Join me in the queue to root for England?

THE fella in the socially distanced queue at the shop said he was thrilled how England had made it through to play Italy in today’s Euro final in Wembley.

Wow, I thought, despite 800 years of misery, conflict, starvation, humiliation, loss of native tongue, conflict, partition, Brexit, the goddamn Irish Protocol and Tory politicians, grassroots relations between Ireland and England mustn’t be that bad after all.

Which is how it should be, considering that well over six million people in the UK, about 10% of the entire population, have at least one Irish grandparent. About 400,000 people in the UK were actually born in Ireland.

Britain is our biggest export destination and the Brits are also our biggest tourism market, delightfully swamping us with 4.7 million visitors in 2019, before that Wuhan bat did his thing.

We love their sitcoms, TV dramas and spy thrillers; they love our sense of humour, our get-alongability, our more charming use of their language and our creativity (product of necessity after centuries of ahem… well, you know already).

And we throng their soccer stadiums to witness the beautiful game first-hand and proudly wear the kit of our favourite Premiership team down the pub when we can’t make it in person.

The clincher, however, is that this England team contains players who are, for all practical purposes, Irish.

Jack Grealish wore the Irish jersey with distinction before he made the business decision to grab the Three Lions instead. Ditto Declan Rice. Harry Kane is as near to Irish thoroughbred as it gets – three Irish grandparents and a Galway-born father. Tribesman, and that’s for sure.

Fact is, there’s something wonderful about this England team right now. That’s why I’d love to see them win today, by say 3-2, in a classic, even if that unleashes an uncontrollable display of English strutting that’ll last for at least 50 years. (We’ve been doing precisely that with Italia ’90 – and we won nothing).

As the man in the queue passed me I said: ‘Yeah, love to see

England win it now.’

He stopped abruptly and leaned in towards me a manner that wasn’t exactly to Dr Tony’s specifications.

He said: ‘Wha? Christ man, what’s wrong with you? I only wanted them in the final to see them bate out the gap. That’d hurt them more. England win? Joking me you are?’

Maybe, we’ve still a little way to go.