Category Archives: Euros 2016

A sporting rival I had in another sport, who I sort of liked and sort of didn’t, once said to me, ‘Think of anything that is meaningful to you in your life. It’s always shared in some way with people you care about.’ (I liked him when he said interesting things like that. I didn’t like him, for example, when he kept pushing into me from behind in a long queue at Dublin airport customs late one Sunday night recently, and blanked me when I nodded hello to him.)

So, a week on from the end of the tournament, I’m thinking of the people who shared the journey of the tournament together. That’s what made the defeat in the final hurt, how much you cared about it, cared about it with these people. Continue reading →

Quoting Legolas (referring to one of the incidents mentioned below) ‘For me the grief is still too near’ (in my case, to talk about losing in the Final of the Euros.) I’ll write something tomorrow. In the meantime, to cheer myself up, I made my Top 12 List of Sporting & Other Emotional Traumas. These are things that rocked me to my core at one point or another in my life. (Only time will tell where the Euros end up on this list but right now they’re firmly up there at Number 1.)

Enjoy! 🙂

No. 12 Empire Strikes Back

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The night before another Touch Euros, Jersey 2016 and the build up to this goes back to the end of Euros 2014 in Swansea and waiting for another go at this.

The physical preparation for me goes back to Manchester in the mud in February when I was such pain I couldn’t bend down to tie the laces of my boots and I realised unless I did something I wouldn’t make this tournament.

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