WHY I’M CHEERING ENGLAND
YOU’LL be hearing Three Lions by Baddiel and Skinner and the Lightning Seeds many times over the next few days. That is important — not just because it is that rarest of things, a really good football record, but because it demonstrates the apparently effortless genius of the English for making great pop music, and thus enriching the culture of the world in ways that your Jacob Rees-Mogg will never understand.
Yes, England have been lucky in this World Cup — but in this there’s a kind of cosmic consolation for all of us. A sense that the gods, even when they are being most unkind, will always try to give something back to you.
Because in its public life of late, England has been most unlucky.
It is not just that Brexit is one of the worst ideas of all time, driven by the worst people in the world, it is the fact that at these times of the utmost peril, the main “opposition” is coming from Jeremy Corbyn — which is to say, there is no opposition.
That is the killer, that is the most perverse stroke of misfortune — yes, there will always be Tory degenerates, selling the country down the river, but to have nothing up against them except Corbs, maintaining an ideological opposition to the EU which must have sounded excellent back in 1986 or thereabouts during all those meetings above the Dog and Duck, but which is of no use to any human being living in the world today... that is truly the most rotten luck for England.
That is the kind of bad break that can destroy a country for 800 years, a cruel accident of history of the type you’d see in a technicolour Hollywood epic, in which Charlton Heston, struggling heroically to speak, though he is suffering from a terrible wound, would look to the skies with his most noble countenance, his voice trembling with barely constrained emotion as the orchestra plays something very sad:
“Ye gods… ye gods who hast abandoned us… ye gods who hast forsaken our warriors in battle, who hast taken from us our women and our children… ye gods… ye baleful gods who are so unmerciful that ye have sent these calamities to our land… spare us ye gods, we implore thee…” That sort of thing… So when Harry Kane was banging them in against Tunisia and Panama, like they were Bluebell United and Rialto who had somehow arrived at the World Cup, you sensed a bit of payback from those baleful gods.
And though I pointed out last week that drawing Colombia was not necessarily the greatest of breaks, given that Colombia can be very good, it turned out that Colombia were not good at all against England, that they decided — wrongly — that the game could be won though oldschool black guardism.
Lucky, lucky England. But then, for inflicting Nigel Farage on them, do the gods not owe them at least a win in a penalty shootout? Indeed we may be reluctant to admit it, but England has not just been unlucky of late in its public life, it has been quite unlucky on the park in these major tournaments.
While it is far more enjoyable to ascribe their failures to a complex range of psychological and cultural defects, to be losing all those matches on penalties over the years, they had to be a bit unfortunate too.
And we are lucky, in turn, that it wasn’t Big Sam Allardyce getting the benefit of these happy accidents, because then we might have struggled with our own weaknesses in this domain. Then we would be hearing all too horribly the voices of the Brexiteers claiming that this is what old England can achieve on her own, when of course all these England lads owe their personal and professional development mainly to the Premier League, with its open-door policies and its cosmopolitan culture which is roughly the opposite of the narrow nationalism of Brexit.
Ireland can even claim with some validity that we have made our contribution, because the Premier League is ours too in the sense that we are paying for it with our TV subscriptions — and personally I do not begrudge that for one moment. Indeed when I recall that Jordan Henderson is on £100,000 a week at Liverpool, I am hoping that it is my money specifically that is going into that rather large pot. They’re our lads too. Well done the lads.
‘Yes, England have been lucky in this World Cup — but the gods, even when they are being unkind, always try to give something back...’