This is not the country I left behind four weeks ago
Jim White is back from Russia to find a nation full of flags, waistcoats and Harry Maguire tattoos
On my return from four weeks in Russia, sitting on the kitchen table at home was a note of welcome. It was weighted down in place by one of those small plastic Corinthian models that were collected in the Nineties. This one was of Gareth Southgate, in Aston Villa kit. And the note beneath his feet read simply: “It’s Coming Home.”
I seem to have come home to a different country from the one I left. When I went to Russia, this was a place largely characterised by indifference about what was to unfold, where expectation was subterranean and everyone was doing their best not to get overexcited. After all, for the past 28 years we have seen where that sort of behaviour leads. We did not want to be embarrassed yet again.
So much so, when I left nobody had a flag fluttering from their car window, nobody was spending their Saturday evening dancing on the bonnets of ambulances, there was not a tattoo artist in the land who had been asked to install an image of Harry Maguire on anyone’s arm. When I left, the only place where England flags were out in force was hanging from the balconies of the Kirby Estate in Bermondsey, south-east London, where every flat was patriotically draped. And the response on social media to such decoration was largely to sneer.
Now I have returned to a country so swathed in red and white it makes the Kirby look restrained, a country in which mini-roundabouts have been painted in the Cross of St George, a country where the default greeting on the street is a quasi-religious “It’s coming home”, like everyone has turned into a character from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Put simply, the place has gone giddy, drunk with excitement at the events unfolding in Russia. On social media, wedding videos circulate of grooms finishing their speeches with a spirited rendition of Three Lions and the entire reception joining in the chorus of the moment. The sign at the start of Southgate Drive in Kettering has been expertly extended to include the words “Sir” and “Gareth”. Yesterday afternoon, British Airways staff were greeting fans flying to Moscow for today’s match with a sign which read “Checkkane” and were fitting every passenger with a blue waistcoat just like Southgate’s. In which case, the Museum of London had better head to Heathrow pronto. They are apparently looking to purchase one of Southgate’s used numbers to put in their exhibition.
And it is not as if this is a geographically isolated contagion. Sure, 30,000 are expected to gather in Hyde Park to watch a special screening of England’s semi-final with Croatia. But if the numbers coming together for the quarter-final against Sweden are anything to go by, there will be crowds of unprecedented scale gathering in Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, too. Everywhere, in fact, across the land, the entire population seem to have gone Southgate barmy.
At a time of increasing fractiousness and uncertainty, of political squabbling and failing leadership, what this England team have done is provide something positive for us to gather round. It is hardly a surprise everyone would rather gather round the television and watch comedy footage of a dance craze inspired by Kyle Walker’s agonised convulsions with cramp against Colombia.
The new craze of “Kyling” is indicative. Walker, himself, has joined in the gentle, amused mockery. Just as Maguire has of the endless social media memes of him apparently boring a random woman in the crowd after an England victory (it was actually his girlfriend).
This England team is one that is very easy to fall for. In the recent past, David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Wayne Rooney and the rest of the England team were superstars, aloof, disconnected and untouchable. Maguire, Jordan Pickford, Kieran Trippier and the rest look and act like our mates, lads we have played with in Sunday League, lads we would choose to have a drink with, lads that laugh at themselves and are self-evidently having the time of their lives in Russia.
For sure, had Gerrard and Lampard, Rooney and Beckham ever achieved what this team have done, we would have been celebrating. But not quite with the abandon we have these lads. And at their head is a man who has become universally admired. How refreshing it is to be represented on the international stage by such a modest, decent but talented man.
All this means we can lose ourselves in the performance of Southgate’s England without guilt, without reservation, without caveat. Though it would a bold prediction to suggest, should England lose to Croatia, we will all still be wearing the waistcoat in a week’s time.
Grooms have finished their speeches with a rousing chorus of ‘Three Lions’