It’s time for football to join our parade of triumphs
Football is crying out for a success that will end its cycle of despair
Across the spectrum of English sport over the past 50 years, there are lights that will never go out: spectacular moments of victory, easily and vividly remembered. But not for the England football team.
The great anomaly of sport in Gareth Southgate’s home nation is that the biggest activity, the daily obsession of football, is adrift from the parade of national triumphs in rugby, cricket, the Olympics, golf... the list goes on and on. Each of those sports has been able to implant images of dominance and celebration, right up to England cricketers relieving themselves in the garden of No10. The country’s football team have been stuck in their own orbit of frustration and despair.
To declare a personal interest, England winning a football tournament is the one story I have been unable to write in more than 30 years of reporting. There were fingers of fire for the 2003 Rugby World Cup win in Australia, the epic Ashes series win of 2005, and, broadening this out, the Olympic gold rushes of London 2012 and Rio 2016, as well as the implausible Ryder Cup comeback (the “Miracle of Medinah”) in 2012.
Granted, to extend this theme to a European side is pushing the boundaries, but the fightback that weekend on a golf course near Chicago was led by an Englishman, Ian Poulter, so it seems reasonable to be flexible with the definitions. Put it this way: in Britain/england, the last 20 years especially have yielded a remarkable array of fiestas based around conquests in a broad field of games.
But not for the England football team, who have had to survive on near misses, or recover from inquests, to the point where, before this World Cup, many young people said they felt no affinity with the England shirt because there had never been any reason to connect. Like it or not, success is the payment teams make to their followers for taking an interest, for giving their time and money. Supporting England has been a one-way street of qualifying campaigns round eastern Europe and tournament blow-outs, though the England women’s team have offered firmer grounds for optimism.
Professionally, I have given up on England’s men many times. The justifications for doing so seemed too numerous to ignore. Hard evidence said it was never going to happen for the heirs of 1966. The culture was too inward-looking, the short-termism too ingrained, the emphasis on direct play and physicality too embedded in the English mentality.
The faith-shredding days are too many to enumerate, but one was the 3-2 defeat by Croatia – this week’s semi-final opponents – in November 2007, which cost England a place at Euro 2008. That was the night Steve Mcclaren was condemned to infamy for having the temerity to stand under an umbrella while his team fell apart and Russia squeaked past Andorra 1-0 to take the other European Championship spot. This ghoulish recollection serves a useful purpose in Moscow because it shows how far England have come, to only their third World Cup semi-final, and their first for 28 years. Plainly, 1966 is an inviolable landmark in the English game, bequeathed by great players and a formidable manager who saw an opportunity and shaped it into something beautiful.
But 1966 is so long ago it doubles as an indictment of the subsequent five decades. Not every England team and manager should be thrown under this bus. There have been some good ones; and some were damned by tiny margins.
But England have been the sick man of world football: the perplexing flip-side to Premier League wealth and club success.
The delirium now gripping the country has had few comparable outlets. Italia 90, Euro 96, perhaps France 98. Euro 2004 had its moments too. But the national game has delivered nothing to match Jonny Wilkinson’s winning drop goal in Sydney in 2003: a triumph against Australia, in their own heartland, or the Ashes XI of Flintoff, Pietersen and Vaughan halting a run of eight Australian Ashes wins in the 2005 series – a blissful summer’s tale. As for London 2012 – Jess Ennis, Mo Farah, Ben Ainslie, Charlotte Dujardin – how long have you got?
These peaks seem transitory six months later when the champions are struggling to recreate those feelings and sport has returned to a more even emotional range. The magic however continues to work. English rugby was transformed by Wilkinson and Martin Johnson. British tennis (yes, stretching this out to include Scotland) was saved from embarrassment by Andy Murray winning Wimbledon.
These defining triumphs work both ways. They create in the minds of spectators a higher sense of what those sports are about, and meet one of the great obligations: to give us gleaming memories, to help measure out our lives and insure us against the long periods where nothing much is happening and sport just feels like daily stuff. But they also raise the self-image of those sports. Imagine being tailed off, as England have been, in a pageant of maybe 20 sports, skulking at the back, mildly ashamed. Not forgetting the accompanying shadow of hooliganism, which made it worse.
Another indulgence – but only because it makes the point. I was one when England won the football World Cup. Now I’m...well, you can do the maths.