England, And The Nightmare of World Cup 2010

by Douglas Lindsay - 14:25 on 10 September 2009

Every nation is insufferable about their football team. Except Scotland. We were insufferable once - Argentina 1978 - we learned a hard, bitter lesson, and have been reasonably sufferable (or un-insufferable) ever since. The fact that we're generally pish probably has something to do with it, but there are plenty of countries who don't let being pish stand in the way of hubris, over-confidence and a general total lack of self-awareness.

Take the English.

Those without selective memory, will recall fans waving the England team off on the team camper van to Germany in 2006, with desperately high hopes and claims of 'our best chance ever' etc etc. This despite the fact that the team weren't very good, had a weird manager who couldn't get anything out of his best players, and had recently lost 1-0 to Northern Ireland, at the time ranked 457 in the world (out of 202 countries.) Some nations might have seen the writing on the wall, but the English still charged over to Germany in the firm belief that they were going to win the World Cup. From the moment they qualified, until the moment when they missed that last inevitable penalty kick, they were insufferable. No self-awareness, no hang on a second, let's just see what happens, we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. It was entirely, we're in the World Cup Finals, therefore we're going to win.

They didn't.

And this time threatens to be even worse. We put Radio 4 on this morning, thinking that it might be immune from Premature World Cup Hysteria, to find the reporter from Wembley last night mentioning the words England, winning and World Cup in the first sentence. (And this was just after Radio 4 had trailed a show called something like Children Of The 2012 Olympics... In the name of God! Such was the general white squall of the breakfast table, I couldn't hear what that show will actually be about, but one presumes it will be a documentary season shadowing the lives of the illegitimate children of Lord Coe and Tessa Jowell.)

Radio 4 was dispatched to the digital ether.

I don't even know if you can get digital ether. Maybe you can't.

And here's the worst thing (the worst thing ever, you might say.) This time the England team have decent players, they have a manager who knows what he's doing and can get the best out of those players, they have a perfect blend of youth and experience, they're winning games and playing exciting attacking football.

Uh-oh. If they collectively as a nation thought that their team of badly coached donkeys were going to win the World Cup, in the name of all that is holy, what will they be like this time? And if the nightmare scenario plays out, and they do actually win it....

At the moment, right now, on this warm sunny afternoon in Englandshire, it feels like the fires of Mordor are threatening to breathe the fetid air of apocalypse across the peaceful peoples of all the earth. We can but hope that Brazil put aside the Nike adverts for the three weeks of the tournament and actually show up.

Add your comment

Your Name


Your Email (only if you are happy to have it on the site)


Your Comment - no HTML or weblinks


Enter this number in the box below and click Send - why?Unfortunately we have to do this to prevent the system being swamped by automated spam