GET WEIRDLY EXCITED!

It couldn’t be a truly celebratory summer without a major international football tournament to provide a blissful five-week window of fixture planning, skipping work, and drinking during weekday afternoons. And lo, Euro 2020 will arrive a year later than planned on 11 June like a travelling Uefa roadshow that has been stuck in traffic.

To mark Uefa’s 60th anniversary, there is no official host nation, with games instead being played in 12 different countries. Aside from the bewildering level of Covid testing this will entail, this one-off sentiment feels strangely appropriate as we all come blinking out of hibernation.

There’s football to watch too, of course. And astonishingly, England are the bookmakers’ favourites at the time of writing. (Yes, we’ve checked that sentence ourselves as well.) With greater expectation naturally comes greater disappointment, so take a smart punt on Eric Dier scoring an own goal in our decisive group match against Czech Republic (20/1 if you’re interested).

Whether any fans will be inside the stadia is still tbc, raising the haunting possibility of a pipedin England band playing the The Dam Busters theme.

We don’t know how much we’ll be going out by then. We don’t know how much we’ll be staying home either. Watching in pubs is another question mark. So it’s surely incumbent on all of us to ramp up our standard of home viewing. If you thought you’d grown apart from such familiar tournament rites as wall charts, pundit comparisons and critiquing Gareth Southgate’s attire, think again. These previously trite shared experiences are now essential signifiers that normality might just return.

Our newly minted work/life balance will afford us a rare chance to watch every minute. And right now, every fixture has our highlighter pen hovering over it as a reason to get out the facepaint and our glossary of European bar snacks. There are some basic rules to adhere to here. Make sure you schedule games into your calendar to ensure you can’t be dragged into a Teams meeting during the Group E eliminator. Commandeer every screen in the house and place tactically in every room. Order a wide selection of European beers, to be drunk with corresponding fixtures. Sagres for Portugal, Budvar for Czech Republic... but we’re not here to do your online shopping for you.

This all counts as connection, but all being well there is the very real hope of having other humans round to watch a game. For intermediatelevel hosting, try drawing up a shortlist for Euro bingo, taking three sips of Estrella every time Alan Shearer mentions Euro ’96 or someone calls Belgium “dark horses”. At advanced level, prepare a full herring and pickled cucumber smorgasbord for Denmark versus Finland, washed down with some advocaat bloody marys. You get the idea.

It will be an intense five weeks, during which you will briefly know the Hungarian goalkeeper and hold oddly passionate views on Martin Keown’s co-commentating style. It won’t go on forever though, even if it will seem like it during the second half of Ukraine v North Macedonia.

So start now and do it right. Euro 2020 might be just the best thing that happens in 2021.