And we're still not back in the room because Sunday is now on the horizon and the excitement that we feel at the prospect of England appearing for the first time in a major international finals since 1966, six years before I was even born.

I'm finding it rather hard to process. I don't know about you. It's as if, and I am going to inflict one of my

torturous analogies on you before you've even sat down for our time together today. It's, it's, I don't know, have you ever ridden a fixed gear bicycle? They're very popular now among, among hipsters and trendy people. But when I was a kid, it was a BMX. It was a piranha, BMX, with banana mags, since you ask.

And there's special nuts on the back that helped you do bunny hops.

But it was a piranha bmx with banana mags since you ask um and those special nuts on the back that helped you do

bunny hops but it was a it was a piranha bmx and however hard you peddled there comes a point where

you can't go any faster so if you're riding a normal bicycle the laws of physics dictate that the

harder you pedal even if you sort of developed superhuman powers, you could break the sound barrier,

the harder you pedal, the faster you go. But on a fixed gear bicycle, you reach a point at which

however hard you pedal, I don't understand how it works, God knows, don't ask me to explain the

mechanics of it or the actual engineering, but however hard you pedal, there's no faster

speed you can achieve. And that's a little bit how

I feel we're in the final I don't know what to do about it emotionally there's nowhere in my memory

banks where I can either file this or find experiences to draw on that equip me with the emotional

vocabulary that I need to process the feeling, the excitement.

Maybe the Rugby World Cup, I mean, that was magical for me. And there was a lad in the team I went

to school with which gave it a whole new level of magnificence. But it's not the same because,

well, we've always done a little bit better, I guess, in rugby

international competitions than perhaps we have in football. And 66 hangs over us, and 96

hangs over us, like malevolent shadows or like Banquo's ghost at the feast. So I don't know

how to process it, which means I'm apologising in advance for doing what I guard against on almost every other day of the year

and piling in with far too much overanalysis, far too much thinking about it. And absolutely, my rose-tinted

...