Well, it looks like summer is here as the mercury passes 30degrees. It is an important summer of football and first off, I must congratulate the England U21 for winning the Euro 21 Championship or the UEFA European Under-21 Championship to give it its full title. The Young Lions beat Germany 3-2 in the final and Liverpool’s Harvey Elliot walked away with the Player of the Tournament trophy as well. The tragedy is that he comes from Chertsey which is pretty much walking distance to my beloved FC Deportivo Galicia at Heathrow. Our scouts missed that one! I think QPR and Fulham’s scouts might be uneasy too!

No mention here of the Club World Cup in South Canada/North Mexico which is gathering precisely zero interest among fans in England. I have not seen a single match so far, opting to watch paint dry instead.

So, congratulations to Lee Carsley and his young men. Winning it in 2021 was impressive and to win it for a second time, elevates him to almost legendary status.

Sarina Wiegman

Meanwhile the Lionesses are off to Switzerland with  Sarina Wiegman for the UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 in Switzerland. There are high hopes after all the recent success but first of all they have to escape a “Group of Death with Wales, France and the Netherlands. Then they would have to navigate one of Poland, Denmark, Sweden or Germany! So, they are going to have to do it the hard way.

In honour of the tournament, the BBC One Show managed to track down all the members of the squad Harry Batt took to Mexico. He managed the British Independents, an unsanctioned women’s national team that represented England at the unofficial 1971 Women’s World Cup and was banned for life from football by the Football Association (FA). Some of these ladies had not seen each other in 48 years. It was obviously emotional for them but it just shows how far the Women’s game has come in the past 50 years. Batt was barred from football sine die and the players themselves got three month bans because the FA did not want the women playing football. Quite incredible!

It focused on the Storyville documentary “In August 1971, football teams from England, Argentina, Mexico, France, Denmark and Italy gathered in Mexico City for a watershed tournament. With lavish sponsorship, extensive TV coverage, merchandise on every street corner and over 100,000 roaring fans at the historic Azteca stadium, media outlets treated the players like rock stars. 

Despite being one of the most groundbreaking moments in footballing history, most people have never heard of it – because the players were all women. 

This is the extraordinary story of an extraordinary tournament, told through the fearless voices of the women who took part and including recently uncovered and never-seen-before archive footage. 

The tournament was the flame that lit the touch paper for the explosion of women’s football around the globe and in the UK. It was one of the catalysts that led to the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 final, when England beat Germany 2-1.”

… and being as this site is about shirts, here are the Nike tops. The white, I quite like. The black? No, just no!

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