The “Little Italy” Roman Legions in Lygon Street Carlton had their sweet revenge over the John Cleese/Boris Johnson Popular Front for Liberation of English Football (“It’s Coming Home”) cult when the Italians put the Poms to the sword in a penalty shoot-out of the Euro final this morning.

The execution was greeted with rapturous applause, flares, skyrockets, and general mayhem when the coup de gras was broadcast on the big screen of Argyle Square/Piazza Italia this morning.

England had been expecting since 1966 – the last time they won a major football title in the game they had invented as “Association Football” (Soccer) in the nineteenth century – but it was not to be.

The World Game is now the Beautiful Game and simply wishing for it – like a Brexit magic pudding – is not going to make it come about. The woke, bend-the-knee Poms are simply not good at it while the passionate Italians excel like they are playing the lead role in a grand Giuseppe Verdi opera.

Football is one of many games invented by the English -– cricket, tennis, golf, Rugby, slavery, cooking, colonialism, empire, parliamentary democracy, world domination, carmaking, motorcycle manufacturing and good sportsmanship come to mind -– that the English are simply not particularly good at anymore.

Fleet Street does still do good newspaper front pages and I anxiously await their sclerotic self-flagellation of Perfidious England.

In The Life of Brian, John Cleese must be continuously reminded by the plebs that the Romans gave the English Judeans not only football, but also the aqueducts, sanitation, the roads, irrigation, medicine, education, public order, wine etc.

Lest They Forget!

Terence Maher is a former editor of The Melbourne Times and London Daily Mail staffer.