What Were You Doing When You Were 19?

Can I ask you, what were you were doing when you were 19 years old?

Me? I was washing dishes in a local hotel, enjoying free beer in the hotel bar while getting occasionally drunk, and spending a great deal of my wages on tapes and compact discs in my local branch of Woolworths.

I wasn’t standing in the middle of 60,000 people in a stadium or a television audience of 31 million, about to take a penalty that could send the nation into a rapturous celebration or a deep depression.

Arsenal and England star Bukayo Saka should be celebrated as a hero for his efforts during the Euros, but the fact that he knew he was going to be subjected to a torrent of racial abuse online as soon as he missed that penalty says a lot about the world we live in right now.

Saka, Jaden Sancho and Marcus Rashford are three of the best young footballers England has produced in recent years, and they’re part of a national team that brought a nation together, that gave the country hope after decades of disappointment.

But the fact that so-called fans subjected them to abuse as soon as the game was over is both frightening and appalling.

I mean, I love the internet, and I enjoy social media because it gives me the chance to keep in touch with friends and family, some of who are hundreds, and in a few cases thousands, of miles away, and although it’s also given us the chance to connect with our sporting and celebrity heroes it’s also given us the chance to abuse them.

If Harry Kane had missed his penalty would he have been subjected to the same abuse? What if Jordan Pickford hadn’t saved two of those spot kicks?

Saka, Sancho and Rashford didn’t deserve the abuse they got. They did their countries proud, as did the rest of the England squad.

I’ll end this piece by asking you this - how would you feel if you made a mistake at work and thousands of people subjected you to taunts and ridicule afterwards?

The internet really pisses me off sometimes.