All Together Now

Alex Song: Cameroon 2010, tsevis, 2009

Before the South Africa finals, I hadn't watched any football since the 2006 World Cup. Somehow I managed to completely miss Euro 2008. As Scotland failed to qualify as usual, I wasn't hindered by great expectations, dreams of glory or any other kind of emotional high. Unlike England. Despite thirty-two teams competing in the 2010 tournament; the one we have to hear about again and again is of course, that team that won it once a very long time ago. Any time England qualifies for the World Cup the national media (being mostly based South of the border) will drop 1966 into every possible topic or story. Only the Welsh and maybe Northern Ireland could also understand how irritating that is. Though only one thing could be more annoying that having to hear about a missed penalty for a week - England winning.

When the media finally notices their incessant invocation of 1966 might be annoying some people, they turn around puzzled and say you must be jealous or perhaps even racist. Call us dour, but Scotland never gets beyond the first round and we acknowledge that. We'd like it if we got to the second round and beyond, but we know we're not a world class team. We are not delusional. There is a difference between support and arrogance - which is how England comes across every competition. By the next World Cup it will have been forty-eight bloody years since England won. At some point you have to consider it might have been a fluke.

You can see the same thing happening in France ever since they became 1998 world champions and 2000 European champions. When they were beaten by relative minnows Senegal in the opening match of 2002 and eliminated in the first round without scoring a single goal, it was a shock. What was different? Zidane was off the team with a thigh injury and hurried back onto the squad for their third group game without time to properly heal. Fast forward four years and France have made it to the final. Now, another four years later, France have once again failed to make it out of the group stage in an impressive display of self-destruction. If Zidane really was one of the greatest players ever and the individual is greater than the team, then perhaps for French football it was a case of right man at the right time. But France is only stuck living in the late 90s, England is mentally stuck half a century ago.

Which is not as regressive as the tabloids. If there's one thing that happened longer ago than 1966, it's the fucking war. Stop bringing it up! The red-tops always get frenzied whenever England play Germany. It's always funny to see England outclassed by a better team, more so given the entertaining play that Germany has shown this year, and even funnier because Germany considers the Netherlands to be their great rivals. England is like toddler tugging at your trousers trying to get a reaction out of you. The Netherlands suffered the same pathological obsession with settling the Second World War (hint, you already won it). They mostly got it out of their system after the 1988 European Championship.

Even though I might have just written more than six hundred words bashing England, there's one thing we can all agree on - Three Lions is a catchy song. Scots and Germans alike can laugh in hindsight about the line 'thirty years of hurt', but it's a really good song. As for the final: Holland played as if they had turned off fouls in FIFA 2010. The 'beautiful game' it was not, but at least it wasn't decided on penalties.

[631]