Hours before the Euro Cup final kicked off at the historic Wembley stadium in faraway London, Adithya Prasad, a young house surgeon here, downloaded a mobile app.
Anticipating an English victory against the Italians, he had planned a video with the English manager Gareth Southgate holding aloft the trophy. But that video proved stillborn as the Three Lions were kicked out by the Azzurri in a contest that went right down the wire. “Just a waste of mobile data,” said Adithya, sardonically.
For English fans, the number of whom keeps on soaring in the State, thanks in large measure to the popularity of the English Premier League, there was no bigger heartbreak in recent times.
“For years we were mocked as the perennial losers who turn up with high hopes only to return home defeated. This was the first final featuring England for my generation and we truly believed that it was coming home this time,” rued a diehard English fan Sandeep K.V., who tuned into the match from Bahrain where he is working.
No sooner than the final whistle was blown in Wembley in the early morning hours of Monday than a heated debate kicked off on social media among English fans about what went wrong.
As passions boiled over, some turned acerbic and attributed the defeat to “clownish” management by Southgate. “He wasted brilliant attacking talents on the bench and then assigned youngsters with little experience for taking the penalty kicks in a pressure cauldron,” said Firaz Muhammed Zakariya, a mechanical engineer from Kozhikode.
Abhish Puthussery, another fan, however, called for reasoning. “We need to respect a manager who led us to a World Cup semi in 2018 and then did one step better in the Euro,” he argued.
Then as news emerged of English fans going berserk at the stadium and engaging in racial abuse on social media against the young players who missed the penalty kicks, the debate turned towards the hooliganism of fans.
“I wanted England to win the final, but having seen the havoc wreaked by their fans on visiting fans at Leicester Square and outside Wembley, I no longer rue that they lost,” said Alan Bince, a student of Model Engineering College, Kochi.
Naveen James, a young law professional and a fanatic English fan, however, felt that every fanbase has its share of hoodlums. “Just ask Sharapova (tennis ace Maria Sharapova),” he said. (Sharapova’s social media account was in the past bombarded by Malayali cricket fans after she said she did not know Sachin Tendulkar.)
As this back-and-forth was going on between English fans, the neutrals and Italian fans, were busy churning out memes, with “It’s coming home”, from the song ‘Three Lions’ released ahead of the 1996 Euro Cup and has since then become the de facto anthem of English fans, their target.