Sadly I was unable to be in Dublin to watch how Argentina is managing without Diego. I suspect life must be less entertaining down in the dressing room and on the touchline, but a little more ordered and strategic.
I did however belatedly catch some highlights of the England vs. Hungary match. That the majority of fans did not greet the team with boos as many pundits had predicted did not surprise me. Ok England’s performance in South Africa was a disgrace, as is the fact that Capello survived as Europe’s best paid national manager.
But the English have a long tradition of not only excusing defeats but turning them into something transforming, even heroic. Consider just a couple of examples- the Light Brigade massacred by Russian guns, and the retreat at Dunkirk.
In football, the English are good at giving even the lousiest teams the chance of redemption. It’s a post-imperial itch, a refusal to believe that England is just a small island struggling in a global society, or to accept the fact that individual English players tend to shine only when they play with foreigners not against them.
England came back to Wembley this week and played with passion and individual skill-almost like foreigners. The fans- 70,000 of them- were there, mostly to approve and applaud their own.
In Dublin, I read somewhere this morning, thousands (of Irish) applauded Lionel Messi.
Hello! Good blog. 🙂
Thanks, Julia- but tell me what you like about it.
It’s true we always perform better when totally up against it. When there isn’t a cats chance in hell of victory, when the chips are totally down, when you are minutes from not even qualifying for a World Cup and then ….BOOM…..Beckham scores a blinder of a free kick and our faith, as a nation who pulls it out of the bag against all odds, is restored. We love an under-dog and more often than not we are the under-dog! And that’s a good thing. For whilst we might be miserable when the team let us down (which they frequently do) we never quite lose hope. After all Shakespeare wrote; “The miserable have no other medicine. But only hope.”
I also believe that the English consider themselves to be invincible, whether in the glory years of the empire (Trafalgar to Battle of Britain) or not (Agincourt, Armada, Falklands, etc.). However sport is very different to empire building and world domination…
In the relatively short history of Association Football, whose rules were laid down by the Victorians, so therefore an Anglo-Saxon invention, the English have only ever won the World Cup once, back in 1966 (at home and largely thanks to a Russian linesman!). This coupled with the fact that the Premier League is touted as the “best” league in the world and if you gauge it on an economic scale, it has to be said that it probably is the most important league in the world, then the failure of the national team during the last 44 years is a disaster. It’s the continuous failure of the 3 lions that has frustrated the English and excusing another defeat or failure has become the norm, not the exception.
So Jimmy I beg to differ. Football in England is not comparable to the glorious armies, navies and airforces that dominated the world for so long. It is another sport that the English invented through laying down the rules (tennis, rugby, cricket, polo, etc.), and, in the realm of sports, they have always been abject failures at world domination!