I can’t wait to support England at Euro 2020 – we all need a bit of togetherness

I am an amateur but enthusiastic football fan and I always have been. I’m not going to pretend to be any kind of expert, though there will be no jokes about the offside rule here as it is perfectly easy for anyone to understand and broadly the same as in hockey.

There is also a family tradition of supporting Arsenal, and I have sat a fair few times cheering them on in the cold with a hot chocolate in my hands. I even played for the women’s football team at my college, though I did once have to be subbed off before I even went on as I’d pulled a muscle putting on my boots. I referred to it as a “sports injury”, which was technically correct.

I am a bit of a part-time fan then, I admit, when it comes to the domestic game. But I really do love an international football tournament. I am a sucker for a big event. And therefore I am looking forward immensely to the confusingly named Euro 2020, taking place in 2021. The England team plays its first match against Croatia on Sunday, and I will be watching, heart in mouth, cheering them on from my sofa, maybe even with a pie and a pint.

Despite having German family members, there has never been a split loyalty for me when it comes to the beautiful game. You can be anywhere in the world and still feel the tug at your heart when your home side is on. Over the years I have watched the England team play on a huge screen in a tent in Kenya, listened to the commentary on a scratchy long-wave radio in a family home in northern Pakistan, and patched in to BBC coverage on my iPhone while hurtling deep under the Channel on the train to Brussels, quietly fist-pumping when a goal went in.

Something about sport brings us together, no matter where we are. It creates a series of moments that arch over everything, and become totemic in the national consciousness. But it also happens in a very personal and individual way too. Italia 90 – I was 11, and I mostly remember Gazza’s tears, and then I remember laughing alongside the grown-ups, and being so proud to understand the joke, when Spitting Image made a puppet that never stopped squirting water from its eyes.

I remember Euro 96, when I was 17 and should have been revising for my important A-level mock exams, but like all my classmates, I was sat at the kitchen table ignoring the books spread out in front of me, glued to England beating the Netherlands 4-1. The atmosphere at school next day was euphoric.

And the World Cup 2018 when suddenly it seemed like this could be a winning side for England, and I watched penalties being taken on my iPad as I waited in an airport lounge, sharing furtive glances with other English passengers who were doing the same, then the sudden shout of triumph from across the room when a businessman couldn’t contain his joy any longer. I was far from home, but still I felt part of some community.

It’s been a hell of year and we could all do with some uncomplicated togetherness, a sense of union and belonging. What I especially love is that feeling when we all get behind the players, our players. We want to see them as warriors, heroes, giants who will take us somewhere beyond the complications of daily life and provide a back-of-the-net moment, the rapture of forgetting everything else for that instant, throwing your hands up into the air, and grabbing a stranger in a waiting room (sorry about that).

But these players are also real people, not avatars. They do not exist in a computer game. They exist in a world that is sometimes raw and difficult. Many have directly experienced racism – and I mean straight-in-the-face racism at football games, composed of the crudest language, monkey noises, the n-word.

So when they walk out on to the pitch on Sunday, I will be gunning for them as I always have. And when they kneel down quietly and briefly at the start in a momentary acknowledgment that real life in and outside of the game is harder for some than it ought to be, I will feel prouder than ever. This is the England I can always get behind – the England that can look real life in the face, understand that these problems can be fixed if we work together, and then plays the game as hard as it can.