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STUCK INSIDE OF MY LIVING ROOM WITH THE WORLD CUP BLUES AGAIN

June 14, 2010 @ 9:03 am

Have to agree with RBP contributor Richard Williams in The Guardian this morning: Fabio Capello is already making howlers. His tactics against the US were really no better than Erickson’s or McLaren’s would have been (and yes he shouldn’t have brought King and yes he shouldn’t have put the wildly overrated Milner on the left).

Watching Germany pound Australia last night, I tried in vain to work out why a team of men no more gifted than England’s could play with so much more precision and oomph. It has to be the weight of historical anxiety that prevents England players from performing to their ability, and now Capello’s natural ebullience and mental strength no longer feeds through to the men on the pitch.

Not for one minute – alright, maybe for the minute in which Gerrard scored his fine goal – did England have any kind of grip against the US; not for one minute could their fans relax and believe.

So why do we continue to believe at all? Why don’t we just shrug our shoulders and give it up as a lost cause? If I’m honest I barely CARE about being English – other than when the national football team plays! If anything I’m deeply ashamed of the jingoistic fervour that surrounds the nationalist abstraction of “Ingerlund” and the sinister crusader symbol that is the St. George Cross. Is it that I, like many of us, simply want to show the world that we are not after all a nation of pale ungainly carthorses, that we can play with grace and style and co-ordination? And yet I know that we utterly lack the technical abilities of Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Holland, Portugal, Italy, and, yes, even Germany.

Of course we will make it through to the 2nd round; we may even scrape past Ghana or Serbia to the quarter finals. And then, once more, we will go out to a better team on penalties. It’s written in the stars – or at least in our national DNA.

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Comments (2)

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It’s hard to feel very positive about England after that one match, but these things often start hesitantly.

For a nation of perpetual whingers, we have miraculously indefatigable reserves of optimism when it comes to the national team, regardless of the most recent evidence. We have faith, sometimes blind faith, and I think the problem is that it is not shared by the players themselves. For all their riches, fame and pampering, in their hearts they have just enough self-awareness to know that they’re not the demi-gods they’re built up to be in the public imagination – they don’t share our delusional belief in the inevitability of their victory.

Quite simply, they lack the mental strength of the Germans, who believe that victory on the football field is their birthright. The Germans are lucky too, of course but, no matter how half-arsed their team might be in any given year, if they’re losing at half time the coach doesn’t need to start throwing mugs around the changing room. He simply reminds them that they do have to win the match, as if they’d just lost sight of that fact, gently nudges them back into that state of entitlement and self-belief that enables them to go out and do it. It’s an attitude that’s clearly hard to fake if you don’t have it.

That doesn’t mean that it’s never fun being an England supporter. I know I wasn’t alone in having an absolute ball throughout Euro 96. When we lost to Germany on penalties in the semi-final, one of my most football-mad German friends rang up the next day to apologise. “You may have screwed-up on penalties, as usual” he said, “but you were quite clearly the best team in the competition.” And he was right, we were. All-out victory would be lovely but, if the team can play half as well this time round, it’ll all be worth it.

We’ve never experienced a betrayal of national trust and expectation as dramatic as the Brazilian performance at the last World Cup, but still there’s something quite touching about our ability to keep on dreaming of footballing success, despite the repeated trampling those dreams have taken over the years from a succession of lazy, unfocused, non-penalty-practicing line-ups.

Comment by Simon Witter — June 15, 2010 @ 12:06 am
I’m not going to tell you I Told You So. I was only wrong about scraping past Ghana or Serbia. Why do we expect anything different? At what point do we give up investing so much in this fantasy of Ingerlund?

We are simply Not Good Enough and probably never will be – not unless English football goes back to its grassroots and develops kids’ skills at a much earlier age.

Comment by Barney Hoskyns — June 28, 2010 @ 6:33 pm