Rod Liddle wouldn’t risk more than a tenner on the team getting beyond the group stage in the football World Cup. The truth is, we usually perform more or less exactly as well as might be expected given the size of the country
Nobody outside of this country thinks that England stands a cat’s chance in hell of winning the association football World Cup, which is due to kick off in South Africa very shortly — if all the teams are not abducted upon arrival and shot. Almost to a man the leading foreign players and pundits predict a final between Brazil and Spain, and on the rare occasions there is a demurral from this assessment it is to mention the name of Argentina, squired by its porky coke-headed maniac of a boss, Diego Maradona, or somewhat less frequently, Holland (who always play lovely football and never win anything). England? Nope, not a chance. This isn’t because they hate us, the foreigners (although they probably do) — it simply hasn’t occurred to them that we might win the thing. They see a team with only one proven international class forward, the perpetually splenetic potato-headed kidult Wayne Rooney, an ageing and fragile back four which recourses habitually to violence when beaten for pace and, behind them, an embryonic catastrophe waiting to happen. It is a very long time since England had a goalkeeper on whom they could depend.
Four years ago, even eight years ago, it was very different; it was said we had a ‘golden generation’ of players — Gerrard, Rooney (briefly), Owen, Beckham — and the opposition was substantially weaker. But that golden generation failed to deliver anything more than a quarter-final berth, twice. Reaching the quarter-final is actually no mean feat and when English people bemoan the underachievement of the national team they should look a little more closely at the statistics: we actually punch precisely at our weight, given our size of population and the number of people in England who play football regularly. We are almost always in the top 15 of teams in the world and usually somewhere towards the lower reaches of the top ten — that’s about right. We cannot, over the long term, hope to emulate the Germans or the Brazilians with their much larger population base and greater proportion of people who play football. Nor in the still longer term will we be able to compete with, say, China or the USA or Russia or some of the developing African countries, for the same reason. Every so often a country will come along which will punch above its weight for a limited time: right now that country is Spain. But they will submerge soon enough, much as France has submerged (with much sulking and trauma: truth is, they shouldn’t be at this World Cup at all).
Anyway, the point is that England are slightly less likely to win the World Cup than they were in 2006 or 2002, unless luck plays a very substantial part. You might hope for a semi-final appearance, but not stake your life savings on such an outcome. I am not sure that I would stake much more than a tenner on England emerging from the group phase. England’s comparative ease in qualifying for this tournament, against serially overrated teams such as Croatia, hid a multitude of deficiencies. It is probably true that in the agreeably fascistic Fabio Capello we have a better manager than the national side has enjoyed since Bobby Robson and, on its day, one of the strongest midfields in the world. But that is probably not enough to win a World Cup.
You may have seen England recently being outplayed by those titans of the game, Japan, in a friendly fixture held in Austria. Japan would have won were it not for their charming determination to put on a traditional display of Mishima-style hara-kiri for the foreigners watching, and scored two own goals towards the end of a game which, frankly, they were coasting. If only we could persuade all foreigners to capitulate with such deference and politeness, based upon our innate superiority as a people and the fact that we stuffed Hitler and Tojo and invented the Belisha beacon.
I remember the former manager Ron Atkinson commentating on an England world cup game a couple of decades back, when we were drawing 0-0 with Egypt and, horribly, with the 80th minute rapidly approaching. ‘You would have expected these sort of people to have given in by now,’ he said, utterly perplexed. ‘These sort of people’ — wogs, dagoes, spics, wops and the like, I assume the chap meant — are rarely so accommodating these days. They have a regrettable penchant for tenacity. This is what comes of giving countries like Libya and Gabon places on important UN councils; they begin to think that they can compete with us on an equal footing and are disinclined to roll over like they used to. We only have ourselves to blame.
Meanwhile, the popular press is engaged in its familiar pincer movement to ensure that we do as badly as is possible, given the circumstances. First, it builds up the chances of the England team with ludicrous hyperbole and the occasional whiff of xenophobia. Then, with stealth and brilliance, it picks off the best England players one by one and tries to nobble them for having shagged too many women, or got drunk in a bar once, or acted belligerently in a nightclub. This is pretty easy to do because, if we’re honest, a good proportion of England’s players are absolutely ghastly human beings, a case of dumb and still dumber, divorced from ordinary concepts of morality as a consequence of their ludicrous earnings.
It is a poor hack who cannot find one of the England squad covered in bling in the back of a cab, pissed out of his head and with some slapper he’s pulled in Chinawhite’s while his wife waits forlornly at home. So far Ashley Cole, John Terry and the blameless Wayne Bridge have felt the consequences of the carefully aimed scythe of Fleet Street and my guess is there will be more to come before England kick off against the USA next week.
My tip for the final? The same as everyone else — Spain versus Brazil, much as I dislike the Spanish; this will be their squad’s Indian summer. But don’t write off the Germans, even though they qualified for this tournament by the skin of their teeth. They qualified by the skin of their teeth in 2002 too, and still made the final. They are the one country for whom the usual rules do not apply.
Comments