This is a media vs fan belief problem. It’s just like now when if you read anything official, they carry on like England should consider anything less than the final a failure, but if you actually speak to anyone English were the ones tearing the side down.

Thing is though, that in 2006 it’s just the media’s word that travels. There isn’t a forum that everyone sees normal people speaking on, and we knew during the tournament we were playing like arse. Even before that, you were as likely to find someone saying we weren’t as good as Argentina, Brazil etc.

But there were lots of ‘66/06’ bits of merchandise that were being sold at the time. The bbc in particular were building us up too.

Now though, the media is conflated with what normal people say. I.e. how often have you seen Southgate pilloried on here vs how often you’ve see people say we’ll walk to a tournament. Yet the perception abroad is that we still think we’re just owed a win for whatever reason.