[tok.] A bottle came down out of the top tier and bounced off the advertising boards by my feet.
The man with the belly had his hands cupped round his mouth now, leading it, the veins in his neck up. ["JUDAS! JUDAS! JUDAS!"][STOMP. STOMP. STOMP.]
And I stood and I took it, all of it, because I had earned every note.
Understand what this was to them. The softest road to a World Cup final an England team had been handed in 52 years, and they knew it. Tunisia. Panama. A Belgium second string. Colombia on penalties. Sweden.
Not one team in that run that could hurt you, and they had struggled with half of them anyway, and still a whole country let itself believe, because the draw opened up and the song said it was coming home.
And then, in the one match where somebody put a team in front of them that came head-on, that fought, that ran, they froze. They went in their shell in the 47th minute and tried to hold what they had, and we took it off them.
