NB I handed the writing of Part 5 – the England vs Spain quarter-final - over to the excellent Andy Murray. It’s online here and he’s online here.

For all the history with Scotland, the Germans were England’s real “old enemy”. Hosting a tournament again precisely 30 years after beating West Germany in the World Cup Final didn’t help quell the echoes of footballing history, but since 30 July 1966 the echoes were largely tremors. 

Of the seven subsequent World Cups, England had only reached four and been sent home twice by the Germans: Leon at Mexico 70, Turin at Italia 90, and the latter was the undisputed high point of England’s “30 years of hurt”. While the Three Lions whimpered from mediocrity to misery, die Mannschaft had been rolling serenely on: World Cup ever-presents, twice winners, twice runners-up. This was also their sixth Euro semi-final in seven tournaments. They were the very embodiment of there or thereaboutsness. 

In those 30 years, the English had met the Germans - West or reunited – 13 times, losing nine and winning just twice: a rain-soaked 1975 Wembley friendly against an experimental side as the world champions rebuilt, and a June 1985 literal warm-up in Mexico City against a German side just two days off the plane and collapsing in the rarified atmosphere. Those once-a-decade meaningless wins did nothing to undermine the Gary Lineker aphorism that summarised at least one national mindset: “Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.” England were definitely in the big boys’ playground now. 

There was – is – another overlay with Germany: the conflict still known by the definite article, “the war”. The events of 1939 to 1945 loomed a lot larger in 1996, and not just because they were roughly 50% closer. Many football fans – quite a few footballers, come to that – had grandparents who’d gone through it, and therefore parents who’d been brought up with it. 

And that’s before we get to the almost ever-present historical setting of popular entertainment based around a conflict that cost somewhere between 70 and 85 million lives. Proving the old saw that comedy is tragedy plus time, the heroic-drama “war movies” of the 1950s and 1960s had given way to sitcoms: Dad’s Army, Allo Allo, Basil Fawlty’s doomed determination not to mention the war.

But the best situation comedy is about sympathetic flawed characters trapped in a situation they must make the best of. It is not about bullying and highlighting differences. As The Germans loomed once again in the path of historical narrative, against a background of Euro 96 on the pitch and Europhobia in parliament, the baser elements of the footballing press saw fit to parade tired old tropes of “hilarious” racism. 

With Kelvin Mackenzie having left The Sun, the chief cheerleader for tabloid idiocy was Mackenzie’s old showbiz reporter, former prep-school kid Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan. Having dropped the first of his surname’s barrels, Morgan had barged his way into editing the Mirror from 1995; trailing at the newsstand, he was using Euro 96 to court sales from the sort of people who liked their newspapers to call a Scot a “Jock”, a Spaniard a “dago” and a German, well…

We can’t say we weren’t warned. On Monday 24 June The Guardian’s David Lacey noted that “no doubt the next 72 hours will see certain sections of the media resorting to the kind of childlike jingoism which should have gone out with Biggles.” The very same morning, the Mirror belched “There is a strange smell in Berlin... and it’s not just the smell of their funny sausages.” 

By semi-final day Morgan had gone full tin-hat – literally. With Pearce and Gascoigne mocked into WWII helmets, his front page bellowed “ACHTUNG! SURRENDER! For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over.” Morgan contributed an editorial parodying Neville Chamberlain’s official declaration of war in 1939. He reportedly wanted his minions to drive a tank to the German Embassy and drop leaflets from a Spitfire over Berlin. 

Morgan’s tin hats were tin-eared. The Foreign Office condemned the move, the Press Complaints Commission received hundreds of complaints and a cross-party motion was tabled in the House of Commons. It even shocked the tabloid press. Writing in FFT immediately after the tournament, Daily Mail football writer Rob Shepherd said “The antics of the Daily Mirror, which one week wanted to hang the team, the next its own reporters, and then declared war on the Germans, appalled everyone in the industry.”

Moreover, Morgan got his tone exactly wrong for his readers: most people didn’t want a war, and they didn’t want the sort of humour that largely died out in the 1970s, they wanted a football match. Terry Venables noted “It’s gone beyond rivalry in a football match and it’s not funny. The rest of Europe is envying the wonderful atmosphere we have created, so let’s not spoil it.”

Chastened and apologetic, the editor hid behind the usual coward’s excuse of “It was a joke that people didn’t get”. But every time you hear a bonehead sing Ten German Bombers, you can thank Piers Morgan for his tiny part in keeping xenophobia alive.

“Hello again. Glad you’ve tuned in. You’ve obviously heard there’s a football match tonight.” The dulcet baritone of Des Lynam introduced the BBC’s coverage in his usual style of knowing understatement, despite sitting opposite a grinning Jimmy Hill in a George Cross bow-tie. 

Sadly for Jimmy, England and everybody outside Umbro’s kit-sales department, Sir Bert Millichip had lost the coin-toss and England were forced to wear an “indigo blue” which looked a lot like grey, prompting a million wags to concoct jokes based on Manchester United’s kit malfunction during an April 1996 loss at The Dell. Also suffering an oh-so-90s kit malfunction was crooner Paul Young, who just about got through the national anthem in an off-white suit not unlike the ones worn on the same pitch six weeks earlier by Liverpool. At least Young got a tune out of his.

As with the quarter-final, Terry Venables would have to do without one of his magnificent XI. Paul Ince had been suspended against Spain, and although he was available again, England’s only continentally-based player admits he wasn’t sure he’d get back in.

“You start wondering: ‘Well they’ve just got through to the semis, I didn’t play in the quarters, am I going to play in the semis?’,” Ince tells FFT. “I started having a little panic-up! But of course I had to play in the semis: I had to, you can’t have Incey out of the semis!”

England were now a man down elsewhere, Gary Neville having succumbed to his own second-yellow suspension. In a back four his teenage brother Phil was a fraternal like-for-like option, but after a few days of public head-scratching, Venables decided for only the second time in five Euro 96 games to use a back three, with Gareth Southgate and Stuart Pearce flanking Tony Adams while David Platt stayed in midfield with Ince and Paul Gascoigne. 

Or did he? In his typically insightful book The Anatomy of England, the peerless tactical writer Jonathan Wilson describes Platt playing “with admirable assurance” as an emergency right-back, which is where the BBC’s pre-match graphic also suggested he would play. But contemporary newspaper reports, personal eyewitness statements and, perhaps clinchingly, Venables himself described it as a back three.  

It was certainly fluid, and that was the entire point: an XI designed to suit all occasions. “Our system was flexible,” explained Venables in specific relation to the semi-final. “If they played two up top, we would play three at the back, but if they had gone with three then we would have had four in defence. I knew I could respond at any stage if there was an injury to deal with or I wanted to change the shape. It was not about changing the personnel but getting them to switch positions.” 

Southgate was the exemplar of this flexibility: one of two centre-backs in the back four against Switzerland, Holland and Spain, and starting the Scotland game as a defensive midfielder before replacing Pearce on the left of a back three, he was now taking his fourth position of the tournament. 

In front of these tactical tweaks, the front two (Alan Shearer and Teddy Sheringham) and wide two (Steve McManaman and Darren Anderton) kept their places, as they had throughout the tournament. In five games, Venables made several tactical tweaks but just two changes to his starting XI, and those were enforced through suspension. 

The Germans had their own problems. With main strikers Jurgen Klinsmann and Oliver Bierhoff injured, Berti Vogts had to turn to a striker knocking on 34 whose four goals in 21 caps all having come in friendlies, and who had thus far been best known as a surname-based punchline: Stefan Kuntz. If ever there was a time to beat Germany, it was now. But, as Alan Shearer told FFT: “We didn’t dwell on the previous stuff. We didn’t think of old encounters. We felt we could go on and win this.”

Not for the first time in the tournament, England certainly started like a team full of belief. Within the first two minutes, Ince had announced his return to the side with a stinging 25-yarder Andreas Kopke was glad to parry over. Adams flicked on Gascoigne’s flag-kick for Shearer, unmarked four yards out, to nod in his fifth in five finals games. There were 133 seconds on the clock. 

Even the most fervent optimists hadn’t banked on that quick a start. As Sheringham recalled, “It was unexpected but you get on with it.” Shearer himself was more sanguine: “This wasn’t like Holland. You don’t run away with it against Germany.”

Indeed, in their 53 games since Euro 92 the Germans had only twice gone two goals behind (to Brazil and Jack Charlton’s Ireland) and were in no mood to bag an unwanted hat-trick here. Probing around the edge of the area, captain and Italia 90 survivor Andy Moller played big centre-back Thomas Helmer in past Southgate, and an offside-appealing Pearce failed to notice Kuntz slipping behind him at the far post to level. It was the stopgap striker’s first international goal in 16 games since 7 September 1994, the same day Shearer’s now-forgotten drought had started. 

With both sides playing five in midfield – Germany arguably six, frequently augmented by Matthias Sammer, Europe’s last great libero, gloriously Beckenbauering his way around the place – the semi-final might well have become tensely territorial. But for all their necessary solidity against Spain, Venables’ XI were at heart an attacking assortment. This was a team that supported its two strikers with McManaman, Anderton and Gascoigne, with Platt also breaking forward in the manner that had brought him 27 goals in 62 caps – a haul remarkably unheralded now, three behind Shearer’s 30 from 63 and just two less than Frank Lampard’s 29 in 106. 

While each team had spells in command, the semi-final was rarely one-way traffic in either direction for long. Understandably ascendant after equalising, Germany ceded the initiative to England by half-time with Sheringham and Shearer both keeping Kopke honest. The second half was tighter, Helmer going closest, and suddenly England were going to extra time again. 

Introduced to reward attacking in extra time, the golden goal rule generally had the opposite effect as teams negated risk. Not in this case: again, England came roaring off the blocks in the first couple of minutes. Drifting to the right, Platt sent in McManaman to beat the offside trap and barrel to the byline. Upon looking up, he must have been amazed to see Anderton, unaccountably unmarked nine yards out, with enough time to hold out his arms in the universal “I’M IN ACRES HERE!” stance. As McManaman told FFT, “I got to the line, pulled it back for Darren and waited for the net to bulge.” 

But the net didn’t bulge. To combine hindsight with hypercriticism, where a striker would have held the space, Anderton had continued his run; combined with Kopke’s desperate angle-narrowing, the Spurs winger had to reach behind him to make contact with McManaman’s pull-back. Even so, he manfully diverted it goalwards, where it bounced back from the post into Kopke’s grateful grasp. As Venables held his head in his hands, commentator Barry Davies howled “How unlucky can you get?” and his sidekick Trevor Brooking drawled “You won’t get any closer.” 

“I don’t think about it now because it was an instinctive thing,” reflected Anderton. “It wasn’t like a one-on-one with the keeper and hitting it one way or the other. I just got a connection and the keeper got a little touch. I remember as I picked myself up off the ground seeing the ball bouncing back into the keeper’s hands.”

Reliving the moment a quarter of a century on, Ince still can’t believe what his mind’s eye sees. “Darren had the greatest chance ever to score, it hit the post and I was thinking ‘Oh, he’s got to score that!’” 

With Wembley still burbling to itself in the unbelievable-Jeff fashion, the action zoomed up the other end. Frustrated in a packed midfield, skipper Moller had suffered his own Gazza-in-Turin moment on 80 minutes by picking up a final-cancelling second tournament yellow, getting himself involved a skirmish with Pearce that was as unnecessary as it was unwise. Finally shrugging that off, he now surged forward to unleash a swerving dipper that David Seaman was more than happy to tip over. Moller’s corner was then nodded home by Kuntz… but a second’s wild Germanic celebration was cut short by a somewhat harsh decision to penalise Kuntz for a push on Adams. Gasping in the gantry, Barry Davies reached for his doctor’s coat: “Goodness me, the country’s pulse rate must be beyond natural science.” 

And then, the second saddest moment in Paul Gascoigne’s England career. Sheringham lofted the ball into the box, Shearer volleyed across goal and an unmarked Gascoigne was ready to slide in but for a slight miscalculation. “If you watch him,” explained Sheringham, “there’s a slight pause and it’s his brain working too quickly. The keeper has dived out and Gazza is thinking ‘He’ll parry it’ and tries to read that. If he’d taken the gamble and thought ‘I’m getting on the end of that’, it was a goal.”

Gazza agrees. “If I was Alan Shearer I’d have scored, because his instinct is to go straight towards the ball. I thought the goalkeeper was going to get a touch, and I didn’t want to look stupid. I’ve watched many games I have played in, but never that one. It’s too painful.”

The what-ifs still haunted Venables two decades later. “Most nights when I’m in bed I have nightmares about it,” he revealed. “It’s one of those things - you have a lifetime in football, it’s really fantastic but then on this little whisker of Gazza missing the ball for the goal that would have taken us to the final, you wake up and you think what could have been. For a long time it gets to you.”

“Every time I watch it, I still think he’s going to get there,” says Ince. “You just feel that it’s not going to be your day.” Bryan Robson concurs with the fatalism: “Both Darren Anderton and Gazza were both inches away from getting tap-ins at the end of some great attacking moves. We just didn’t have that stroke of luck.”

Back in the moment and without the melancholia of hindsight, Barry Davies was incredulous: “This is unbelievable stuff.” By now extra-time had featured more excitement in its opening ten minutes than many games manage in 90. Still there was time before the turnaround for Gascoigne and Anderton to go close, before Ziege did likewise at the start of the second extra period. 

After that, Germany started to retreat, especially when depleted further: with Helmer hobbling off, their excellent defensive midfielder Dieter Eilts spent the last 10 minutes as an auxiliary centre-half. England weren’t the only team playing a fluid back three with flexible, intelligent players, but they had taken on one of the best teams around and more than matched them. It was an era before such stats were commonplace, but retrospective abacus-twiddlers have announced that England had 55.5% possession and 29.8% of the play was in the German third, compared to 21.1% in England’s. 

That was always likely given Vogts’ tactics: half-imposed, half-chosen. As the Independent’s Ken Jones wrote: “The determined application of a containment policy forced upon them by the absence of Jurgen Klinsmann and all but one of their first-choice forwards deserved the utmost admiration.” Winners find a way to win, or at least take it to penalties.

Here’s another way in which 1996 was a different era: England weren’t historically bad at penalties. True, they’d lost their only competitive shootout that night in Turin, but the quarter-final win over Spain wasn’t only cathartic for Stuart Pearce. This was before the spot-kick heartaches that tumbled down the decades: Kiev 2012, Gelsenkirchen 2006, Lisbon 2004, St Etienne 1998 and – spoiler alert – Wembley 1996. 

But if England weren’t yet overawed by their own shortcomings, they were aware of Germany’s elfmeter excellence. Having fluffed their first shootout in the Euro 76 final that genericised the surname of Antonin Panenka, the Germans had profited from penalties in three successive World Cups: before Turin they’d dispatched France in the 1982 Schumacher/Battiston semi and the hosts in the Mexico 86 quarters.  

“We didn’t want it to go to penalties, we knew that, because we knew the history behind it,” explains Ince. “You thought ‘The Germans are quite efficient when it comes to penalties’. But then again, we’d won the penalty shoot-out against Spain and we had Teddy, we had Shearer, Pearcey, enough capable players, so I wasn’t so concerned.”

Neither were the management: Robson reveals they didn’t organise the takers specifically. “In training I took the players who were really confident, and at the end of each session we would practice and make sure they were concentrated on the job in hand,” he reveals. “What we said to them all was ‘Once you've made your mind up about which way you’re going to go, stick with it and strike the ball as well as you can.’ And to be fair, the boys actually did that.”

The confidence was not shared in the stadium, where most English eyes peeped between fingers. Even Des Lynam looked very slightly worried, deadpanning “Well, this is almost too much to ask of you. I wouldn’t mind if you ducked down behind the sofa while this was going on.”

But as with the tournament, as with the semi-final, Shearer took the lead role. Never one to pass up a free shot at goal, he hammered into the top-right corner to set the tone for a shootout of almost universal technical excellence. Set-piece specialist Thomas Hässler found the bottom left corner, Platt followed Shearer to the top right and late sub Thomas Strunz went top left.

At 2-2, up stepped Stuart Pearce, whose unusually weak penalty in Turin had been gratefully gobbled up by Bodo Illgner. No such danger here as Pearce went hard left, his Spanish roar replaced by a cheeky grin and thumbs-up. Stefan Reuter, who like Moller had picked up a second yellow and was banned from the final, sent it top right just past Seaman’s gloves. Gascoigne found the same corner and so did Christian Ziege, again whistling past Seaman. Like Peter Shilton in Turin, the England goalkeeper was guessing correctly but beaten by power and accuracy, although Seaman did tend to get a yard or so closer than the 40-year-old Shilton had; some say the old man is still diving...

And so, effectively, to sudden death after four successful penalties each. Now it was down to Sheringham, who hadn’t been needed in the Spain shootout. “I’ve never been so nervous in all my life,” he told FFT, before revealing he played his own Jedi mind-trick on himself: “I put the ball down, looked up and thought ‘The keeper’s so small and that space up in the top corner is massive. There’s no way I can miss.’” And he didn’t, finding that top-right corner… but so did Kuntz. England needed some new heroes to step forward.

“The manager asks ‘Who fancies it?’,” recalled Shearer. “Some guys were putting their heads down as if to say ‘Don’t look at me.’ I’m not going to tell you who they were, but Gareth put his hand up.”

Ince did, too. “You had your main five, which took care of themselves, then it was a case of who wanted to go next. I looked at Southy and he said I’ll go six, you go seven. If we’d gone the other way, we might have got through! We were confident in the five that were taking them, then once they all scored, you started thinking ‘Shit, this is going to number seven and eight!’”

But it wouldn’t, and Ince wouldn’t have to make the long walk – at least until the next World Cup. As agreed, Southgate went sixth, and chose almost exactly the same spot as Pearce in Turin: low to the goalkeeper’s right but too central, with neither the power nor the placement to succeed. As Southgate turned to trudge back to the centre circle, the roars of the German fans were quickly drowned out by thunderous applause from around Wembley.

“I wasn’t a regular penalty taker,” Southgate told FFT in 2012. “It affected me massively afterwards and it still does. Every single day it is mentioned. Some people still abuse me about it in the street. Ultimately it made me a stronger character, because once you've been through that you can deal with anything.”

Ince, who would have his own 12-yard heartache two years later, had to face his own inquisition from those who wondered why a defender went next. “They didn’t know the situation,” he growls. “I could have gone sixth and I could have missed - I could have gone fucking seventh and missed. Penalties are a lottery: if you make a decision to go one way and the keeper makes the same decision - as long as you don’t miss the target. It just bugged me that we should have won. It shouldn’t have got to penalties.”

Up stepped Moller, the captain who would have to sit out the final. Eschewing the corners so expertly found by his colleagues and rivals, he leathered it high and central above Seaman, sprinting away before peacocking with his hands on his hips before disappearing under a delirious deluge. Typically tactful, a tracksuited Klinsmann instead chose to console his old mate Sheringham. Venables sprinted to catch up with Southgate, to hold the young man’s head up high, to tell him he had done his country proud. 

Hammering the point home, Southgate was led to a thunderously-applauded lap of honour by his skipper Tony Adams, who had his own demons to face: after white-knuckling his way teetotally through Euro 96, Adams promptly went on a seven-week bender before acknowledging his alcoholism and entering rehab. Twenty-three years later he is still sober, but others in the England camp are still in a quiet mourning for what might have been.

“When Gareth missed it felt a bit like death must do,” said Venables. “It was the lowest point of my career. That was my chance to win a trophy for my country in front of our fans.”

“We were gutted because we felt we were the better team,” says Ince. “We knew we’d be playing Czech Republic in the final and we knew we had too much for them. We were a better team than Germany, too. That’s probably the worst thing when you get knocked out of these tournaments. We came away disappointed that we didn’t get to where we should have got to, because we should have won it.” Robson agrees: “If we’d beaten Germany, I really do believe we would have gone all the way. The team were in great form.”

Others have tried to take it in their stride. Asked about regrets, McManaman insists “You can’t have any,” before immediately contradicting himself: “The only regret is that Terry left. We didn’t build on it.” For all the razzmatazz of the Premier League and the promise of a Golden Generation, it would be 22 long years before England reached a semi-final again, led by a man who knew more than a little about pain.

The effects of England’s defeat were wider and deeper as Euro 96 marked a beginning and an end. In the dying years of television’s near-total dominance of the media, an astonishing 26.2 million Brits watched the semi-final on the box – the sizeable majority choosing the BBC, for whom Des Lynam put the game in historical perspective: “You’d better remember where you were watching this tonight, because in 30 years’ time somebody will probably ask you.”

It may also have been the moment that English football accepted a new role and station. After decades of aloof arrogance artificially extended by a World Cup triumph on home soil, twice in a decade England had reached semi-finals and lost by the proxy of penalties – and this new type of heroic defeat was weirdly OK. It gave the country just enough room for lachrymose what-ifs rather than bellicose why-nots. 

From here on, no matter how one-eyed the narrative about cheating Simeones and Ronaldos, lucky Ronaldinhos, wily Pirlos and enemies within from Philip Neville through David Beckham to the entire Euro 2016 squad, there was a wider acknowledgement from most fans that England had no divine right to success; maybe a semi-final team if they fulfilled their promise, but far worse if they didn’t. 

Perhaps it was also the increasingly cosmopolitan Premier League demolishing the islanders’ insularity. It’s difficult to assume inherent superiority if your key man is a Cantona, Zola, Henry or Torres - perhaps even less so if the gaffer is a Wenger, Mourinho, Benitez or Guardiola. 

That multiculturalism wouldn’t come easy. There was violence as the suddenly-ended summer of love turned nasty. Idiots took their opportunity to live down to their reputation. But hooliganism was a minority pursuit now shunned by a footballing class that was trying to move forward into a brighter future.

Originally published as part of the cover story of FourFourTwo’s February 2020 issue, then online.