Can England win the Euros?

As a buoyant, exuberant England side, with a spring in its step and hopes held high, plot its campaign across the channel – a campaign which if successful will represent the greatest English victory on foreign soil since Wellington sent Napoleon Bonaparte into early retirement – it’s worth remembering a few things.

The Battle of Waterloo may well have been won on the playing fields of Eton but the last time English football conquered the world, it happened on home soil in 1966 and had its roots on the unassuming, inauspicious and less hallowed ground that is the parish of Chadwell Heath.

Nestled between the unglamorous London boroughs of Redbridge and Barking and Dagenham, it was here at the legendary West Ham academy that the talents of Bobby Moore, Martin Peters and Geoff Hurst were nurtured, developed and honed to a point where on July 30th the late, great Bobby Moore lifted the Jules Rimet trophy high into the Wembley sunshine.

On July 10th this year, just 20 days shy of 50 years since that historic day dare England supporters dream that it will be English hands lifting the European Championship trophy at the Stade de France?

Comparisons – as Cervantes wrote – may well be odious, but, along with coincidence and irony, they are meat and drink to your average football pundit and it is difficult not to draw comparisons between the all-conquering West Ham trio of 66 and what is emanating from ‘across the border’ in Enfield in North London and what many firmly believe could end the ‘50 years of hurt’.

The portents are good.

For Geoff Hurst read the 22-year-old Harry Kane, a more than able, razor sharp, golden nugget of a player with the same goalscoring instincts of England 1966 hat trick hero.

Martin Peters was described by his manager, Sir Alf Ramsey, as ten years ahead of his time and it’s difficult not to see similarities in the budding genius that is the midfield talents of Dele Alli and Eric Dier who with a combined age of just 41 almost certainly, with Kane, represent the future of English football for the next decade.

Danny Rose is no Bobby Moore (but who was and who ever will be?) but he has grown and flourished as a fine full back both in a defensive and attacking capacity and showed enough on his full debut in the memorable win against Germany to suggest that it is going to take some player to get the nod ahead of him for the number three shirt.

All have played in the younger England sides from under 17/18 upwards. All have done their apprenticeships and when they play together on the same pitch, it shows. Maybe, at long last, the penny has dropped with the movers and shakers at the FA

And here’s the first irony. In a Premier League awash with more money than a horse has hairs, the future of English international football could well be largely dependent on four players that to date have cost Spurs, give or take a few quid, around £10 million, not to forget at this juncture a certain Jamie Vardy who not so long ago was banging them in for the likes of Fleetwood Town when they were in the Conference

Moore, Hurst and Peters were moulded in the then Spartan confines of the West Ham soccer school while Kane, Alli and Dier have flourished at Spurs’ state of the art academy at Hotspur Way in Enfield. The principle remains the same, only the science, technology and investment levels have developed.

It won’t have escaped the notice of any football fan that the main architect in charge of building the ‘young revolution’ at Tottenham is Argentina’s Mauricio Pochettino who hails from the same soccer mad neck of the wood that a certain Leo Messi comes from.

Coincidentally this is not the first time Mauricio will have done England a good turn. It was his ‘foul’ on Michael Owen that earned England the penalty that gave them victory over Argentina in Japan in 2002.

Ron Greenwood was the West Ham manager that oversaw the growth of the West Ham Academy that led England to glory. In 1977 he became manager of the full England side, a post he held for five years.

If Pochettino was to go down the same road and eventually take charge of the England – and I have the impression that he would fit very well in that role – wouldn’t that be a coincidence? Or would it? Maybe, but perhaps what an Argentinian managing a full England side really would be is the ultimate irony.