Wright and Keane’s row cheered up a nation in mourning
YOU can pick it apart. You can look at the missed chances, at whether or not Harry Kane was carrying an injury, at John Stones’s positioning. You can continue the search for a meaningful explanation for why or how, but sometimes it is better just to sit and feel. That is where you find the rare beauty of Ian Wright, who through some weird and wonderful evolution has become a wind sock for the nation in good and bad. He sat there when this was all done and, just like an ITV audience that was no doubt north of 20 million, he had a face like a disappointing Wednesday in Moscow. Folk denigrate him as an easy target. But sometimes, in a moment like this, he more than just about anyone catches what football is about. While some me try to apply an academic’s mic’s zeal to a ball game, he just shows you what it looks like at the molecular level. He is the fan, the guy whose day is made or ruined by how something silly gets played out. Other pundits give ve their view; he gives you yours. And so when he puffs out his cheeks and says, ‘We did all those memes about football coming home. Well, it isn’t,’ then it feels somehow more profound than anything else. Roy Keane spoke about ‘getting kicked where it hurts’. Gary Neville about doing the nation ‘proud’, going to ‘a place we never or imagined we’d get’. Lee Dixon said England ‘looked like the team that tired first’. All true, of course. But in the end it boiled down to football not coming home. And so it was the man you love to mock who got it right on the night, even when England didn’t. For that reason, you have to say ITV were correct to pick him when so many said no. They haven’t always delivered with England at this tournament — no non-English voice for the Colombia game felt very odd — and both defeats were on their station, while the Beeb had the luxury of three wins. But this particular broadcast had a bit of everything — Neville as the best analyst on TV, Wright showing his heart, Dixon offering some restraint and Keane. Roy Keane. That man who is always ready to burst the balloon. Or, in this case, tear down the parade bunting. Many folk will have hated his contribution — Ed Miliband did for one, judging from Twitter. But there is always the potential for TV gold when Keane sits at the table ta and that is why he always must. mu His H exchange with Wright at the end of the programme was w everything that t is great about a both of them th — the man with wit the broken heart and the man with the dark one. Keane: ‘You have to focus just on one game but everyone’s taking about the final... that football’s coming home.’ Wright: ‘We wasn’t talking about the final there, we were just having a laugh with you. The fact is we were just happy and you weren’t happy for us being happy for us at that time.’ Keane: ‘I don’t mind you being happy but you’re getting carried away, you were planning the final and where the parades were. You’re a grown man. You need a reality check.’ Wright: ‘Why shouldn’t we get excited about it?’ Keane: ‘You can get excited about it when you get to the final — this was the semifinal.’ It was glorious. It was funny. It was magnificently unnecessary and it was a smile at the end of a wretched evening.