What a conservative old Anglo-Saxon country we turn out to be, eh?

How else do you explain the very odd business of us becoming POMs when it came to the Euros?

For a country that purports to be multi-cultural, I didn’t see any one supporting Italy or Germany or France, unless of course they had direct connections to the country.

We all for the past couple of weeks have decided we are Brits. Which is good for monarchy, given it shows a very strong attachment to a country allegedly lots of people want to drop to chart our own course as a republic.

If the evidence though of the past few games is anything to go by, we would have to have a better football team because very large numbers of us seemed happy to adopt England’s.

Why is it we love the England football team? We don’t love the England rugby team, we don’t really care if Andy Murray wins Wimbledon, why do we get so gripped by the football?

Is it because our team barely go to the World Cup and when they do they’re never going to win?

Is it because football here is a large participant sport and we all as parents have stood on side-lines cheering our kids, but none of them go on to higher levels of the game , hence its peters out at international level? 

But here is an irony: no, we don’t often get to the world cup, but although the England team do, they are never going to win it either.

We sort of join that strange mass belief that because something magical happened in 1966 it can happen again.

But, this wasn’t even the World Cup, this was the Euros and we are not remotely European.

Why are we interested in a tournament that has literally nothing to do with us?

By the way, is or is not the penalty shootout the greatest invention in sport

Play your regulation time, play your extra time, but at the end of it, if you are not separated, it’s the gladiatorial session of kill or be killed.

There is little in sport more exhilarating, more definitive, more revealing of the human spirit than a penalty shootout.

And England bottled it – again. Which is yet another irony: why were we backing such a bunch of losers?