These sides met in the 2009 Women’s Euros final but that game belongs in a different era – Sunday’s match will show just how far the game has come
he most striking difference is the feeling of space. Space in the stands and space on the pitch. As England and Germany step out for the final of the 2009 European Championship, the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki is less than half full: the rows of black plastic seats creating their own shade, the noise simply evaporating like steam. In large part this is attributable to the fact that the final – for some mystifying reason – is being played on a Thursday evening in September.
Is it remotely possible to treat this like just another game of football? To know what it all means and to un-know it at the same time? Do you try to harness the emotion and sense of occasion or do you try to block it out? And this is before we even thrash out some of the finer details of this game: the battle between Keira Walsh and Lena Oberdorf for midfield supremacy, Popp’s and Beth Mead’s scrap for the Golden Boot, which team can best sustain the press and which team can best resist it.
The danger is in taking a breath, in stopping to admire the view, in dwelling for even a second on the magnitude of what they might achieve. This is why Germany are the single most dangerous side they could possibly face.