Stuart Maconie on why we always expect too much from England

By Steve Anglesey in 2010 World Cup Blog

Published 22:00 27/06/10

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Be thankful for small mercies. At least they stuffed us. At least we were surgically taken apart by a team quicker, sharper, cleverer and better organised than we were. At least we won't have to endure the inevitable pathetic orgy of National Hard Done To-Ness that we can slip into so easily; with effigies of Sepp Blatter hanging from lamp-posts and people Googling to find out what the chief exports of Uruguay are so that we can boycott them and throw them in the Thames (It’s Fray Bentos pies by the way, so no chance of us boycotting them. Why couldn’t they export watercress?)

Sepp Blatter may be the creepiest, smuggest, most oily-haired sports mandarin on the planet. He may look like he should be stroking a white cat whilst saying “Ah, Mr Bond I’ve been expecting you", but this wasn’t his fault. Because which ever camera angle you look at it from, which ever goal-line technology you squint through, we were rubbish.

Our most glittering jewel, Wayne Rooney, played like a pub footballer getting over a hip replacement. Lionel Messi may look worryingly like Neil Morrissey but he has done more imaginative things in the warm-up than we’ve managed in the tournament. We were the men behaving badly here.

Sacrilegious though it may seem, the golden boys of 1966 may have a lot to answer for. A World Cup won on our soil on a gorgeous summer’s afternoon when London was the epicentre of the world and England swung like a pendulum has falsely raised our expectations for every football tournament since.

Maybe it’s time to see that fabled victory in some kind of context and without the gleam from the Jules Rimet trophy in Bobby Moore’s hands blinding us. We were extremely average in the group stages, admittedly not embarrassingly inept and turgid as we have been in South Africa but for a host nation we weren’t exactly Brazil 1970; a dull draw with Uruguay and two wins against countries who, with all apologies to France and Mexico, were footballing backwaters in the 60s.

he narrowest of wins over ten men, then an admittedly great match against a very unlucky Eusebio and Portugal. And finally a game so shrouded in legend and controversy that no lessons can be drawn from it really except that we certainly needed goal line technology back then.

Why oh why, comes the bleating, can Gerrard, Rooney, Lampard et al perform brilliantly perform week in week out in the Premiership and fail so dismally for their country? The reason is that in the Premier League they are playing alongside and not against the best players in the world. Maybe I could be a half-decent midfield general if I had Drogba, Torres and Tevez as my dashing corporals.

The Premier League is the best league in the world but it is a global league. And Rooney’s angry/petulant (take your pick) outburst against the booing fans was illuminating. I understand his frustration. But some of it was wounded outrage too. Here’s a man who is unused to the bitterness of criticism, feather-bedded by weekly adulation by Prawn Sandwich man and teenage girls in Taiwan.

But as disappointed as we are in Fabio and the tarnished golden generation, maybe we should take a long hard look at ourselves. Maybe we are just as much to blame, the flag-flying, face-painted, ever-hopeful, ever deluded Mr and Mrs Average.

No amount of cold water in the face ever seems to wake us up to our place in the sporting world and beyond. It goes even further than that. A TV diet of Jeremy Kyle and ads for Lawyers Direct has turned the nation of Agincourt and giving Adolf a bloody nose into trembling lipped whingers with no sense of perspective.

For too long, we’ve deluded ourselves that we’re the bees knees at everything. And, to be fair, as Peter Beardsley would say (about ninety times) we have got a good CV. We did give the world penicillin and passenger railways and the world wide web and the iPod. But within ten minutes, every country in the world had a better railway system adhering to curious foreign principles like punctuality and ‘going to places you want to go to’. And if we’d had to actually market and distribute and promote the iPod it would be the size of a wardrobe and only play Oasis records.

It started with the toffs obviously. Being sent out from Sandhurst and Eton to far-flung places with unspeakable names to give them the benefits that we enjoyed here; dull sex, over-boiled vegetables and leg-spin (Twenty minutes in the nets with a coconut and they were better than us at that too). When the Empire fell, we believed we had been cheated out of it and secretly the colonials all pined for PG Tips and having the Queen’s head on the stamps.

And it’s an attitude that’s trickled down to all of us, sometimes disguised with a false modesty that hides rampaging blustering egos. That’s why in England it is always the fattest, ugliest football blokes who get their shirts off first on the terraces at internationals. They genuinely believe that one glimpse of their pimply shaven heads and lobster-red lardbodies, those lissom signorinas from Milan and Manhattan are going to stop ogling David Beckham and fancy a bit of wobbling waistline and a kebab and Kestrel Super supper.

We still think we’re the aristocrats of the world when really are its hoodies. We believe at some level that simply being English gives us a place at the world’s top table, when really maybe we should be out in the car having a bag of crisps and a bottle of Lemonade with Turkmenistan and Iceland, with one of the grown-ups (Brazil or India or China) popping out every now and again to see if we’re OK and bringing us some pork scratchings and a wall chart to fill in.

We are at our best when we are being gifted amateurs. Gloating and beating our chests is a recent, unwelcome development of this potato headed generation and is just not very English. Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple are crime-fighting for a laugh essentially without it ever becoming anything as boring or shabby as a job. James Bond would never take anything other than the mixing of a decent cocktail seriously.

And take Dunkirk. Our finest hour is some blokes in cockle boats from Margate bringing back our professional army who’d been left high and dry as target practice for, erm, the Germans. Thank god, they weren’t as good with their shooting back then as they were yesterday afternoon.

Yes, we are the nation of Shakespeare, Bobby Moore, The Beatles and Monty Python. But we are also the nation of Jeffrey Archer, Glen Johnson, The Dave Clark Five and Terry And June. And that’s sort of loveable too. But calm down, eh, there’s a good lad. And put your shirt on.

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