Natasha Chahal

The days leading up to the final were worrisome. If we lost, would everyone lose the plot? If we won, would everyone lose the plot? The BBC shared footage of a bus en route to Bellingham being mobbed in celebration of Jude Bellingham. Keir Starmer hinted at a bank holiday if England won. The Coldstream Guards played ‘Three Lions’ at Buckingham Palace. The king encouraged the players ‘to secure victory before the need for any last minute wonder-goals or another penalties drama’.

Corbin Shaw’s work draws on the history of flag-waving and textiles in football. Now based in East London, he was born and grew up in a South Yorkshire ex-mining town. He began making flags after the death by suicide of his father’s longtime friend and companion on the terraces. The first one was a parody of a Sheffield United banner that instead of ‘we hate Wednesday’ said ‘we should talk about our feelings.’ He’s made versions of the St George’s Cross with slogans like ‘I’m never going to be one of the lads,’ ‘God save the queers’ and ‘Soften up hard lad.’ Shaw collaborated with Women’s Aid during the 2022 World Cup to highlight the rise of domestic abuse during football tournaments.

The star of the England squad, fresh from winning the Champions League with Real Madrid, is 21-year-old Jude Bellingham.

To paraphrase Ed Miliband in 2015, this is not the piece I wanted to write; this team has come back before and will come back again. Maybe it’s glib to compare football to politics but try telling that to the politicians. Keir Starmer has been lending his support to the women’s national team on social media. His style of play, he says, is ‘midfield, controlling operations, strong left foot’, though he admits his teammates might not describe him that way. Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, managed to mangle the cliché about a team leaving ‘everything on the pitch’ or ‘nothing in the dressing room’ and told the England women that they ‘left absolutely nothing out there’, though he went on to say: ‘We are all incredibly proud of you.’ I can only assume he didn’t really mean it but which part is unclear.

The BBC coverage began with a children’s choir singing a song from Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical over a montage of the players then and now. Now I know that these women playing for the national team used to be teeny tiny girls with big big dreams and I am delighted they keep inspiring a generation but there’s no need to keep infantilising them. When Chloe Kelly sat down for an interview on Good Morning Britain after winning the Euros in 2022, Richard Madeley insisted on calling her ‘Coco’ because ‘that’s what I call my daughter Chloe’. He asked Alessia Russo: ‘How are you feeling? It’s three days on now. If I was your dad and asked you that – “how are you feeling love” – what would you say?’ As far as I know, though, he isn’t her dad.