THE HUMBLE SEMI-FINALISTS
Down-to-earth England make friends wherever they go
ThE almost imperceptible way that Gareth Southgate corrected himself, late on Saturday night, seemed to encapsulate the new England and why they are being viewed in a way never known before.
Relating how ‘the FA’ had hired him, he immediately qualified his words to say ‘the English FA’ — revealing in doing so that England no longer consider themselves to be football’s reference point.
The English fans might sing about football ‘coming home’ but the team in question don’t want to parade any sense of entitlement, as representatives of the nation which invented the game.
Southgate and his players are the humble semi-finalists — a group who are still developing and don’t even yet possess ‘renowned world- class players’, as the manager so memorably put it in his deeply articulate post-match press conference at the Samara Arena.
The swagger has also vanished from the area where journalists and players mix. It was there that Jordan Pickford casually discussed his bandaged left hand with the kind of self-deprecating candour to which we have become unaccustomed.
he had intended to bang it on the turf in frustration but somehow managed to hit his knee instead. ‘I’ll live another day, won’t I? I’m a man, not a mouse,’ he said. Pickford had just said something about ‘ keeping our feet on the ground’ when his Swedish former Sunderland teamm ate Seb Larsson strolled past and said: ‘ I’ve never seen your feet on the ground.’
Pickford responded by asking Larsson what on earth he was wearing on his own feet.
These places are easier to handle when you’re winning, of course, but England mixed zones have never seemed quite like this. The Russian people seem to like what they see.
The Southgate waistcoat featured in the papers yesterday, with one discussing him in the same terms as Sir Alf Ramsey.
It is hard to avoid the impression that England, not Croatia, are the side Russia will be rooting for on Wednesday. Cheering on any other nation will be difficult, of course. Moscow was subdued as the rain set in yesterday and the defeat by the Croatians was assimilated. There were no recriminations.
‘We thank you from the bottom of our heart,’ the Sport Express paper told the Russia team. ‘We love you and hurt for you. To us, you are the world champions.’
But the Croatians did contribute to the Russians favouring England when their defender Domagoj Vida posted a video on Instagram of him shouting ‘Glory to Ukraine’ — an anthem of the Ukrainian army and the nationalist cause that is opposed to Russian territorial claims on the country.
There was a furious Russian response to the video — in which Vida’s former international teammate Ognen Vukojevic also claimed that the quarter-final win was ‘a victory for Dynamo Kiev and for Ukraine’.
A wish that Vida be suspended for the semi-final because of this was not granted but he received a warning from FIFA.
The controversy reflects a deep and long- running antipathy between Russia and Croatia, the roots of which lie in the host nation supporting Serbia against Croatia in the 1990s Balkans wars. Many Russian volunteers, aligned with the Serbs because of their Orthodox religion, enlisted to fight against predominantly Catholic Croats.
Videos of Zenit St Petersburg ultras chanting ‘ubi ubi ubi ustasha’ (‘Kill a Croat’) are viewable on YouTube — ‘Utashi’ being the term for Croatian nationalists. Conversely, many of the immigrant Russians in Ukraine who are opposed to Russian president Vladimir Putin were supporting Croatia on Saturday night.
Russian indignation is compounded by the way that Ukraine, whose Crimea territory has been annexed by Putin, has already been delighting in Russia’s defeat. The head of the Ukrainian football federation, Mariupol Zhuravlyov, declared: ‘ Farewell, unwashed Russia’ — quoting one of the nation’s poets.
Yet for most ordinary Russians, the semi-finals will be anything but political. Millennials have seen the tournament as a rare chance to meet foreigners. Those who speak English are a source of particular interest as it is an increasingly studied language which will become a compulsory part of the school curriculum in two years.
‘We learn that the capital of England is London but for the younger people here it is so hard to get visas to visit,’ said a young mother, Olga, on a Samara bus with her husband Alexander and one-year- old, Yaroslav. ‘ People have that reason to follow England and try to speak English.’
Southgate’s erudition is certainly contributing to that fascination. In the past, the reflex reaction would have been to wince when an English football manager is asked if the national team might help salve divisions caused by Brexit.
But Southgate latched on to that question with confidence on Saturday.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The chance to connect everybody through football and to make a difference to how people feel . . . is even more powerful than what we are doing with our results.’