There is a passage in the prologue of Never Stop Dreaming, Stuart Pearce’s new retrospective on Terry Venables’s England team and their fondly remembered journey to the semi-finals of Euro 96, where the man formerly known as Psycho ponders the roles of love and hate in football and how they can become the drivers that encourage different players to compete and excel.
‘I saw something in the paper the other day,’ writes Pearce, a former England caretaker manager and England Under-21 boss, ‘and the question was, “Are you motivated by love or hate when you play football and which is the more powerful?