The wait goes on England get a dose of painful reality

And fade to red. The Euro 2024 trophy will not, it turns out be coming back with the players to England after all. The parade can be scaled back, the beds turned down, the welcome basket stashed.

- Barney Ronay

Today will be a day for hangovers and regrets, which is in its own way English football's own safe place.

But it is at least headed to a very good home as England's footballers were eased aside in the Olympiastadion, Berlin, by a supremely coherent and gifted Spanish team. A 2-1 victory, the winner coming painfully late, means Spain are now fourtime winners of Europe's elite competition.

Whereas for England, well, the wait goes on, perhaps even shifting now into another phase in that continuing psychodrama of long marches, honourable defeat and almost-but-not-quites. The age of Gareth Southgate, eight years in the making, might just be teetering very close to the edge now.

This was at least an excellent final, a full-throated affair against the team of the tournament. Spain has been the dominant football culture of the last quarter century, a tactical atelier that has fed the universal global coaching style, not least the Premier League's own age of Guardiola-imprint possession football.

Football did seem keen to come home here. It just turns out that home is in Catalonia, Galicia, the Basque Country and surrounding provinces.

At the final whistle England's players were distraught, white shapes scattered around the limegreen turf, utterly drained after seven high-drama games en route to a first overseas final in the men's national team's history. They will be proud, when the bruises heal, of the way a young team grew into its tournament shape.

Under Southgate England have now enjoyed the most sustained period of tournament success in their history.

Even if, for now, that collective yearning, the vast and unslaked hunger of flags and painted faces, a kind of grail quest in love with its own falling-short, will now continue at least until the next World Cup, 60 years on from 1966 and all that.