Football rentre à la maison

Fabien Barthez, Laurent Blanc and Zinedine Zidane
pose for the cameras in 1998

If England 96 was when football came home, France 98 was when it got a radical new haircut, swaggered into the living room having not been seen for a couple of months, nailed the cat to the TV, threw all the family photos out of a top-floor window and then left straight through the wall, joyfully, ferociously, shrugging as it went. Or so your faulty memory would have you believe. Or would it?

Teams That Made Us Fall In Love With Football #7: Netherlands 1988

Back to the international fray and a warm welcome to Magic Spongers for Richard Hall on the Dutch Euro '88 champions

Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and Johnny Bosman. Yes, Johnny Bosman. At the beginning of June 1988, these three men were key to Dutch hopes of winning the European Championship in West Germany.

At the beginning of the decade, the celebrated 1970s side had faded away, replaced as is often the way in footballing nations with small populations, with an inferior crop of players. The Dutch game was no longer cutting edge, tactically, evident in the subsequent failure to qualify for the finals of World Cups in Spain or Mexico. Or the 1984 European Championship in France, which was won by a Michel Platini-inspired team that had picked up the mantle of sophisticated, progressive football relinquished by the Netherlands after their World Cup final defeat in Buenos Aires in 1978.