Farewell to a feast of football that’s been off the chart in ways we couldn’t imagine
THE wallchart is nearly full now, there is just one space to be filled with the name of either France or Croatia. When all those spaces were blank, when they contained nothing but possibility, many of us could imagine France in this ultimate position. It was a reasonable thing to expect.
Personally I had imagined Brazil there, and that was a reasonable thing too, considering that they were a tad unfortunate to lose against Belgium. But one of things you find out at the end of these meandering epics is that reason will only get you so far — that there is some other weird energy that comes into play, and that overthrows all your fine permutations.
And we think we are allowing for that weird energy too, we think we are taking everything into account, but the wallchart as it looks today will tell you that that is an illusion. It is a perfectly structured essay on the limits of our imagination. It is a celebration of the things that we never saw coming.
What are England doing there, in the last four? How could Sweden have gone so far? By what crazy alignment of the planets did Germany go out so early, beaten by South Korea? How did we not foresee that Croatia would be there at the business end, when Spain and Argentina were long gone?
Yes, we knew Croatia were pretty good — but still we did not imagine that they could actually win it, and even though they are in the final today, still we are not seeing it — mainly, I suspect, for no good reason except that we have never seen them winning it before.
We will tell ourselves that they won’t win it, because France are just a bit better all round — and there is much talk of Croatia being old and exhausted, which oddly enough, is what a lot of people were saying before they beat England after extra time, when it was England who were looking old and exhausted.
That game was fascinating for the way it exposed these weaknesses of the imagination — the way that we pretend we’re being reasonable, when really we’ve been swept away by some kind of fever.
Why were so many people thinking that England would probably do it? Why was I one of them?
Yes, we thought we were taking all these intangible energies into account, we felt that England were on a roll, but somehow we overlooked the fact that Croatia probably felt that they were on a roll too.
We loved this idea of the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne representing England with honour while the Tory sleazeballs back home were disgracing themselves again.
And we were right to love that idea, but we forgot that Croatia, for their part, might have other ideas — several of these players were born during the war in the former Yugoslavia, and that kind of thing can concentrate the mind just as forcibly as Gareth Southgate creating an environment which has liberated the lads from those nightmarish visions of England’s past.
Yes, the race memory of the Three Lions has images of Chris Waddle blazing his penalty over the bar in the semi-final of Italia 90, but your Croats would be able to call on memories which are perhaps even more potent than the ignominy of The Waddler, such as the sound of the shelling during the siege of Dubrovnik. That might get you going too, one way or the other.
They also have Luka Modric, one of the great footballers of the age, the kind of player who seems to embody the very soul of the game, this little squirt who can run the whole show, who is so sublimely gifted. And still many sensible people thought England would do it?
We could visualise the Croats choking, but we couldn’t visualise Harry Kane choking — yet in truth he did. And still Roy Keane was graceless to be mocking England for getting carried away, for not closing the deal.
Because to make a country feel that good about itself even for a few days, is no small thing, especially when it has been beyond the capabilities of England’s degenerate ruling class for a long time — a point that seems beyond the limited imagination of Roy.
Let us imagine then, that the name of Croatia will be the last one written into the wallchart today. A bit of a stretch, I know, but by six o’clock this evening you may be wondering how you ever imagined it otherwise.
‘The filled-in wallchart is a perfectly structured essay on the limits of our imagination. It is a celebration of the things that we never saw coming’