The prediction racket is a sportswriting staple. When the World Cup kicked off three weekends ago this corner boldly blogged the prophecies for The Speccie’s website: that is, the England team would be home for the first week of Wimbledon; the Berlin final on 9 July would finish Argentina 2, Czech Republic 2 (the latter winning on penalties); and the likeliest lottery longshots to reach the semi-finals would be one of Switzerland, United States, Ivory Coast or Australia. Hey-nonny-no, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Just meaningless fun and, at about the same level, I suppose, as the barmy vote-catching gimmick which had grave tartan Chancellor Brown cooing undying support for England and First Minister McConnell ferociously rooting for each and every England opponent. What a couple of mugs.
Mind you, I suppose our Gordon down at No. 11 was strictly following the ‘Tebbit test’, which Chingford’s noble lord set down as proof of contented integration and assimilation into a new country — that is, 100 per cent wholehearted sporting support for the land, not of your birth, but of your residence. Baloney itself, of course, as we see most summers and shall happily witness again on Thursday week at Lord’s when England’s new cricket series begins against Pakistan and even third and fourth generations of true-blue Brits will, understandably and rightly, be cheering on the Khans and Mushtaqs at the crease. My family long ago upped sticks and left the black bogs, but still at any sport an Ireland v. England fixture has me sprouting the shamrock. For St Paddy and the land of my fathers.
At cricket, I’m devotedly pro-England, no problems; but at soccer and rugby there’s a hesitation, an ambivalence, which I can never quite nail down. I only sort-of want England to win World Cups, and then only if I am allowed to despair of, and jeer at, their gormless and error-strewn progress towards winning it. I want England’s coach to be either a prat or more ditheringly indecisive than any other, and its overpaid-dandy players (just an odd maverick ‘character’ chipping in heroically) to be both generally incompetent and, of course, incoherent. Why is this? Perverse or what? God knows. Sure, there’s a touch in it of D.H. Lawrence’s ‘English in the teeth of the world; even in the teeth of England’ as I smile superciliously at flag-decked vans (though not, for safety’s sake, at their drivers) and sneer in rage at the BBC’s relentlessly juvenile jingoism.
For all that, half of me desperately wants England to win everything — a sensation usually overcome by dread of the day they just might, knowing how intolerable will be the national frenzy if they did. At the same time, my other detached and indifferent half has been known to be skewered in a sadness, an emptiness, when ‘I told you so’ comes to pass and, as usual, England are kayoed; no, more than a sadness really, some sort of mortification.
Am I alone in such schizoid contradictions? In by far the best of the recent blizzard of foot-lit catchpennies, The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup (Abacus, £9.99), nicely caustic novelist Nick Hornby sums up current England soccer supporting: ‘We’d prefer to be bombing Germans; but after 60 years there’s a slowly dawning suspicion that those days aren’t coming back …in the meantime we must rely on sarong-wearing multimillionaire pretty boys to kick the Argies for us. We’re not happy about it, but what can we do?’ Good question.
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