England cast off the shackles of the past to claim a historic Euro 22 title

England are the winners of Euro 22, creating their own history after a performance of nerve and control against Germany at Wembley.

Looks like it came home, then. There has been considerable talk of comparatives between the England women’s team and its men’s equivalent, this last couple of weeks, of the desirability of the women’s to forge their own history and to disregard and cast aside the various albatrosses around their own necks that their male counterparts have managed to position over the years.

England vs Germany is special because England vs Germany is special. There can be a rivalry without it being poisonous. At Wembley Stadium in front of a crowd of 87,000 people, there was no booing of the German national anthem, no need for such basic disrespect. It’s one of the stranger aspects of this phenomenon, really. The strain of England supporter that feels a need to boo always does so in the knowledge that at some point those boos will be thrown back at them. This pointedly hasn’t been an issue for the England womens team in any respect, in this tournament.

In terms of European pedigree, the gulf between Germany and England couldn’t be much greater. Germany are eight-times winners of this tournament, while this was only England’s second appearance in the finals. And while Germany’s absence from the last Olympics, brought about by a failure to get past the quarter-finals of the last World Cup, had hinted at a decline on their part, performances since then had shown them to be coming back to their best.

A bombshell dropped, just ten minutes before kick-off. After considerable pre-match discussion, centred not least on whether she would end the tournament as its top scorer, it filtered through that Alex Popp had been injured in the warm-up and wouldn’t be playing. The Wolfsburg striker, with 59 goals from 119 appearances for her country, would turn out to be a big loss for the Germany team.

Losing any player ten minutes before kick-off is one of the bigger unwelcome distractions that a team can go through before a big match. To lose a player of Popp’s quality only makes that distraction all the greater, and England started confidently, as Germany struggled to adapt to their late change of plans.

England nearly had a perfect start, with Fran Kirby breaking on the left to float the ball towards the far post for Ellen White to bring a comfortable save for the German goalkeeper, Merle Fhroms. Fran Kirby and Beth Mead found the…