AND SO I have finally made it to Berlin, sufficiently exhausted and egotistical to harbour visions of myself sweeping into the city through the Brandenburg Gate like Napoleon after he crushed the enduring Prussian resistance in the aftermath of the battle of Austerlitz.
In reality I stumble off a train and onto the platform, carrying my heavy suitcase in a series of snap jerks.
After his triumphant entry, Napoleon took the statue sitting atop the Brandenburg Gate – the Quadriga - and shipped it off to Paris as his own reward. All I have to take home with me are my memories of the Deutsche-Bahn.
I arrive on Thursday, a day redeemed by the fact it Wasn’t Wednesday, the most stressful day of the tournament so far.
And it had all started so well.
Working off about three hours sleep after Spain’s semi-final win over France, I arrive way too early for my 7.30am train from Munich to Essen. (Nothing, not even sleep, gets in the way of my neurotic obsession for showing up for public transport way too early. This has been the main benefit of growing up to become an independent adult – nobody can stop me from showing up five hours before a flight.)
Dortmund hotel prices are utterly daft – one hotel that usually costs around €70 a night are charging over €1,000 on the night of the second semi-final – and so I’ve found a hotel in Essen, theoretically a 15 minute train ride from Dortmund. Theoretically.
I get to my hotel, nap for an hour, and then hop on a train to Dortmund. I’ve left five-and-a-half hours before the match in the hope of beating the crowd. Chalk that one down as a defeat. I tetris-contort my body to squeeze onto a packed train.
We are halfway down the tracks when my WhatsApp starts demanding attention.
Who the f**k is that?
I fight for the elbow room to investigate further.
And it was at that moment I realised the FAI had announced a new Ireland manager.
Over the previous 230 days, in the hope of staying ahead of the story, I’d scoped out Lee Carsley’s stint driving a bus for a local school PE department, told live radio listeners that Chris Coleman was a contender minutes before he was officially ruled out, gone on a wild goose chase for the phone number of a Kjetil Knutsen, and discovered Willy Sagnol was managing Georgia.
And now it had been announced as I was squashed between English and Dutch fans in a metal box trundling through North Rhine-Westphalia. I had a lame impulse to tweet the name of Heimir Hallgrímsson but was frustrated by patchy phone signal.
I spend the rest of the trip frantically hitting refresh on his Wikipedia page in the hope it will load. I then leg it to the Westfalenstadion, and am travelling in the wake of the Dutch fans march, with the streets a shimmering, crunching carpet of broken glass. Once I get into the stadium I busy myself in the business of becoming an expert in Heimir Hallgrímsson. I pace the media hub looking for a journalist who may be from Iceland, to no success.
My usual pre-game routine of occasionally reading some relevant articles while being distracted has now been destroyed. Instead I spend a couple of hours getting up to speed on Our New Leader before making my way to the press box for the game. In traditional Dortmund fashion, a thunderstorm breaks as I’m walking in and so I get soaked. The torrent falls just as I reach the narrow media entrance gate, which, consistent with much of this tournament, is not marked by a sign and is manned by a single steward.
With shelter on the other side of the gate, fans rush in, and I get caught in a crush against the metal gate. It’s genuinely frightening, but mercifully only for a couple of seconds. An England fan in front of me yells, “Fucking hell, this is like Hillsborough.” Security personnel sprint over and pull some fans away. I am carried through just before they start pushing people back and forcing closed the gate. They then barricade the gate and are unmoved as accredited media flash their lanyards, being drenched as the rain falls. One supporter has his jeans rolled up and is remonstrating with a steward while pointing to a cut on his leg.
Once the rain relents, I skip across the exposed tarmac and into the stadium concourse, and get the now traditional first glimpse of the Dortmund pitch: through the giant waterfall sluicing down the corner of the stadium.
England then go and win the semi-final in the final minute. A task even more difficult than forbearing this month has been writing about England. They are obviously doing lots of things very badly, and yet they keep winning. What is happening here? Has everything I thought I knew about football been a lie all along? This sport about which I have been writing and trying to tame with common sense and logic…is it all just random? And if it is, then what is the point of me?
Getting out of Dortmund is, of course, a disaster. It’s a 40-minute walk to the station and a 15-minute train from there to my hotel in Essen, so naturally I get back to my hotel four hours after full-time. There are hardly any trains arriving into the station and, unbelievably, there are fewer leaving. Those sitting in the station are packed with people to the point that they cannot carry the accumulated weight of the passengers, but when asked to get off, passengers are naturally refusing to do so given the fact there are no other trains.
But hey, it’s all in the past now, because I have swept victoriously into Berlin.
There is no real central square in Berlin, as is the case in other European capitals. Berlin is more like a vast patchwork of fantastically vibrant and distinct districts. This lack of obvious planning and balance makes it the kind of city that Gareth Southgate might design.
I can picture the absurd self-confidence of the people of Bellinghamplatz and the excitable sycophancy of the denizens of Riceplatz.
I can imagine the loose land zoning laws of AlexanderArnoldplatz; the libraries and Marks and Spencers in Southgateplatz; the excessive number of candy stores and Red Bull vendors lining Pickfordplatz.
I close my eyes and can hear the grumbling over poor transport links among the people of the remote and awkwardly-fitting Trippierplatz.
Sorry for flogging the metaphor, but England is obviously on my mind. I can now understand what it is like to think solely of England, and see the world through the prism of England. Maybe I am now qualified to write for the BBC.
I am wrestling with some deep questions about identity: should we care if England win?
In many ways, it shouldn’t matter. The manager is a dignified and decent man and most of the players are pretty likeable, along with being brilliant. Plus, in many ways we have matured as a nation. We got a major buzz out of being the adults in the room during the Brexit fiasco, so I guess that means we should be comfortable with England actually winning a football tournament.
But if you can’t go along with this, if some ancient impulse within you compels you to approach Sunday’s final with a queasy dread, then that’s okay too, because it can be said to be what makes you Irish.
Countries are what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities”" a place filled with people who identify themselves in the same way in spite of the fact they’ll never meet. That identity is derived from a shared set of symbols, and, in Ireland, one of those shared symbols is Hoping England Lose. This may be nationalism but it is a very benign form of it, so perhaps it is worth indulging.
But regardless of the result on Sunday night, England can be proud that they haven’t yet gone home, and have made it all the way to Berlin.
Take it from me: that’s an achievement.
