We have already twice beaten the Germans at their national game
Saturday, July 30, 1966
If THE Germans beat us at our national game today, we can always console ourselves with the fact that we have twice beaten them at theirs. And how’s that for narrow, nationalistic hedging from one who has never in his life paid as much as half a dollar to watch 22 men disputing possession of the hide of a cow?
I speak as a unit of soccer’s lost millions. Or, rather, as one who was never tempted to the terraces. I played rugby – the game which doesn’t go in for kissing the scorer.
You may have hated the World Cup, as I think I did, but you can’t ignore it. It has encroached more deeply into the inwardlooking British temperament than any international event since the one we now know as World War II.
Indeed, it has been war. And a very valuable little war, too, if only because it showed us how nationalism can raise its idiot cry over a cowhide. And I’m not thinking of foreigners hanging trainers in effigy, or quaking Latin trainers finding they have urgent business in the Outer Hebrides. I mean us.
The World Cup emptied the pubs. (And you’re a fool if you skip over that statement without savouring all its horror.)
Housewives stood shoulder to shoulder with us before the idiot box. Our children, who were being brought up as woolly- minded internationalists, now whip out nasty little toy pistols at a mention of Argentina.
When the evening matches were on, the suburbs cringed under a deadly hush. Gardeners froze over their hoes, like the people in The Angelus, except that they were listening to their neighbours’ radios and their prayers were that Portugal’s Eusebio wouldn’t do it.
(He usually did. And if Harold Wilson could find a way to get the national adrenalin coursing at the same rate he’d have Lyndon Johnson coming to see him.)
We have sub-editors in this office whose only reaction to the Last Trump would be finding a headline to fit. Yet they sat transfixed at their desks, half stoned out of their Rule Britannia minds at the news coming through the transistor earplugs.
‘Eng-land, Eng-land,’ cried Wembley. Hysterical triumph in a crowd is much the same no matter what the cause, and I didn’t like the sound. They were not, I repeat, defending a freedom, they were kicking a cow.
The commentary I heard on the England- Portugal semi- final similarly depressed me by its sheer partisanship.
When England were moving forward, the exulting voice climbed higher and higher, and descended at the same rate whenever the play went the other way. Only when England were two up did the commentator remember the message that soccer is supposed to have taught the world and start looking for phrases to praise the sportsmanship of the Portuguese. And the more certain we were of winning, the more magnanimous he became.
Here I have to declare an interest. Bred in the near-certainty that we never win anything, and dazzled by Eusebio, I bet a true blue friend a fiver that Portugal would beat us. It’s not just the money. I had to sit through the match with two sons who were puzzled by my expression every time Bobby Charlton scored. I have felt like a traitor ever since.
And I never, ever gamble. And, obviously, I know nothing of soccer.
I have been consoling myself with readings from the works of the football writers, a body of men rising magnificently to their moment.
Theirs is a sub-division of English as rich and as distinctive as pidgin or Bombay Welsh. Even when employed on the Rovers v Wanderers on a wet Wednesday in West Hartlepool it is the most jingoistic tongue we still dare use, every adverb at attention, every adjective at the salute.
Well, after that semi-final they broke and unashamedly wept. They begged heaven to witness that there had been only eight fouls. Had there ever been such a clean game in soccer’s temple? Had life ever tasted so good?
Win or lose, tomorrow’s papers are going to be sheer hell. The shame of a defeat will be exceeded only by the horrors attendant on a victory. The deductions that will be drawn about the future of the British nation are already terrifying.
And what bothers me is — how the hell did I get mixed up in it?