This article has been updated as part of The Athletic’s coverage of Euro 2024 and the Copa America, having originally been published in 2021.
I watched the goal again just now; David Seaman launching the ball forward, Teddy Sheringham bringing it down and finding Darren Anderton, who chips it first time and Paul Gascoigne is away and free, away and dreaming. A flick of the left foot leaves Colin Hendry sprawling, then it’s a right-foot shot and he’s sprinting to the byline and on his back and there I am, spraying water into his mouth, a glorious mess of relief and release. There we all are.
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It is difficult to accept that 25 years have gone by since that moment, one of the most iconic in the history of the European Championship, up there with Marco van Basten’s volley in 1988 and Antonin Panenka’s penalty for Czechoslovakia in 1976. Since England vs Scotland, in that hot, hazy summer of 1996, when Three Lions was on a loop, when football came home, at least until that penalty shootout against the Germans, when it buggered off again. When we played.
There were so many little crescendos in that tournament, from our turgid opening game with Switzerland when I scored my first international goal for nearly two years to all those demons bursting to the surface on Stuart Pearce’s contorted face when he found the net against Spain. There was a dawning sense of possibility and a crashing end in the semi-final, when Gareth Southgate assumed the mantle of agony.
In between, we took on Holland at total football and beat them, a performance I don’t think England have bettered in my living memory, notwithstanding the five goals Sven-Goran Eriksson’s team stuck past Germany in 2001. We had a great manager in Terry Venables, who died in November 2023, a fierce bond forged on a bleary night out thousands of miles away. We had a mercurial man-child in Gazza, we had fine players. We had a chance.
Scotland, though, was the start and end of something. I can see the blur of it; the beautiful weather, a full house at Wembley, a weighty, historical fixture, expectation heavy on us to do something. Boy, it was a tight game, hinging on a mad couple of minutes when David saved a Gary McAllister penalty and Gazza conjured up sorcery. I seem to remember scoring, too, although nobody else does!
Before Euro 2020, in which England drew 0-0 with Scotland, I spoke to team-mates and opponents from that 1996 game, piecing it together from the fog of memory. Some of those memories are unreliable or fragile or lost, but we will always have that moment. England’s dreaming.
Down the line, Paul Gascoigne is choking on tears. It has been a suitably chaotic conversation. He is in a hotel room shortly before his stint on Italy’s version of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, which ends prematurely when he dislocates a shoulder. Only Gazza…
As usual, he is up a height. He is forever England’s tarnished golden boy, the midfield player the rest are compared to. What a baffling, restless, troubled, overwhelming existence. To me, he’ll always be that gurning kid from Redheugh Boys Club, brilliant and hilarious, a head-spinning pleasure to be around. He was also a magnet for headlines, the battleground for a newspaper circulation war.
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“With the press and being followed, pictures being taken or me getting stitched up left, right and centre… my life was 90 minutes on that pitch,” he says. “Everything went away until the game was finished, when it all came back again. It was a release for me. It was my time to just enjoy it because I knew what I was going to get afterwards.”
Gazza got it in the build-up to that tournament. After our infamous tour to Hong Kong, when a few hours of sociable decompression led to shirts being ripped and a stint in the dentist’s chair, which sounds like an instrument of torture but was really an excuse to lie back and have alcohol poured down your throat, he featured on the front pages of newspapers. “DISGRACEFOOL” blared one headline. “Look at Gazza… a drunk oaf with no pride.”
This, it turned out, was the preamble to Scotland and the making of that England team, although the attention was unforgiving at the time. I was in that China Jump bar with a pal, but I didn’t get into the dentist’s chair and the pair of us escaped the mayhem as it started to get boisterous. I still had my shirt torn; Paul Ince made sure I wasn’t the odd one out.
Funnily enough, when I ask Incey about that, he isn’t having any of it. “I’m not even sure what you’re talking about,” he says. “If I remember rightly, I wasn’t involved.”
You bloody were, I say.
“No, I was sat in a corner having a quiet drink with Bryan Robson, talking football,” he says. “I wasn’t even aware of what was going on.”
I see; what happens in Hong Kong stays in Hong Kong. Although it’s a bit too late for that and the truth is written all over Incey’s face. He’s grinning now.
I ask Gazza about the chair. “I had toothache, so I went for a filling,” he says, which is a good, if well-worn, line. “The gaffer gave us the night off and we were at the bar and I took the mick out of Robbie Fowler and he got the hump and threw a pint over me. I threw one back and it just went from there. This guy came over and asked if I fancied the dentist’s chair and me being me — an alcoholic, I suppose — I went for it.
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“We all got carried away. We were having fun, pouring drinks over each other and ripping shirts. The Euros were ahead of us and we got too excited, but that’s the person I am. I never really thought any more about it. It wasn’t until my family called me and said, ‘F***ing hell, have you seen the papers?’.”
“What happened out there brought a nice unity,” Teddy Sheringham, my old strike partner, tells me. “Venables had a lovely way of bringing the squad together. We were allowed out and alright, we went a little bit reckless, but it was our one night out two weeks before the start of a major competition. It ain’t that a big deal really, the way I saw it, although the media made a big deal of it.
“Terry wasn’t best pleased, but he was brilliant. He just said to the press, ‘I let them out, it’s my fault’. The way he protected us was just the kind of man that he was. Fantastic. He just said to us, ‘Let’s come together and get on with it’. You wanted to do well for him.”
“Terry was just so calm,” Incey says. “There was no hollering or shouting, no ‘what the f**k were you doing?’. Anyway, he couldn’t have a go at us because ‘Robbo’ (Bryan Robson) was his No 2 and he’d been having a few beers with us that night!
“But he enjoyed the fact he could use the tool of what happened. That’s what I liked about him. He simplified everything. You had that fine line where you respected him and couldn’t go overboard, but he also looked after you and thought the world of you. That was the turning point for us.”
The flight home was carnage, too. More drinks, television screens on the back of seats smashed. Once again, Gazza was the ringleader; in his autobiography, he writes about Dennis Wise climbing into an overhead locker just to get some respite and a bit of sleep. When an FA official told him to keep the noise down, he was told to f**k off.
“When we came back to England, we had a couple of days off and I went to a pub in Essex with Rod Stewart,” Incey says (that clang you can hear is the sound of name-dropping). “Rod is a big Celtic and Scotland fan and we were just talking about the games. I only had one bottle of Budweiser and all of a sudden, there were four photographers coming out from behind the bushes taking pictures. F**king liberty.
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“The next day in the papers I get absolutely slaughtered. They said, ‘If he’d not had enough in Hong Kong, look at Incey now…’. That told a story of where the press were with us and what the mindset was like going into that tournament. We couldn’t f**k up because we knew what the backlash was going to be like if we got knocked out in the group stages. That was one of the reasons we did so well. The way we were treated motivated us.”
“I was worried,” Gazza says. “I saw the newspapers and ‘kick Gazza out of Euro 96’ and all the rest of it. When we got back, everyone went to see their families but I got in a taxi and went all the way to a health farm in Wales. Even then, the paparazzi turned up.”
The football hadn’t started and it was already an epic.
Our first game, 1-1 with Switzerland, was as Incey puts it, “f**king horrendous”. Those opening matches are often stilted and this was a classic of the genre. “It was roasting hot. It was just a crap game. You get to the end of it and then think, ‘F**k me, it’s Scotland next. Then the Dutch, who are very, very good’.”
“I didn’t play well,” Gazza says. “I got substituted and I was gutted, upset with myself. Do you know what it was? Before kick-off, one of the coaches for the women’s national team — they played before us — came over and said, ‘Hey, Gazza, the girls want to meet you in their dressing room’. And I went in and every one of them was bollock naked. I just went, ‘Oh my god’. Maybe there was something on my mind. Maybe that’s why I played like a tit.”
Can this possibly be true?
“Losing would have put us in a bad position, but we ground it out,” Teddy says. “As soon as we came in, Venables said, ‘It’s not the end of the world. We can take a lot of positives’. He got us back on that even keel very quickly.”
On a personal level, I’d scored our goal in the 22nd minute, collecting a cute pass from Incey and firing the ball in at the near post, ending a barren spell of 12 games and 21 months. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have doubts during a run like that and I’d had mine. I’d been trying everything, but although I was still banging them in for Blackburn Rovers, it just wasn’t happening for England.
Sir Bobby Robson was brilliant for me at Newcastle United, but Terry was responsible for the best bit of man-management of my career. On that trip to the Far East, he told me, “You’re not going to play every game on this tour, but don’t let that get to you because you’re my centre-forward against Switzerland.” For him to have that belief in me, wow… I had to repay him.
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That goal would have gone to the VAR now because the offside was so tight and instead of me pelting around the pitch like a lunatic, we’d have been standing fretting while those stupid f**king lines were being drawn on the screen. As the team’s No 9, I needed goals. If I hadn’t scored that one, who knows? It might have been the end of my England career. Instead, I ended up with five and the Golden Boot.
Like Sir Bobby, Terry was part of a rare breed, an inquisitive English coach who went abroad, leading Barcelona to La Liga and their first European Cup final in 25 years. He then moved back to Tottenham Hotspur, where he worked with Teddy and Gazza. Tactically, he was astute, but he also knew footballers and how to get the best out of them.
“He was fantastic,” says Gazza. “He let me do things that he wouldn’t have allowed others to do but he also knew how I could perform. When I played really well for Tottenham, he asked to speak to me in his office. He’d say, ‘You were crap today’ and I’d walk out and think, ‘Shit, I’ve got to do better’. Then if I played crap, he used to say, ‘Brilliant today, son’. He would do that to my head, wouldn’t let me get too high or too down.”
“He gave me the confidence to do what I wanted on the pitch,” Teddy says. “I took criticism for coming too deep, but the way I played, it wasn’t just a personal battle against my centre-half. I saw the game differently and Terry would say, ‘Son, if that’s what you want to do, then do it. That’s what your imagination is for’. It wasn’t like he allowed me to be a free spirit, because I had to do my job, but I was also encouraged to be myself.”
It gets me thinking about Teddy and our relationship on the pitch. At Newcastle, I had a devastating partnership with Les Ferdinand, but Teddy was the best I worked with for England. We complemented each other. He was such an intelligent footballer; never the quickest, but his mind was like lightning. I had to be in and around the box to be the focal point, he very rarely filled my space and I wasn’t interested in filling his.
Sometimes it’s like that, I say. It’s just natural. It clicks. “We had that instant feeling of knowing where the other one was,” he says, although Teddy raises an eyebrow when I say that it came easy, that we didn’t really have to work at it. “I worked on it,” he says over Zoom. “I ran around and did everything else and you took all the shots.”
Fair dos; he’s got me there.
We knew we had to step it up in our second match. “I didn’t really get nervous before games,” Gazza says, “but I put pressure on myself. It was all about wanting to play. If I’d scored a goal or done well, then I’d be, ‘Right, I’ve set my standards, I’ve got to do it again’. The night before Scotland, I was thinking, ‘He’s not going to play me, here’.
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“At about 9pm, I went to the gaffer’s room and knocked on his door. I told him, ‘I don’t know if you’re playing me tomorrow or not’. And Terry said, ‘Well, you didn’t play very well against Switzerland…’. I didn’t mention going into the women’s dressing room. I had a few tears in my eyes. ‘Just play me — I’ll do well for you, I promise. I won’t let you down’.
“I started crying a little bit. Terry finally went, ‘Of course you’re playing! Now go to bed!’. I went, ‘Cheers, gaffer’, and gave him a massive hug. I feel like crying now, just thinking about it. I ran to my room and only had about five hours’ sleep because I was so excited.”
Whether this is fully accurate or not, I can’t say. In his autobiography, Gazza mentions asking Terry for reassurance the day before Switzerland, not Scotland, but perhaps it was both. If nothing else, it gives an insight into his craving to be loved, to be needed. I always found that endearing, but for others, particularly those he had played with at club level, it could be exhausting.
“When people say, ‘It’s like looking after a baby’, that was how it was,” Teddy says. “We took it in turns to babysit Gazza. Someone would play snooker with him, then table tennis. They’d come back three hours later saying, ‘I’m f**king shattered’. You’d go out on the putting green outside and he’d be chipping balls. It would always be, ‘What’s next, what can we do?’. It was constant. But we knew that Gazza was special and so we had to look after him.”
“Gazza used to call my room ‘The Queen Vic’,” Incey says. “He was always in there; couldn’t get him out. Everyone used to come in — talking, playing on the PlayStation. It was tense. We’d talk about Switzerland, what we could do better. He was going, ‘We’ve got to beat Scotland, we’ve got to beat Scotland’. He must have said it 50 times. I said, ‘Gazza, calm down’. You got the feeling that if he got overexcited, he’d do something stupid.”
We knew the Scots would be pumped up for the match but for Gazza, it was personal. By that stage, he was playing for Rangers in Glasgow, and stick had flown around. “For a couple of months beforehand, I was getting grief off their players,” he says. “I stood up in the dressing room and I said, ‘Look guys, I know how you play. You don’t know how I play for my country. Just wait’.”
Like us, Scotland had missed out on the World Cup finals in 1994, but this was an era when they were regulars at big competitions. “Craig Brown (who died in June 2023) was meticulous in his planning,” Gary McAllister says. “We went to the United States and played them and Colombia over there. We were low-profile, under the radar, and got on with our preparations quite calmly away from the eye. It was first-class.”
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It could hardly have contrasted more with us and Hong Kong, which is not to say that Scotland were free of hype. The papers up there could be savage, too. “It was the year after Braveheart, the Mel Gibson film, and there was a lot of that kind of stuff — ‘You’ll never take our freedom!’.” Gary says. “You can understand it. It’s the Auld Enemy. But there was no inferiority complex.” In Scotland’s first game in Group A, they secured a decent goalless draw with the Netherlands.
There is no avoiding cliche when it comes to England versus Scotland. “The obvious correlation is with the big derby matches,” Gary says. “Celtic vs Rangers, the Merseyside derby, the north-east derby. That’s as close as you get to it. It tends to become more physical because there’s so much at stake in terms of pride. You can’t hide from it. You’ve got to win the physical duels.”
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“Everybody wants to beat England,” Teddy says, “but when you play against the Scottish, the Welsh or the Irish, they really want to beat you. They love to get one over you. You don’t realise there’s so much passion against the English until you play against these nations. We knew they were going to come at us. We needed to match that to have any chance.”
“We assumed the Scottish players were saying, ‘Listen, if we take Gazza out of the game then we can win’,” Incey says. “He was our maverick. I had kind of a minder’s role. If anyone tried to take Gazza out, then I’d be putting a bit on them, you know.”
That assumption wasn’t wrong. “Wherever Gazza was in the middle of the park, we knew we had to go to him,” Gary says. “The last thing you can do is sit off. You’ve got to try and get close and not allow him to get his head up. You couldn’t allow him to get any rhythm. That was the message before the game: deny this guy time or space.”
It was all set up.
It was another glorious day in London. “The minute I woke up, I was just buzzing, excited,” Gazza says. “Me and you had that banter during the tournament when you’d shout, ‘Come on lads!’, and I’d reply, ‘Come on England!’. I was the last to get off the bus when we got to Wembley, just so I could listen to Three Lions again.”
“On the coach journey, people were hanging out of windows and pubs, cars beeping,” says Incey. “It was unreal. The Scotland fans were brilliant, too. It’s everything you want to be involved in.”
It being 25 years since Three Lions was first released, Frank just sent me this pic of this piece of paper. I didn't realise he still had it. Should be in the British Museum, surely… pic.twitter.com/Y4GGHfdWn8
— David Baddiel (@Baddiel) May 20, 2021
“I was playing against my Spurs team-mate Colin Calderwood and you were up against Colin Hendry from Blackburn,” Teddy says to me. “There were battles like that around the pitch. You look at your man in the tunnel, on the way out, before you start the game. You’ve got to get the better of him. And you know they’ll absolutely rub our faces in it if they beat us.”
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“I’d said to Andy Goram’s face in the tunnel, ‘I never score in training against you for Rangers, but I do on the big occasions’,” Gazza says. “He wasn’t happy. ‘Get it up you’, he said. I just said, ‘We’ll see’.”
“I was shut away from that,” Incey says. “I was focused. As a player sometimes, you go into your own little zone.”
The first half didn’t get going. “Wembley was always the same,” Teddy says. “It had that grip on the ball, so one-touch passes were a little bit sticky and you had to be very precise. Sometimes they stuck, sometimes they overran. It made for a cagey game. They were up for it. I don’t think we played well but we’d been told to match them, 100 per cent, before we even thought about doing anything. It was a fighting game.”
“I thought we won the middle of the park,” Gary says. “We had the overload. It was just Gazza and Incey for you, whereas we had Stuart McCall, Johnny Collins and myself. We stopped you playing. I wouldn’t say we were creating loads of chances, but we had good possession and were getting into your back line a bit better than you were getting into ours.”
Momentum swung when Jamie Redknapp came on for Stuart Pearce at half-time. “That levelled up the numbers in midfield,” Gary says. “With his ability to make passes, you got more rhythm.”
In the 53rd minute, I nabbed our forgotten goal, meeting an unbelievable cross from Gary Neville at the far post. When I say to Gary Mac that it was close until that point, he bristles. “It was against the run of play,” he says. Teddy had a great chance to make it 2-0 from about five yards out and then Dave Seaman clawed a header from a bandaged Gordon Durie onto the post. At 1-0, it was up for grabs.
Gary sighs. “Listen, the reason I’ve never revisited the game is that it wasn’t a very good day for me,” he says.
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It all revolved around the penalty that was awarded when Tony Adams cleared out Durie. “Everybody talks about Gazza, but the thing that comes to mind when I think about Scotland is that penalty,” Incey says.
Even after all this time, it feels cruel to ask Gary about it. “You can tell me to f**k off, if you want,” I say, but he ploughs on.
“After missing that penalty I went on to score big penalties,” he says. “I was a penalty taker like yourself. Nobody goes through their whole career and doesn’t miss. it just depends on the level of the game you miss in…
“If I’d come out afterwards and said the ball moved just before I kicked it, it would have sounded like the mightiest excuse ever, but it did. I was about to release my shot and the ball flipped over. I had a million things happen inside my brain in a millisecond — do I stop and run the risk of bumping into the ball, do I try and swipe above it? The mechanism that kicked in was, ‘I’ll just lash it’. I wasn’t a ‘lash it’ kind of penalty taker.”
“I’ve watched it and re-watched it and the ball definitely moves,” Incey says. “It was a wonderful save from Dave Seaman, but it moved. That could have been so different.”
David dives slightly to his right, lifts his gloves, the ball hits them and loops high and over. If you watch it frame by frame, his reactions are instantaneous. “When I see Dave, he always says, ‘It’s a f**king joke. No one mentions the penalty but if I hadn’t saved it, you wouldn’t have scored’,” Gazza says. “It makes me laugh.”
Gary isn’t laughing. “There was actually a night about four years ago when I didn’t think about it…” he says.
We all know what happens next, but I’ll allow the man himself to describe it.
“Well, Dave saved it (the penalty), and I’m thinking, ‘Ah, brilliant, we’ve got a chance here’,” Gazza says. “And then when it went to Teddy and he gave it Darren Anderton, I’ve seen a gap and just thought, ‘Go for it, take a runner with me’. For Darren to play that ball was perfect, a great pass. I’ve got into the box and had a quick glimpse and seen Colin coming and I thought, ‘I’ve got him’. I did the flick over him and connected perfectly. I didn’t have much time to think. I hit it.”
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“It was a piece of magic,” Gary says. “I know how good Andy Goram is one-on-one. As Gazza flips it over Colin, there’s still a bit to do and Andy had such a habit of making big saves for Scotland. He was a really good sportsman — golfer, cricketer, a decent outfield player — and he was very good at reading people bearing down on goal.
“But everything about the goal was class, including the finish. He just gauged it. It was as if he knew. It was like, ‘I know you, Goram, and I know you know me and I’m going to beat you’.”
Was it Gazza’s best goal? “There were two others that stuck out,” he says. “One, where I played for Lazio and I beat a few players (against Pescara), and the free kick (for Spurs) in the FA Cup semi-final against Arsenal. I don’t even know why Seaman tried to get to that. But to get the Scotland one in a tournament at home was incredible.
“A couple of weeks before, I was getting all that grief, hiding in Wales. I was nervous. After seeing the headlines, ‘Kick him out, he shouldn’t be allowed at Euro ’96’, to get that goal, the feeling was phenomenal.
“I met Colin Hendry quite recently and he said, ‘Gazza, what are you doing in London? I thought you lived in Bournemouth’. And I replied, ‘What are you doing here? I thought I left you at Wembley’.”
The old ‘uns are the best ‘uns.
But the goal wasn’t just the goal, it was also the celebration, Gazza tumbling to the ground, stretching out both arms, opening his gob and reenacting the dentist’s chair. This was planned, although nobody can agree on when or where or by who. “I don’t know why I came out with it, but in the dressing room I said, ‘Look, if anyone scores, please, please do the dentist’s chair’,” Gazza claims.
“I don’t know if it was Gazza,” Teddy says. “It might have been Jamie who’d said, ‘If one of us who was in the photos (from Hong Kong) scores, let’s celebrate with a dentist’s chair remake’.”
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“When I saw everyone running to the touchline and squeezing the Lucozade bottle – knowing Gazza, it was vodka and orange inside – it didn’t really resonate with me’,” Incey says. “I thought, ‘What the f**k are they doing?’ and then it just clicked, ‘Yeah, OK, dentist’s chair, I f**king get it, right, f**k it, let’s try and win this f**king game and stop f**king about’.”
Win it, we had. “It was sheer silence and massive disappointment afterwards,” Gary says. “We knew we’d played pretty well. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I score the penalty, the game is right in the balance. That’s where it swung.”
The following morning, the newspaper headlines were more sympathetic. “Mr Paul Gascoigne: An Apology,” read an editorial in the Daily Mirror.
Gazza remembers the night of Scotland being particularly raucous. “We went back and Terry allowed us to have a beer each…” he says, breaking off to giggle. “There was me, Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman and we were messing about.
“I knew where the kitchen was and I’d seen the biggest tub of tomato ketchup, industrial size. I told Robbie I’d found some food, turned the light off, he came in and I poured the ketchup all over him, all over his England tracksuit, everywhere. I was laughing my head off. He’s gone, I’m sitting back down with a beer, laughing, and I didn’t see him again.
“So the next morning, I’m brushing my teeth and thinking to myself, ‘Robbie is going to go mad’, but when I went down to the breakfast room, he just said, ‘Ah, you’re OK’. And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve just freshened up, brushed my teeth’. And he showed me a picture of my toothbrush up his backside. ‘Oh my god, you bastards’.”
Apologies for the pun, but getting to the bottom of this tale has proved impossible, too. I can’t remember it, thank goodness. Again, Gazza mentions the ketchup in his autobiography, but in that version, it’s after the semi-final and revenge did not involve his toothbrush but an anonymous culprit who… well, defecated in his wash bag. At this juncture, as a serious journalist, I’m obliged to say that Robbie Fowler has been approached for comment!
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Next up were the Netherlands. “That was the biggest moment for me playing for England,” Gazza says. “Terry said, ‘All we’ve got to do is play them at their own game’, and we did. To beat them 4-1… David Platt came on as a substitute, I gave him the ball, he gave it back and said, ‘Go on, it’s your game’. To have a whole stadium singing your name… I went back to my hotel room and cried my eyes out… sorry, I’m nearly crying now. I was so proud.
“You scored a couple, Teddy scored a couple. To beat them, to batter them at their own game, was fantastic. That’s when I thought, ‘We’re going to win this’.”
“We ripped them apart,” Teddy says. “We played some outstanding football. It was like, ‘Right, we’ve got a bit of everything here. We can grind out a result, we can play passing football, we can be resilient, we’ve got talent in abundance’. There’s no better feeling than looking around a dressing room and thinking, ‘I want him in my team, I love him in my team’ and then looking the other way and going, ‘He’ll do for me’. That’s how it felt.’
“We were favourites to beat Switzerland and Scotland,” Incey says. “We weren’t favourites to beat Holland. That was the yardstick to see where we were at. I wasn’t sure we were good enough. It was about the way we started. We were so quick. Everyone was up for it. That was the best game I was involved with for my country. And the result was fully deserved.”
Patrick Kluivert’s late consolation had unintended consequences, sending the Netherlands through to the next round on goal difference ahead of Scotland. “Not only did you do us in our game, you did us with that as well,” Gary says.
Our quarter-final against Spain, was the reverse, finishing 0-0. If the Netherlands was a showcase for ability, our quarter-final was about grit. Pearce exemplified it, converting a penalty in the shootout six years after the pain of missing at Italia ’90, the suppressed emotion surging out of him. Having the nuts to stick it away like that tells you everything about Stuart’s character.
Catharsis did not endure for long. It was Germany, again, and then it was penalties, again. Before that, in extra-time, with the score at 1-1, Darren Anderton had struck the woodwork. Then Gazza stretched to meet my cross and, with the goal agape, narrowly failed to make contact. “I honestly thought the ‘keeper was going to get a little fingertip to it, so I held there for half a second,” he says. “I still think about it now.”
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This time Gareth was the fall guy, and England’s sixth kick, our first in sudden death, was saved. “Everybody was behind us, the adrenaline was buzzing through the camp and then all of a sudden, it all goes flat very quickly,” Teddy says. “You think about yourself first, but then it’s, ‘Gareth, oh my god, they’ll say you’ve ruined everybody’s dreams’, so you put your emotions into him.”
“I do talk-ins with fans and one of the things I say is, ‘What’s wrong with this country?’.” Gazza says. “I scored my penalty fantastic and that was it. Gareth Southgate misses his, gets £30,000 for a pizza advert and becomes manager of England. What the f**k did I do wrong?”
That is a very different question, but there is poignancy when Gazza considers the tournament as a whole. “That goal against Scotland, the celebration, they’re things no one can ever take from me and I’m proud of that, you know,” he says. “There are things in my life I would like to change and I can’t now. All I can do is improve and I try my best. I’m not brilliant at it, but I try.”
Losing, of course, was a great sickener. We’ve had a few down the decades. My natural inclination is to swerve the big adjectives because we didn’t go on to lift the trophy, but I’m getting soft in my old age. It was all vital and special and powerful and stirring. And that night against the Dutch … Nobody can deny that we played some bloody good football. All of us — the whole nation — thought, ‘Shit, we can win this thing’.
Incey expresses it well. “People still talk to me about Euro ’96,” he says. “It was the song, the weather, Gazza’s goal, the dentist’s chair. In some ways, it encapsulated everything the country is about. It wasn’t just football fans, it was everybody. It changed everyone’s mindset. What we did somehow brought the whole country together.”
It’s nice to think that football can do that.
Back in the hotel — I’m still desperately trying to banish thoughts of Gazza’s toothbrush — a circle was squared. “We were all devastated,” Incey says. “Terry told us we could leave if we wanted or we could stay and have a few drinks. Most of us stayed. It was sad and funny.
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“We got into the little hotel bar and we sat there drinking. Macca and Robbie had a CD player and they started playing this George Michael single. We were in there until six or seven in the morning, listening to this same f**king George Michael song all f**king night.”
We rack our brains for a while. What was it called? Eventually, I look it up: Fastlove, apparently. “Yeah, that was it,” Incey says. “That was a tune, Shocksy!” Shocksy was my nickname back then. Fastlove? The Euros, those moments, football, your career, time; it all goes so quickly.
But it started with a drink and it ended with one, too.
There is a postscript to Scotland and, naturally, it involves Gazza. As usual, he gets the last word. “After the tournament finished, I was on holiday, enjoying myself,” he says. “With a few days to go I suddenly thought, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got to go back to Rangers’, I’d forgotten I played for them.” How on earth can you forget who you play for, I nearly ask, but … well, it’s Gazza, isn’t it? His whole life has been one big WTF.
“When I got back to Scotland, I got about 30 photocopies of my goal celebration and put it all around the dressing room on everyone’s peg,” he says. “I did it every day. I used to sit next to Andy Goram and one day he said to me, ‘Gazza, I’m not being funny, but if you put another one of those above my peg tomorrow, I’m going to knock you out’.
“I don’t know why I thought about this, but I went to where all the cleaning stuff was kept. I came out with a mop and a ball and shouted, ‘Hey lads, look at this’, and I flicked the ball over the mop as if it was Colin Hendry and then volleyed the ball above Andy’s head. I said, ‘That’s how you do it’, and walked out.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design by Sam Richardson)