But there is no doubt in my mind that the player of the UEFA European Championship that ended with the quasi-inevitable penalty shoot-out at Wembley on Sunday night (July 11) was the old warrior Giorgio Chiellini.

The Azzurri are not always blessed with an outstanding squad.

Yet through football history, Italy have probably won more matches that they should have lost than any other international team.

It is the consummate match-craft of Chiellini and his ilk that enables them to do this.

I was less than surprised to discover therefore that the Italian captain had left a humdinger of a post-match message on his Twitter feed (and here I am indebted to Google Translate).

"Thanks to you," the message read.

"To all of you

"Because in this incredible adventure we took you inside.

"Before [our] eyes, you.

"In our hearts, you.

"The pain of those who have suffered. The efforts of those who have been brought to their knees by the pandemic. The desire to come back to life.

"The faces of women, men, old, young, children and those who saved our lives: doctors

"You pushed us

"You helped us

"You sang with us.

"The result is only part of the game but this result, this victory, these tears of joy are dedicated to you."

International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, who faces a big sports event of his own in coming weeks, should take notes.

The tired "light at the end of the tunnel" mantra is no longer good enough, if it ever was.

All of which takes us back into "sport and COVID" territory, a subject with which our entire industry has been necessarily obsessed since the virus emerged a million years ago.

I have written before that I have found it hard to get worked up about sport while we are all facing such a novel, life-changing and frightening threat.

By this, I mean of course "other people’s sport": ensconced in our tiny COVID bubbles in our particular affluent corners of the industrialised West, the importance of the exercise, adrenalin stimulus and fellowship provided by our own personal sports lives has been multi-underlined.

This still seems to me a natural reaction; after all, pandemic life has at times felt like moving onto a war footing and, when facing a war, it is hardly surprising if its parody - sport - loses some of its piquancy.

My pal the poet Will Burns sums up this aspect of the pandemic beautifully in The Paper Lantern, his entrancing new COVID-19 memoir, writing: "A generation of people who had always struggled to define themselves against the terms of their parents' totemic conflicts finally had their own war."

The sustained, earnest-to-a-fault intensity with which the month-long soap opera of Euro 2020 has been witnessed, particularly in England, forces me to acknowledge that my new indifference to professional sports outcomes is not widely shared, or at least that the story has moved on.

Victory in international, or top-level team, sport is now cast as some sort of grand consolation, recompense for the privations and family tragedies of COVID-19.

One issue with this is that it is an awfully big responsibility to heap onto the shoulders of an activity which ultimately will not much change life’s hard realities, except perhaps for the starring players.

Another is if defeat correspondingly adds to people’s despondency.

Defeat, after all, is a lot more common than victory: only one of the 24 Euro 2020 team captains - Chiellini - got to lift the trophy.

Euro 2020 also saw the England team transmogrified as never before into a peg on which the multitudinous keyboard warriors of our deeply divided nation attempted to validate their personal belief systems, however obnoxious.

This applied whether it was faith in the progressive leadership style of England manager Gareth Southgate, or in the power of the Brexit/Global Britain project to somehow galvanise the country and change all things for the better.

In the United Kingdom, it seems, we have moved far beyond acceptance that sport and politics inevitably mix.

In the UK in 2021 football is politics.

Roll on Qatar 2022, God help us.