Last decade was greatest in British sporting history but Three Lions can make this one even better – The Sun

THE 2020s have a lot to live up to — but if they deliver one particular event, all will be forgiven.

It will have a lot to live up to. The decade just gone was surely the greatest in the history of British sport.

London hosted Team GB’s most successful Olympics of the modern era. Then our athletes did even better in Rio.

Andy Murray ended the nation’s long wait for a male singles champion at Wimbledon, as well as inspiring them to a first Davis Cup title in even longer.

Bradley Wiggins became the first Brit to win the Tour De France, before Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas made the event as British as Queen’s "Bicycle Race".

Lewis Hamilton won five of the six world titles that have made him an F1 legend.

England (and Wales… and Ireland, if you factor in Eoin Morgan) are the cricket world champions.

New heroes emerged in previously unheralded disciplines, like world and Olympic gymnast king Max Whitlock.

Women’s sport enjoyed great success and a bigger profile than ever before.

Jessica Ennis-Hill and Dina Asher-Smith were the stand-out performers in the traditional realm of track and field.

But break-out stars like Nicola Adams in boxing and Jade Jones in taekwondo showed there were new routes to individual glory.

Meanwhile, the British hockey squad and England’s cricketers both claimed the biggest prize in their sports.

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And the England team proved — in two Women’s World Cup semi-finals in a row — you don’t have to be men to be able to raise a nation’s hopes to fever pitch and then dash them.

As the decade closed, darts queen Fallon Sherrock beat the men at what was supposed to be their own game.

Never before have girls had so many role models across such a range of activities.

The next ten years could, no should, be the most exciting and lucrative yet for women’s sport.

Reading all that back — and apologies to the countless champions of both sexes whose have been omitted — it seems ridiculous to suggest just one single sporting success would trump them all.

But it would. And its broader impact would be bigger and more welcome right now than anything else.

We’re talking, of course, about a Home Nation winning a major football tournament.

With all due respect to the other members of the Union (which was still just about holding, at the time of writing), England are the most likely to do so.

And nothing, not even Gavin and Stacey, brings the country together like football.

In an era of box sets, catch-up TV and mobile devices, sporting events are the only thing you have to watch live to avoid becoming a social outcast.

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