The England women’s footballers, the Lionesses, won the Euro 2025 competition in Basel on Sunday evening, thus retaining the trophy and becoming the first England football team to win a tournament on foreign soil. Under the stewardship of their Dutch head coach, Sarina Wiegman, they beat Spain in the final on penalties. Earlier, they had fallen behind to a goal by Mariona Caldentey midway through the first half before Alessia Russo headed an equaliser after 57 minutes. In the shoot-out, England scored three of their five penalties while Spain missed three of their four, two of those being saved by Hannah Hampton. She, along with Chloe Kelly, provider of the cross for Russo’s header and scorer of the final penalty (actually, that should read ‘smashed into the roof of the net’), were the stand-out performers but obviously it takes a team effort to win any football match.

Remarkably, England held the lead in their three knockout games for a total of only five minutes, that being after the late winner Kelly scored against Italy in the semi-final. A fair assessment might be that England were second best in all three of those games – against Sweden, Italy and Spain – but, hey, they won them all. In the final, they had eight shots compared to Spain’s 22. Their never-say-die spirit was best epitomised by the fact that Lucy Bronze played the entire tournament with a fractured tibia; their composure typified by captain Leah Williamson; their joie de vivre personified by Michelle Agyemang.

Above all, though, it is hard to overstate Kelly’s contribution to her country’s cause in this tournament. She had been frozen out by her club, Manchester City, over Christmas and was contemplating quitting the game. But she then secured a sudden move to Arsenal, where she was part of the team that beat Barcelona in the Champions League final in May. (Maybe there’s something about her and Spain?) In Switzerland for England, she started on the bench; her impact running at tired and tiring defences was transformative.

Wiegman, pictured on the home page, is the first manager, male or female, to take a team to five consecutive major finals. She was the manager of the Dutch women’s team that won the Euros in 2017. Two years later she led them to the World Cup final. Having been appointed England manager in 2021, she oversaw England’s 2-1 triumph over Germany in the final of the 2022 Euros at Wembley – and, by the way, Kelly also scored that winning goal – and then to the World Cup final in 2023, where they were beaten 1-0 by Sunday’s opponents. The word ‘revenge’ was largely avoided in Switzerland but there was no getting away from that reality.

England had come back from 2-0 down against Sweden in the quarter-finals and then won a chaotic penalty shoot-out in which only five of the 14 spot-kicks taken had been scored. Spain, on the other hand, had only been behind once in the whole tournament, and that for a mere four minutes against Italy in the group stage. They were never behind against England. Until, suddenly, they had been beaten.