“Massive” is the word that is forever on the lips of Britain’s football pundits. Big games are not just big, they’re massive. Top players are massive, too — none more so than the Manchester United and England striker, Wayne Rooney, whose injured right foot is headline news. As for the contribution that a fit Rooney could make to England’s World Cup campaign, it is, needless to say, massive.
With the tournament due to start in Germany on June 9, pundits are already reaching obessively for their favorite adjective. When, every four years, the World Cup takes place, the British media and British public get caught up in a frenzy of overblown expectations about England’s prospects. The repeated disappointment of those expectations will not stop them from being nursed anew this year with at least as much intensity as on previous occasions.
Given all this, it may seem curious that it was long after it started in 1930 before England deigned to participate in the tournament. In the days of the British Empire, the belief was that the English football team towered over other national sides. After all, was not football the creation of the British working class, a game perfected on English soil? Taking for granted English footballing supremacy, the English soccer establishment treated the World Cup with disdain. The rest of the world, it was assumed, could hardly hope to measure up to football’s inventors. When this assumption was finally put to the test — in the 1950 World Cup — its complacency quickly became apparent. England’s much-vaunted maestros were beaten 1-0 by the United States, a country not noted for footballing prowess.
The trouble was that English soccer culture had become mired in insularity. The innovative footballing strategies that had been developed in other countries had eluded the parochial English and further setbacks followed the admittedly freakish defeat at the hands of the USA. Years were to pass before England at last found a manager, in the former England player, Alf Ramsay, who appreciated the need to adapt to the more expansive style of play common in other parts of the world. It was under Ramsay that England finally won the World Cup, beating Germany at Wembley in 1966. Ramsay was lucky to have at his disposal an exceptional generation of English footballers, stars like Bobby Charlton, Bobby Moore and the magnificent goal keeper Gordon Banks, but his shrewdness and bulldog spirit contributed more than a little to a famous victory.
Few events occupy a more central place in modern English mythology than the 1966 World Cup final. To this day, the footage of Geoff Hurst’s winning goal is endlessly replayed on British television, to the accompaniment of the immortal words of the booming patrician commenator Kenneth Wolstenholme: “They think it’s all over...It is now.” Among the English, victory over Germany will always have a special piquancy. Triumphing over the country against which Britain and its empire were pitted in two world wars remains a much-coveted national objective, the most satisfying way of restoring bygone imperial pride and prestige. Pathetic though it may be, the fixation with 1966 is understandable. Since then, England fans have known much frustration. In the post-Ramsay era, the English game once again became stuck in antediluvian attitudes. It was slow to adjust to soccer’s relentless international evolution. If football turned into a brand name-dominated branch of global commerce, it also became an increasingly cerebral sport requiring far more sophisticated coaches than were available domestically.
Much of the blame for this failure to progress lies with the Football Association. A body of men who hardly reflect their country at its best, the FA have long been more associated with cynicism and venality than with imaginative stewardship of the national game. Least of all have they been associated with intelligence. Nevertheless, the FA finally grasped that the only possibility of England staying competitive was to recruit a foreign coach. Enter England’s first foreign manager, the owlish Swedish soccer boffin, Sven Goran-Eriksson.
It was feared that English fans would never reconcile themselves to a non-English manager. But what Eriksson’s hitherto moderately successful period as England’s coach has demonstrated is that most fans are not much bothered if England is managed by a foreigner. What matters is very simple — winning. The origins of the team’s manager scarcely matter. By the same token, it may even be that fans would tolerate foreign footballers playing for England; certainly they have grown used to the prevalence of foreign players among leading English clubs. The sometime Conservative politician, David Mellor, once said he didn’t care if the players of his favorite team, Chelsea, hailed from the planet Zog — so long as they were putting the ball into the back of the net. It is a view evidently shared by many other Chelsea fans — so long as their side is on top, they plainly do not mind in the least that it is owned by a Russian billionaire and heavily reliant on exotic talent.
Now that Eriksson’s contract is finished, the English team is once again to be managed by a native Englishman, former Middlesborough boss Malcolm Maclaren — but only because the FA failed to secure the services of the Brazil manager Luis Felipe Scolar. Fans may soon be longing for Goran-Erikkson’s cosmopolitan professionalism, indifferent to the evidence of his mercenariness which the British press has been zealous in exposing.
Yet for all the acceptance of the internationalizing of the game, English football is much bound up still with English nationalism. For constitutional purposes, the country made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland may identify itself as Britain, but there has never been any question of establishing a British football team, or for that matter a British cricket or rugby team.
This summer (as during previous World Cups) many English fans will paint their faces white and daub them with the red cross of England’s patron saint, St George. Bristling with xenophobia, a racist section of these fans will be heading for Germany bent on causing trouble. The brutishness of this regressive rump of supporters is a source of dismay to fans who have embraced the British game’s new cosmopolitan ethos. One such fan is the celebrated British writer and Arsenal fan, Nick Hornby. Hornby confesses to being so thrilled by his team’s French North African players that when he sees the virtuoso Arsenal striker Thierry Henry strutting his stuff for France he is no longer sure where his national loyalties lie. His instinct is to cry: “Allez les Bleus”.
One English football fan who will be experiencing no such conflict of loyalties is Prime Minister Tony Blair. Rather, he will be praying for England to excel themselves, hoping to turn their success to his advantage. Indeed, for Britain’s beleaguered premier, one word alone can convey the significance of England’s participation in this year’s World Cup. That’s right: “Massive”.
