In the first of a series of articles looking at how the tournament was received at home, Al Needham strokes his chin, sifts through the discarded plastic flagpoles and wonders where all those crosses of St George came from. And does it mean anything anyway?

It’s good for a country and its people to take stock and re-evaluate its sense of identity every now and then, and I did just that in a bus shelter last month, sitting next to an elderly Jamaican woman, watching the endless procession of cars with plastic white flags with red crosses clipped to their windows. Where had they come from? It wasn’t this bad in 2002. Had a giant sandcastle firm been made bankrupt, or something? Was it just a local thing? And what did it all mean? “Look at these fools,” said the Jamaican woman, all of a sudden. “They don’t know what it means to be patriotic. In Jamaica, we have the flag up all year round, not for some… pussyclaat football game.” Then she sucked her teeth. For a very long time.

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Daunis Auers was among the Latvia fans following their team of outsiders around Portugal. They might have even stayed a little longer but for a crucial decision by an English referee…

Euro 2004 arrived suddenly and unexpectedly in Latvia. About two weeks before the tournament, the local media began running stories on the national team. They followed the training regime of the players, reported on their choice of cars (Simon Jordan will be pained to hear that the two ex-Crystal Palace players had the nicest ones) and even ran features on the players’ wives.

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Portugal resident Phil Town watched the local reaction to the national team's efforts change from despair to delight and back again over the course of Euro 2004

Well, it was, according to UEFA chief Lennart Johan­sson, the best-organised European champ­ion­ship ever. It did not have any cases of doping, and terrorism of any kind was thankfully conspicuous by its absence. It was also, of recent editions, the least scarred by hooliganism. Banning orders slapped on around 3,000 of England’s “finest”, plus a similar number from Germany, will have helped that, but so will a general sense, on the ground, that having a good time might just be better fun than kicking heads. And the mild-mannered and relatively non-aggressive nature of the Portuguese gave this mood a valuable helping hand.

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Beginning our European Championship reports from writers in Portugal, Philip Cornwall offers an upbeat assessment of the England experience, where expectations were met on the pitch and exceeded off it – even if the portents for 2006 are shakier

C autious optimism, last month’s WSC editorial sug­gested, was in order on and off the pitch for England at Euro 2004. I should have paid attention. Ten min­utes from time against Portugal I was edging nervously past caution and starting to dream. Then again, what happened next was a long, long way from the England nightmares of the past. The national team have won two European quarter-finals: in 1968 against Spain in a home-and-away tie, and against the same opponents in 1996 when, as hosts, they won on penalties after the opposition had had a goal disallowed controversially. Any sensible analysis of England’s exit has to have this context: it rarely gets any better than this and could so easily have done so.

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However unjust their elimination from Euro 2004 might have seemed at the time, the truth is that England will never go further than the last eight in a major tournament until there is a major rehaul of the Premiership

 England’s elimination at Euro 2004 felt like a compilation of all their previous tournament crises. The team tend to rely on survival through attrition, of desperate defending with their “tin hats on”. But that never pays off, so other reasons for failure are found, often involving making a scapegoat of a referee (Urs Meier this year, Kim Milton Nielsen in 1998). This means uncomfortable questions don’t have to be posed, such as whether it’s right to place faith in star names when they are playing as badly as David Beckham, or indeed whether the best English players are in fact especially good in the first place.

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