THE 2020s have a lot to live up to — but if they deliver one particular event, all will be forgiven.
It will have a lot to live up to. The decade just gone was surely the greatest in the history of British sport.
A major tournament win for England would make the 2020s the best sporting decade in British history
England won their first-ever Cricket World Cup in the 2010sCredit: AFP
London hosted Team GB’s most successful Olympics of the modern era. Then our athletes did even better in Rio.
Andy Murray ended the nation’s long wait for a male singles champion at Wimbledon, as well as inspiring them to a first Davis Cup title in even longer.
Bradley Wiggins became the first Brit to win the Tour De France, before Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas made the event as British as Queen’s “Bicycle Race”.
Lewis Hamilton won five of the six world titles that have made him an F1 legend.
England (and Wales… and Ireland, if you factor in Eoin Morgan) are the cricket world champions.
New heroes emerged in previously unheralded disciplines, like world and Olympic gymnast king Max Whitlock.
Women’s sport enjoyed great success and a bigger profile than ever before.
Jessica Ennis-Hill and Dina Asher-Smith were the stand-out performers in the traditional realm of track and field.
But break-out stars like Nicola Adams in boxing and Jade Jones in taekwondo showed there were new routes to individual glory.
Meanwhile, the British hockey squad and England’s cricketers both claimed the biggest prize in their sports.
ROLE MODELS EVERYWHERE
And the England team proved — in two Women’s World Cup semi-finals in a row — you don’t have to be men to be able to raise a nation’s hopes to fever pitch and then dash them.
As the decade closed, darts queen Fallon Sherrock beat the men at what was supposed to be their own game.
Never before have girls had so many role models across such a range of activities.
The next ten years could, no should, be the most exciting and lucrative yet for women’s sport.
Reading all that back — and apologies to the countless champions of both sexes whose have been omitted — it seems ridiculous to suggest just one single sporting success would trump them all.
But it would. And its broader impact would be bigger and more welcome right now than anything else.
We’re talking, of course, about a Home Nation winning a major football tournament.
With all due respect to the other members of the Union (which was still just about holding, at the time of writing), England are the most likely to do so.
And nothing, not even Gavin and Stacey, brings the country together like football.
In an era of box sets, catch-up TV and mobile devices, sporting events are the only thing you have to watch live to avoid becoming a social outcast.
They’re also one of the few kinds of occasion capable of uniting people of different, or violently opposed, opinions and ways of life.
There will be some who think an England victory in next summer’s European Championship, on home soil, would only make things worse.
George Orwell famously said “serious sport” was “war minus the shooting” and it’s been used as a propaganda tool by regimes of varying levels of awfulness.
There’s certainly a danger that, among the hard of thinking, it would only increase a misguided sense of overall national superiority.
Since the Brexit vote, football has certainly brought the worst out of people more frequently, with instances of racism being reported more frequently at all levels of the game.
But for all that, Gareth Southgate’s team — or Phil Neville’s at Euro 2021, if he’s still in charge of the Lionesses — have the power to help the healing process.
Whether you like it or not, Britain is leaving the European Union.
The different camps need to find a way to make as much of a success of it as possible, and to do that, they need to find common ground.
During the 2018 World Cup, two years after the vote, the vast majority of the population got behind a young team featuring a number of black or mixed-race players.
For a few weeks, there was a shared sense of pride and joy in being English that had not been witnessed since the 2012 Olympics.
Murray finally broke the drought for a British Wimbledon champion last decadeCredit: AP:Associated Press
Fallon Sherrock became a star at the very end of the 2010sCredit: PA:Press Association
If anything, Southgate’s squad next summer is likely to be even more diverse and better equipped to deliver success.
Victory at Wembley on July 12 would be a timely example of what can be achieved if people work towards a common goal.
And would be a bigger deal than anything that happened in the glorious decade we just enjoyed.
Ben Stokes and Eoin Morgan among sporting names on New Year Honours list as England cricket stars rewarded for World Cup heroics
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
