Paul Rouse: Wounds of the past still deep and vivid for England fans

Not today though. The Euros are in full swing – although the Premier League will be back in a month. The transformation of soccer into one integrated global year-long season continues apace.

Along the beautiful north Wales coastline, golf courses have been made through the contours of sand-dunes and their hinterland. As the train pushes away from the sea, there are pitches for cricket and rugby, soccer and hockey. There are tennis courts, a running track and a course for horseracing. And there are bowling greens made of synthetic grass and wooden platforms for fishing competitions.

In people’s back gardens, there are basketball hoops and all manner of sporting equipment from footballs to skateboards.

The conductor on the Transport for Wales train is a lovely, patient man. He chats to everyone with unfailing good humour, answering questions and offering advice and help as the train fills.

It’s not yet noon but almost everyone is drinking, mostly from cans – beer, cider and the relatively new trend of spirits that have been pre-mixed with tonics or minerals. Further along the carriage, a hen party is drinking a bottle of wine from the neck. Someone forgot to bring the plastic cups and there’s happy abuse about this.

Their night is already well underway, anyway. The bride-to-be is wearing a veil and the rest are in matching t-shirts. The plan is to get a late train back home.

There’s another group of women off to see a Robbie Williams concert in London. They’re giddy and full of fun, hoping to get to Chester to make their connecting train to London and then get on through the city to Hyde Park.

In the café at the station in Llandudno, there’s a group of men gathered around a phone. They’re watching Wales play rugby down in Australia. Wales are struggling and the men are resigned to another loss. It duly comes.

Earlier, on the ferry, two men had been watching England lose to New Zealand, also on a phone.

This capacity to watch live sport on a phone is a huge change over the past decade – it is a change that has greatly extended the reach of sport and the impact it has on people’s behaviour extends across a whole range of social settings.

Later, at a concert in Manchester, Billy Bragg told a story about trying to play songs while many in the crowd watched a penalty shoot-out involving England on their phones.

He wasn’t condemning it – just lamenting the agony of waiting to read people’s faces and their physical reactions as the kicks were taken, one after next. What made it all the more cruel was the way the phones might be slightly delayed from each other, making for a rolling but uncertain wave of pain or ecstasy. And it was torture for him to decode the wave as it broke across the crowd.

As the train passes from Wales into England, it gathers more and more people to the point where there are some standing in the aisles.

Many are wearing England jerseys and are off into Manchester to watch the quarter-final with Switzerland. Three lads begin an intense, detailed discussion on what lies in prospect. Their knowledge of the game is immense. They talk in depth about systems and strategies, about the capacities of Switzerland’s players as well as England’s.

They are split on their manager. Not in a top-of-the-head, reactionary way – just in a fair and reasoned assessment of his merits. Two say that “Gareth” has done a brilliant job for eight years, has made semi-finals and finals, has done the near-impossible job of getting rid of the whole aspect of the circus which for so long defined the national team.

For the other, “Southgate” was a decent man who just wasn’t a top-level manager. He decried the fact that he hadn’t brought Jack Grealish to offer something a little different and that he was still trying to find his best team despite the fact that there was at best a week left in the competition that had been going for two years.

It was fine listening.

The best bit is something that will be familiar to anyone who has ever truly supported any team and craved success. That is to say, they are daring to hope but are absolutely afraid of that very hope, of seeing it again rot into despair. The wounds of the past are deep and vivid.

It couldn’t have been further away from the clichéd arrogance or belligerence or edge of which English fans are accused by stereotype. One of the worst aspects of nationalism is its relentless capacity to paint the characteristics of people who live in the same place in the broadest of brushstrokes. Like most abstractions, it cannot survive any meaningful engagement with reality.

Indeed, it is usually just plain wrong.

There is no denying that sport is implicated in this process. Some of it is harmless, of course; but there is more of it that isn’t. If it is true that borders are the scars of history, they are routinely re-traced by international sport.

The train approaches Manchester. It’s past 1pm now. Two lads get into the carriage, one of them is wearing a Kerry jersey. They are off into the city to see The Saw Doctors play in the Castlefields Bowl. They see the cans of drink and regret the fact that they are empty-handed.

One of the women from a hen party hears them and hands them a can of some sort to drink between them. The lads are delighted. The whole lot of them end up having a conversation that runs with laughter and messing.

It’s after 1pm and the train has that unmistakeable joyous clamour of mass public transport in a big city on the day of a party; it is the sound of excitement straining to get off the leash.

Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin