It's what dreams are made of, Gary

At the end of the day

Go England etc.

In honour of Our Boys and their fifty-eight years of hurt (not forgetting Our Girls and their two) - which could end today - this is an extract from my play Lily Jones’s Birthday, which was staged at RADA in 2009, and written during the Euros the year before.

Lily Jones’s Birthday is an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. In my play England’s women stage a sex-strike because of police maltreatment of Lily Jones who, on her birthday, places a white poppy on the Cenotaph instead of a red one.

Here, the Men of England try to take their minds off the sex-strike by considering the team England should pick for the Final of a major tournament. In previous rounds the national team has despatched Place-We-Go-For-Stag-Weekends 1-0, Bland-Tolerant-Democracy 3-0, and Them-We-Fought-A-Bloody-War-With 4-3 after extra time.