What's behind "It's coming home" song

The sure things of this incredible edition of EURO 2020 are few, but among them there is the solidity of Roberto Mancini's Italian national team, the romantic beauty in seeing the full stadiums and hearing the roars of the fans and the classic English song "It's coming home". You can hear it practically everywhere in the boulevards around Wembley, in English pubs but also in the streets leading to the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, where the Three Lions reached the semi-final. The story behind one of the longest-running unofficial anthems of a national team is as incredible as it is closely linked to English sporting culture, beautifully described by FourFourTwo. Gary Parkinson's prose analyzes verse by verse the song that in 1996 - the year England hosted EURO - wrote two British comedians like David Baddiel and Frank Skinner on the note of Lightning Seeds.

Story that also summarizes Gareth Southgate, leader of this new English wave, who admits at the press conference that "We don't have a positive football history as we believe. We have never been to the European final, they have a European and I'm old enough to remember it. They have done more than we have in history and people tend to forget that". A feeling of nostalgia, that of the singers in "It's coming home" which, however, rests on stories far from reality, because excluding the 1966 World Cup, the English national team has never given the impression of being close to an important milestone.

The definition of "ecstasy of agony" is the best that can be found, in what is a hymn to identity and a sense of belonging, but also a cry of despair and pessimism seen and considered the curse that has been looming since 1966 on the results of the English national team. "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" quoting Time by Pink Floyd and is the pic of how the English football culture lives the national team, the losses accumulated in all these years and the disappointments that have followed one another tournament after tournament, game after game. The cosmic pessimism of the British is a recognized feature around the world and football exacerbates this concept, living "not with absolute negativity but rather with the usual slight bewilderment that they will go a certain way".

But the times of pessimism, resignation and waiting for an outcome that seems to be taken for granted are coming to an end. Gareth Southgate's national team has rekindled an entire country, remaining on the notes of "It's coming home, It's coming, Football's coming home" also given the final in the Wembley temple of football. The time seems ripe to "bring football home" in the form of a cup and confidence seems to be ahead of the defeatism that has accompanied the Three Lions for years.

Sterling, Kane, Stones, Grealish seem to have traced a different path at EURO 2020, far from those "Thirty years of hurt" that tell the Lightning Seeds. But there is always to remember that "everyone seems to know the score, they've seen it all before, they just know, they′re so sure that England's gonna throw it away". There is all the English football culture in four simple words: the awareness of never being favored and then betraying expectations, the resignation in knowing that there will be another disappointment, the anticipated bewilderment of an imminent defeat.

The self-deprecating jingle that changed the perception of English football has never changed over the years and is also accompanying the English in this new climb. They hope to be able to reverse the course, but we want it to remain a fantastic cultural anthem of the "beautiful game" which since 1996 has been telling the condition of millions of English fans.