The football season lurches into its final week, with Arsenal, the newly-crowned champions of England, trying to win their first Champions League trophy. But there will be no summer-long reprieve from the round ball game. A World Cup begins next month in North America, and dozy folk who fail to pay attention may hear a knock on the door at midnight. Only 48 teams this time. What fun.
If there’s a World Cup you can bet your last farthing there will be a ‘conversation’ about ‘national identity’. The BBC have already cleared their throats, with a four-hour adaptation of James Graham’s stage play, Dear England. That’s three hours too many.
Meanwhile David Baddiel, the comedian-philosopher, has launched a six-parter on Radio 4 called Sixty Years of Hurt – 60 years, that is, since England won their only World Cup. Baddiel co-wrote a song for the 1996 European Championship which measured ‘30 years of hurt’, so only one word requires revision.
Fingers on the buzzers, therefore, to spot the jargon and self-congratulatory twaddle favoured by the faux-patriots of television. In the realm of replica shirts and twirling scarves the game is always ‘beautiful’, and ‘Ingerland’ always ‘we’.
In the realm of replica shirts and twirling scarves the game is always ‘beautiful’, and ‘Ingerland’ always ‘we’
The zealotry occasionally bolsters spirits. In 2010, when Germany caned England’s ‘golden generation’ 4-1 in Bloemfontein, the BBC commentator Guy Mowbray sounded close to tears. ‘How many Germans’, he wailed, bottom lip a-quiver, ‘would get in the England team?’ The answer, flung back from thousands of living rooms, was brutal. ‘All 11, matey’.
Graham’s bloated drama, quarried from his 2023 play at the National Theatre, is unconvincing. The writer, as ever, tries to cram a quart of sentimentality into a pint pot in his search for ‘significance’, with predictable consequences. Viewers learn a lot about him, and nothing worth knowing about England.
In a drama about identity, personal and national, it might be a good idea to get the small details right, but Graham’s grasp of football is loose. In another TV drama, Sherwood, one of his characters refers to ‘Notts’ Forest. Oh dear. In Nottingham, the city closest to Graham’s hometown, that error is unpardonable.
He presents Gareth Southgate, England’s manager, as a secular saint, and the players as urban warriors with hearts of gold. The real Southgate is indeed impressive, and some of his players did come from rough streets, but the dialogue, with its ‘caring and sharing’, is adolescent mush.
Graham’s heart may be in the right place, even if his pen is not. Clever-clogs Baddiel, who gets a nosebleed every time he steps north of Dollis Hill, has never yet met a cliché that did him harm. So our national anthem is ‘a hymn to power’, our country ‘fractured and disparate’, and our suspicion of non-conformists as English as Dandelion and Burdock.
Even Association Football, drawn up in 1863, represents ‘another form of imperialism’. A fairly benign form, he must admit, because the world has not withheld its gratitude.
Roping in a few tame ‘historians’, he rolled out that old favourite, ‘class barriers’. One of those historians pronounced Bobby Moore, the victorious captain in 1966, guilty of ‘deference’ for wiping his hands before he accepted the trophy from the Queen. To most people it was good manners.
To borrow a phrase from Karl Kraus, Baddiel has nothing to say and is determined to say it. He knows little of England, and even less of football. Anybody who believes that Rodney Marsh, a Seventies boulevardier, should have been the first name on the team-sheet has an imperfect understanding of what constitutes a team. Mavericks don’t win tournaments.
Despite that glorious July day in 1966 England has always been a middle-ranking football nation. The game this country helped to create has been defined in its highest moments in continental Europe and South America.
If we’re being truthful England has produced two outstanding teams (1966 and 1970), and six great players: Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews, Gordon Banks, Bobby Charlton, Jimmy Greaves and Moore. There can be no comparison with Germany, Italy, Argentina and Brazil.
But the chest-beating is about to begin, and don’t be surprised if our Prime Minister pulls on a beautifully laundered replica shirt to send the valiant lads into battle. There will be talk of ‘pride’ and ‘passion’. There always is, in other lands, and other sports. Football is one game among many.
England has given so much of value to the world, and sport is part of that bequest. The great team games, and most of the individual ones, are English in origin. But football should never speak for England, no matter how fiercely metropolitan comedians press the case.
