The World Cup and England

Well, it was fun while it lasted, England’s uncharacteristically long run in this year’s football World Cup!  And many congratulations to France for their victory.  Of course, I am a complete lightweight really: I don’t usually follow the leagues, don’t know the players, and can’t call myself a dedicated supporter of any team.  I also admit that in ‘ordinary time’ I am put off by many of the trappings that seem to go with modern football: the colossal sums of money that change hands, along with the poor losers and egos and silly haircuts and showing off.  And it is always disappointing that the teams are seldom made up from residents or natives of the towns their teams represent, so it is sometimes difficult to see in the major clubs anything more than big businesses.  But the World Cup… when the World Cup comes round, I find myself being drawn in…

Perhaps it is because the names of the countries do mean something and, however modestly, their teams represent their people, or because the World Cup provides an arena for a natural friendly rivalry between nations, all competing for the harmless prize of an excuse for a celebration.  Part-timers like me are reminded that the tapering grid of fixtures, the ladder to the trophy, can be dressed with all the devices of narrative — the heroes, the villains, the allies, the antagonists, the climaxes and anticlimaxes, the chances and near misses and the deus ex machina and history made or repeating itself — and we learn again that well-played football really can be a beautiful sight.

And at home in England, too, the air changes.  Out come the flags, for a start: there is something I have always loved about flags and banners and coats of arms, and it is cheering to see the cross of St George fluttering optimistically from the roof of many a hatchback, or undulating with dignity from first-floor double-glazing, or draped across the entire flank of a Transit van.  This year’s England team have also seemed a likeable bunch, at least on the pitch, and Gareth Southgate a very decent manager.  It must have been just before the Panama game in the group stages (6-1 to England!) that the pull really became irresistible: perhaps England were not going to do too badly and I really was going to have to pay attention.

This July has been particularly dry and hot; parts of England have now gone without rain for five or six weeks.  We are in a perpetual summer like Narnia’s winter: the days are almost unfailingly bright and hot, and the sun high and relentless.  The green blade has been baked to the colour of parchment and the parks are beige in their desiccation.  It has been as if the weather were holding its breath; the unusually good progress of the football team abroad coincided with a heightened summeriness at home.  So as the fleet-footed men went further and further on, surging to victory over Panama, surviving a penalty shoot-out against Columbia, defeating even Sweden outright, the sense of a season extraordinary twice over, of unbroken sun and nearly unbroken success at football, gathered until, by the semi-final, it was almost as intense as the ripe heat.  A colleague from work reported deserted stations and quiet streets in London at seven in the evening on a weekday.  This is the sort of othertimeliness we now tend to have only at Christmas and New Year.

Alas, it was not to last.  But yes, this rare spell of togetherness had not been unpleasant, I reflected, as I watched Gareth Southgate moving like a priest among his men after the defeat to Croatia, ministering to them in their suffering.  I am used to the margins when it comes to national feeling in Britain, as a Mass-goer, Brexit ditherer, lover of metrical verse, monarchist, Gothic-Revival-Revivalist and so on (which is not to complain or feel sorry for myself: nobody forced me to hold these positions and this is the path that I have to take).  So, when some popular tide of feeling rises in Britain that is hopeful and well-meaning, a movement that is not a confection of the media and in which I can participate with a clear conscience, well, it is rare enough to be worth savouring.  A tension is eased; there might even be a sensation of relief.  Perhaps a longing for togetherness without a clear source of it, and an aversion to isolation, explain why there are so many bandwagons trundling around these days.

It is just a shame that we seem not to be able to unite ourselves around anything more substantial than football.  That is not to say that football is insubtantial: both professional and amateur football produces a certain amount of genuine camaraderie and local feeling that it would be wrong to overlook.  And there is an extent to which it is more than a matter of life and death.  But human beings need really quite substantial bonds to keep them in harmonious neighbourliness.  Is support for the football team really the most that England has in common?  Some are fairly sure we all know what we are against, but what are we for?  What shall we build for the next generation?  I don’t ask this question in hope of a grand answer, with the world stage in mind, but am thinking more of the smallness, the localness, the details of public life.  If football really had come home on Sunday, to what sort of place would it have been welcomed?