the power of their platform, instinctively closer to progressive causes through their LGBTQ+ allyship. This matters, because even before their plane had touched down at Southend airport their triumph was being co-opted by people who believe the very opposite.
For Exhibit A, study Monday’s Daily Mail, which juxtaposed a gleeful photo of Kelly and Michelle Agyemang with the more sombre headline “NOW SHUT MIGRANT PROTEST HOTEL”. Hannah Hampton’s declaration that “we’ve got English blood in us” was feverishly seized upon by Tommy Robinson and his acolytes as proof that the Lionesses are actually a sleeper ethnonationalist cell.
A columnist in the Spectator, meanwhile, paid begrudging tribute to England before promptly getting on to its main talking points: the taking of the knee, the “foolish and irrelevant” pursuit of equality with men’s football and – bingo cards at the ready! – the usual gratuitous swipes at Labour and trans people. And once you’ve stopped yawning, there is of course an ever-present danger that an achievement this spectacular and unifying will be celebrated by the wrong people for all the wrong reasons.
Which is why it is the actions rather than the words of this team that speak to its nature. A team so evidently built on selflessness, individual sacrifice for the common good, inclusiveness and mutual support, hard work and manual labour, where an attack on one is an attack on all, where nobody is grander or more important than anyone else. A team drawn from every corner of the nation, just 4% of them privately educated, a group of women from which we can all learn a thing or two. And if that’s not proper English, then what is?