EXCLUSIVE:James Graham, the television playwright and playwright, has revealed that the BBC’s adaptation of his acclaimed football play Dear England It will feature Jude Bellingham’s stunning goal, a reverse kick, which spared the Three Lions the ignominy of defeat by Slovakia in the European Football Championship this weekend.
Bellingham’s incredible equaliser came with just 86 seconds of added time remaining in the knockout stage of the last 16, guaranteeing 30 minutes of extra time to complete the game.
Graham (Sherwood, Quiz, Coalition) told us that “it seems likely and necessary to feature Jude and his incredible moment of pure ballet theater.”
Jude Bellingham’s overhead kick goal against Slovakia at Euro 2024 on Sunday
Jürgen Fromme – firo sportphoto/Getty Images
After Bellingham match shot At the AufSchalke Arena in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, on Sunday, captain Harry Kane scored in added time to give England a 2-1 victory, send them through to the quarter-finals of Euro 2024 where they will face Switzerland on July 6, and provide momentary relief to critics in England.
It was a moment of pure magic, and as Kane said of Bellingham’s magnificent shot: “It was one of the greatest goals in our country’s history.”
The team would have had to fly home without that golden goal.
Even soccer fans in the United States were delighted.
THE Dear England The play, which premiered at London’s National Theatre a year ago, follows the England men’s football team under the revolutionary leadership of Gareth Southgate, who have seen the ebb and flow of success and failure at the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Euro 2020 and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Joseph Fiennes played Southgate on stage and will reprise the role in Dear England TV show.
The plan for the series, supported by BBC TV and Left Bank Pictures, is to expand and open up the story to include dramatising aspects of the current Euro 2024.
RELATED: ‘Dear England’: James Graham ponders which former England football stars could feature in his BBC TV version
(LR) Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane on Sunday
Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images.
The length of the TV version will depend on the Three Lions’ success against the Swiss in Düsseldorf on Saturday and their chances of progressing to the semi-finals in Dortmund on July 10 and – which might be a stretch – the final at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin on July 14.
Graham wants them to win.
However, in a recent interview on Breaking Baz, he admitted that “as a playwright, it’s a better story where we lose.”
It may sound treacherous, “but the play is about learning to lose, how we have to accept that we’re going to lose quite often and regularly as a country and how we find strength in that. … But I’ll accept it if we win.”
THE Dear England The show will likely include the now-famous “Who else?” quip that Bellingham, who plays club football for Real Madrid, made after scoring Sunday’s historic goal, and his post-match comments about the “nonsense” being spouted by fans and pundits about (at least up until that goal) England’s poor performance in Germany.
ITV football pundit Gary Neville, while acknowledging that Bellingham is “a special player and that goal saved England”, also lambasted the fact that it “saved” Southgate from having even more manure thrown at him.
And, as Bellingham himself observed in Sunday’s post-match press conference, “in 30 seconds, one kick of the ball and everything can change.”
Graham and director Rupert Goold have been on the ground in Germany to monitor England’s progress and analyse how Southgate is handling what will likely be his final games in charge of the Three Lions.
Apart from Southgate, Kane and Bellingham, and probably Gary Lineker, the BBC Match of the day Commentator Graham said he had “absolutely no idea” which characters will be included in the TV series.
Joseph Fiennes stars as Gareth Southgate, manager of the England men’s football team, in the play ‘Dear England’
Marc Brenner
He added that he “would not put pen to paper on the TV version until I know how it will end” at the Euro in Germany.
And certainly no other casting, other than Fiennes, has been done.
Bellingham is a showman on the football field. Perhaps he might be tempted to make an extended appearance in Dear England? I am sure that there is no player on Earth capable of reproducing that historic goal he scored in Gelsenkirchen.
