This dream summer of football is built on base of humility
An hour after England’s victory over Sweden in the World Cup quarter final on Saturday, the Samara Arena was still alive with noise. Everyone else had left the place, in the stands the cleaners were sweeping and wiping, technicians were dismantling the spaghetti of wiring alongside the pitch.
But behind one of the goals the England supporters were still there, still floating on a mix of delight and disbelief, still belting out their version of Earth Wind and Fire’s September, which has become their campaign song: “Hi-dee-aye, England are in Russia/ Hi-dee-aye, drinking all your vodka/hi-dee-aye, England’s going all the way.”
I have watched football supporters expressing their enthusiasm for decades now. But what I saw in the freshly built Samara Arena was entirely new.
Because down on the pitch, all the England players were joining in with the fans. Harry Kane, the brilliant, dignified captain, Harry Maguire the foresquare centre half and Raheem Sterling, the quicksilver forward, were all dancing and singing, their smiles as wide as the Volga river just down the road. The lads on the pitch were in perfect harmony with the men, women and children in the stands. They were in this together.
As this show of unity was unfolding, as the players threw their shirts into the crowd, picked out mates and loved ones to embrace, everywhere you looked people were filming it on their phones. Posted on social media, those back home would have seen immediately what was happening. In turn, those in England will have posted their own videos of pubs erupting at goals, of celebrating fans falling through the roofs of London bus stops, of nationwide delirium.
What the England players have done
is remarkable. In my memory, nothing has brought all of us together like this glorious, summer of football. Not even the magnificence of the London Olympics shut the place down like this. That the festival of football has taken place amid a heatwave, the likes of which are rarely seen in Britain, has only added to the euphoria.
On Wednesday evening, when the team steps out on the turf at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow to take on Croatia in the World Cup semi final, viewing records will be set, beer sales will go into overdrive. And that’s just for the semi final.
Imagine if they make it to Sunday’s showdown. Imagine if they actually won the thing. Jeremy Corbyn’s suggestion that we all enjoy a national holiday is but the start of it. Frankly, we’ll all still be grinning at Christmas.
What makes this all the more surprising is that it is football that is sending us collectively potty. Sure, it is our most popular sport. But until now it has had as many detractors as it has enthusiasts, seen by many as a poisonous pursuit. England campaigns in international tournaments were hopeless and hapless, stalled by the dangerous combination of misplaced superiority and crushing inferiority. There was no joy there.
Not any more. Not with Gareth Southgate in charge, the champion good egg. He has introduced a new concept to the England set up: humility. Watching him on the pitch at the end of Saturday’s game, thanking the referee, consoling his opponents, taking as much time to commiserate as congratulate, it was impossible not to admire him. In an age of fractiousness and division, this is a man who represents everything for which we as a nation would like to be recognised: politeness, calm, rationality, dignity.
He has taken that humility into his approach to coaching. This is not a man who thinks he knows it all. He has studied others, he has learnt and borrowed. His approach to penalties, the old English Achilles’ heel, is typical. For years England managers complacently announced there was no point practising the shoot-out, because the pressure of the real thing could never be replicated in training. As a consequence we kept losing. Southgate was different. He wanted to
know how others succeeded under similar pressure. So, among many, he spoke at length with the Great Britain women’s hockey team about their flawless shoot-out to win gold in Rio. He learnt that it was done through ruthless practice, through relentless application of psychological principle, through developing the muscle memory of success. He was not embarrassed about borrowing their approach.
That is the way to do it. A knighthood seems the least we owe him. And Southgate’s players quite clearly follow their leader. Not just in their tactical application (they score so many goals from corners because they are so well drilled) but in the way they conduct
themselves. Young and eager (only three of Saturday’s starting eleven were born the last time England reached the World Cup semi final in 1990) they have none of their predecessors’ crushing self-regard and assumptions of superiority. Just like us they are having the time of their lives in Russia.
Everything about Jesse Lingard and Dele Alli, Kieran Trippier and Kyle Walker is admirable, everything in their story of application and determination to make the most of themselves is worth passing on to the next generation. Here’s how much these guys have made of themselves: five years ago, Jordan Pickford, the hero of the victory over Sweden, was playing for Alfreton Town.
Of course, given how many of us are wrapped up in this, there are idiots involved. But the vandals demolishing that Ikea store, or the fool dancing on the bonnet of an ambulance, or the morons attacking a police dog, because it was of a German breed, are not remotely representative of what is going on in Russia.
Doubtless were Gareth and his boys to hear of what the tiny minority have done in their name, they would be appalled. They would much rather on Wednesday night the country had fun, smiled a lot, politely wished any Croatians they knew good luck. And then took their litter home with them.
‘In my memory, nothing has brought all of us together like this glorious summer of football’
The Baddiel and Skinner anthem from Euro 96 can be heard everywhere: “Football’s Coming Home”. Of course in 1996 that was literally true, since the European championship tournament was held in England, the home of the game, or at least where the rules were codified. Then, England made it to the semi-final only to lose on penalties to Germany. The last time England was in a World Cup semi-final was in Turin in 1990, again losing a penalty shoot-out to Germany. Before that, it was 1966, when a victory over Portugal at Wembley set up a final against the Germans which went into extra time. Mercifully, there is no German team standing in the way this time. Has the hoodoo been broken? More than half a century after England won the World Cup, can Gareth Southgate’s men bring it home again?