My geek genes mean I can’t normally get excited about football. West Ham vs. Middlesborough on some winter afternoon bores me perfectly. But I get a kick out of the World Cup. Probably because it’s a summer thing. Summer thing beats sporty thing, like paper wraps stone. In summer, I get all Age of Aquarius, strip to as little as possible, stay up late needing no sleep, and am able to write entire TV shows in two days, with pollen hitting my nervous system like crack. I swear, the sight of a big full moon on a summer night will one day just make me come.
Downstairs neighbours: that’s what the noises were.
So, as Wimbledon is to most of the British public and tennis, so the World Cup is to me and football. I read everything, listen to everything, and have the kind of sudden, amateur, guy in the kung fu movies who’s there to get his head kicked in by the bad guy, arriviste knowledge on the subject that can really piss serious footie lads off.
My local lads have been very kind. I’ve entered the Portwell Bar’s World Cup contest, which involves predicting the scores, and another local game on the same basis. I’m five points off the lead as of tonight, but doing better than I thought I would. On the day of England’s last first round match, all the dice fell the right why and I predicted all four matches right. 8000-1, Guy tells me, and for the sort of money I often bet, I could now be a millionaire.
I’m sure he told me that in a spirit of happy encouragement. I never realised I could sob so long and so hard into a pint. Or that the pint would taste so interesting afterwards. All that pollen.
So I’m enjoying the heroic efforts of the Aussies and Japanese, the national anthems nobody can sing, and the ones with the big singalong choruses (doesn’t La Marseillaise just make you want to be French? All that and Audrey Tautou!), the genius of Brazil and Argentina, the way national events like the Togo players’ revolt and the background of racism in French football affect what happens on the field…
But lately, as the weather’s turned awful, and I’ve had a long cold that’s dragged me back to winter and reminds me of last summer’s bronchitis in Ireland, the World Cup’s become rather bitter too. It’s the sheer spite of Australia’s last minute loss, that filthy Portugal/Holland game, but most of all –
It’s the way the British media treat the England manager and team. Sven seems to me to be doing the best he can with limited resources. He’s got us to the last eight of the World Cup with very few alarms along the way. We haven’t set the field alight, but we’ve done the job, and we’ve often looked superior. A sane summing up would be: ‘England team lose important striker to injury, but make steady progress, with hopes for improvement’.
Instead of which, I can’t listen to Radio 5 anymore, because there’s always someone calling for Sven to be sacked, or for him to implement whatever correspondent’s own obvious strategy, which varies vastly from expert to expert, and is seemingly formed by mob opinion, changing daily.
It’s telling, I think, that the players who’ve come in for most criticism are Beckham and Hargreaves, neither of whom play in England, so thus don’t have an army of partisan fans to speak up for them. The criticism of Beckham, especially, seems insane. He links everything we do on the field, he sees where others go and drops footballs in their path. Especially mad is that the criticism continued after the most recent match, won by his single goal, after which he vomited from sheer continued effort. ‘I wouldn’t have played him,’ boasted one BBC pundit, with a straight face. Nobody replied ‘well, then we would have lost’. A recent ITV interview with injured striker Michael Owen gently invited him to join in the criticism of his manager. He displayed apt loyalty in the face of that.
It’s interesting to note the way the criticism is framed too. ‘He’ll never drop Beckham,’ is the repeated phrase. (Football punditry is built on repeated phrases. The new ‘game of two halves’ is ‘to be fair’, sometimes six or seven times in an interview, which started appearing after Eric Cantona karate kicked a spectator, and professed fairness became important.) Not ‘I think he should drop Beckham’, note. Because to say that out loud would require bravery.
Luiz Felipe Scolari was the F.A.’s first choice for the next England manager, and briefly took the job, until his answerphone filled up with noxious material from the English sports press. So he decided against. And the journos celebrated because now they were sure to ‘get a Brit’. Rather than someone good.
That’s the most concrete example of what’s wrong with English journalism, and what’s wrong with England. We’re afraid of failing, so like a nation of spoilt children, we declare that we’re going to fail before we even start, so we can nod wisely when we do. At the next World Cup, I fully expect our manager, if he’s British through and through, to declare after we go out that we were trying to lose, actually, and the ball is ours, and we’re taking it home.
This is why the Aussies think we’re mad. I hope that summer comes back, and my head clears, and England suddenly decides to put its heart on something and think something is good again. Because at the moment, we’d really hate it if we won the World Cup.
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