What has it come to when us getting to a World Cup is met with a wall of apathy?
IWAS 15 years old when I watched my first England match at Wembley. My dad drove us down in the car from Macclesfield. We passed other cars that trailed England scarves from their windows on the motorway south and the sense of camaraderie grew the closer we got to London.
We parked near Stanmore tube station. A long flight of stairs leads down from the entrance hall to the ticket office and the platforms there. It felt like the first of several gateways to heaven.
It was November 1981, the final match of England’s qualifying campaign for the 1982 World Cup. Ron Greenwood’s team needed to avoid defeat against group leaders Hungary to make it to the World Cup finals for the first time in 12 years.
The Jubilee Line train to Wembley Park was packed, full of noise and excitement and trepidation and hope. When we got out, Wembley Way was teeming.
The Twin Towers loomed larger and larger. The place was agog. We were carried towards the famous old stadium in a great mass of humanity and anticipation. The noise inside was deafening. Wembley was a magical, mystical place to me then, full of sound and vitality, the grass impossibly green and bright in the floodlights. Nick Hornby captured that feeling in Fever Pitch. It looked like a field of dreams.
It was crammed full to its 92,000 capacity and the commotion when Paul Mariner opened the scoring in the 14th minute was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. Kevin Keegan was everywhere, Bryan Robson drove the midfield and Trevor Brooking was at his elegant best.
And when the final whistle went to signal that England had qualified for the World Cup in Spain the following year, there was a giant roar of exultation and relief.
The players celebrated and we celebrated with them. Wembley was a place of joy and abandon. I walked back down Wembley Way feeling like it was the best night of my life.
I parked in Stanmore again on Thursday night for England’s qualifying tie against Slovenia. I walked down the same flight of stairs at the Tube station. It was an hour or so before the game. The train carriage was almost empty. There was no singing and no excitement. I stared at my phone, like everyone else.
Inside the stadium the atmosphere was desultory. It was flat. Qualification for a World Cup was on the line again but you wouldn’t have known it. Fans threw paper planes and got more out of that than the game.
And when the final whistle went to signal that England had qualified for the World Cup in Russia next year, t here was barel y e ven acknowledgement of the achievement. The players looked happy and swapped embraces. The fans — t he f ew who were l eft — streamed for the exits.
‘ One more time we’re gonna celebrate,’ Daft Punk sang over the loudspeaker system, recalling the days when fans used to generate their own noise. ‘Oh yeah, all right, don’t stop the dancing.’ Nobody was listening or dancing.
So what the hell happened? How did it come to this, that England qualifying for a World Cup was met with a wall of apathy and a barrage of disillusionment? It’s not as if we were world beaters back in 1981: we lost to Switzerland and Romania in that qualifying campaign and squeezed into the finals as group runners-up. Well, in 1981 we’d only had 15 years of worrying that we would never get close to winning a World Cup again. Now it’s 51 years.
That kind of consistent failure is going to have an effect. It dulls ambition. Hope is draining away. We have been raised on a recent diet of winning in qualifiers and losing when it matters. That’s why successes like Thursday night are met with a shrug.
The rise of self-determination after the Cold War has something to do with it, too. There were 33 teams competing for Europe’s 13 World Cup slots in 1981. Today there are 52. The result is that most of England’s qualifying games mean nothing.
There is no tension attached to the vast majority of them. And so, their lack of quality emphasises the fact that international football has become a poor relation of the club game.
‘ International week’ is a dirty term now. International week is a fallow week. It is not a week to be savoured but to be endured. And then we get into a cycle of despair. Because our hostility affects the players. The fear gets them. We breed it in them. Look at the way media and fans have treated Raheem Sterling during his England career. Look at the way Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain has been treated. Do you think players enjoy that? I looked at social media after the game against Slovenia and four England players were trending on Twitter. Marcus Rashford was bei ng praised, quite rightly. Jordan Henderson, Joe Hart and Kyle Walker were all being slaughtered. And this is when we have qualified. I spoke to the England manager Gareth Southgate about it in the corridor next to the changing rooms after the game. I asked him why our players seemed, historically, more afraid to fail when they pulled on an England
ONCE, when choosing the captain of the England football team, they tried to pick the best captain. Now, they just pick the best player. Captaincy has become a sop to ego.
shirt than players of other nations.
‘I don’t know if it is just us because I have not played in another shirt and I have not dealt with and worked with another country’s media,’ said Southgate. ‘For us, the disappointments over decades add to the pressure.
‘But your question is spot on. It is the biggest challenge of trying to get the team to function at the highest-possible level.’
Southgate hit exactly the right note after the match. Some offered him the chance to say he believed England could now go on and win the World Cup.
To the chagrin of some and to his credit, he didn’t take it. He pointed out, quite rightly, that England are still an awful long way behind teams like Spain. That won’t change in the next eight months.
Some of the criticism aimed at Southgate has been absurd. It is not his fault that he has inherited a side denuded of the midfield riches it once boasted.
He has done what he was asked to do and qualified for the World Cup. He has the experience and the intelligence to start moving us back in the right direction. He knows that the World Cup will come too soon for some players but that they will grow if we let them.
As for the short term, we are an average team who will struggle when we get to the Big Show. Much like we were that November night i n 1981 i n the midst of those rejoicings at the old Wembley.
Ah, but we were so much older then. We’re younger than that now.