English football was at a terrible low although the 1980s would get even more dire. The FA had planned to appeal the ban by Uefa on English clubs, following the Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985, in European club competitions. The Uefa executive committee meeting was 10 days after the game in Dusseldorf. Such was the scale of the trouble in the city that the FA shelved that appeal, fearing that it could be subjected to even more punitive measures.
Back in London, there was a sense of shame at the damage to Britain’s reputation. Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, called Hurd and Moynihan to Downing Street for a “summit” on English hooliganism. There were reports of drunken English hooligans making Nazi salutes in Stuttgart after Bobby Robson’s team lost their first Euro 88 game in the city to the Republic of Ireland. In the trouble that followed there were reports of hooligans fighting with US servicemen, based near Stuttgart – specifically African-American servicemen. A taxi driver of Egyptian heritage was stabbed in the city.
Already, the FA had decided that friendly games outside of qualifying in Europe were now out of the question. It could only realistically organise England games at Wembley, or places where the most violent English fans could not travel – identified, startlingly, as the Soviet bloc or South America. A friendly against Italy in Turin planned for September 1988 was cancelled.
Van Basten’s hat-trick in 3-1 defeat
The Daily Telegraph voiced fears that England, and English football, was “on the brink of being cut off from the global game”. The English were, it wrote, “one more incident away from being banned completely from the game they gave the world”.
It was against this backdrop that Bobby Robson’s struggling side faced the Netherlands, with both teams having lost their opening game. Injuries plagued England. One of Robson’s first-choice centre-backs, Dave Watson, was out. Gary Lineker, then of Barcelona, had a knee injury and suffered with illness for much of the tournament. He would fail to score a single goal. A young Tony Adams was thrown into the side alongside Mark Wright in defence, and Van Basten would turn the Arsenal centre-half inside out for his first goal.