All is well in my parallel
world of sport, so I can forget about Trump and the melting ice caps, the
starving polar bears and the Brexit May-hem for a little while and celebrate
instead the triumph in the World Cup of my second country. On the day after the
quatorze juillet, too.
Any residual fireworks that evening were probably there to mark the winning of
a football match rather than the storming of the Bastille.
My first country remains
England. We performed gallantly without ever showing enough creative class to
suggest that we could reach the dizzy heights of Les Bleus. Essentially a team of journeymen, they showed
plenty of spirit and can return home with their heads held high – for once. Being
journeymen, they gelled more readily into a team, which is rather more than can
be said for the collections of assorted stars over the last 50 years or so.
Half a century of hurt and under-achievement. For the gelling, we have that
nice Mr. Southgate to thank. Something of a spirited journeyman himself in his
playing days, he had the good sense to recognise that we would go further with
youth on our side, and the man-management skills to get them playing for each other
and sort-of believing in themselves. He showed that there's nothing wrong with
niceness in the context of competition if allied to (emotional) intelligence. I
would advocate an MBE at least.
The last time we won it –
in black and white – we had another manager who appeared to be nice (on the
outside at least) and who succeeded in moulding a fairly unpromising and
disparate bunch into a cohesive unit. We had a few stars – although Gordon
Banks, Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton and the unlucky Jimmy Greaves, were so
down-to-earth and modest that they could never be mistaken for prima donnas –
but the others would not have been everyone's first picks. Yet they worked so
well as a team. There's a lesson there somewhere, but I think I was too young
at the time to appreciate it.
I watched virtually all of
the tournament on my grandparents' black-and-white television in their sitting
room in Bath, where we would generally go for our summer holidays when we lived
in Belfast. A long drive down from Liverpool that seemed twice as long because
my father took the A-roads rather than the new motorway and drove at around
40mph in deference to my mother's nerves. With four fractious children in the
back of his Cortina estate, that journey seemed like an eternity. Even with the
current levels of traffic, you could probably do it today in about four hours.
Under half the time.
My dad watched some of the
matches with me, but most of the time I watched alone. For the rest of the
time, I was probably upstairs in my attic bedroom playing cricket matches on
paper. I was quite a good cricketer and quite a good footballer, but always
better in my head. With half a chance and a lot more self-confidence, I like to
imagine I could have been a creative midfield genius, with an eye like Glenn
Hoddle for the kind of telling pass that the current England team tended to
eschew.
But back briefly to the
heroes of '66, who achieved their apotheosis at Wembley on the very day that we
drove back – for once via Holyhead, Dun Laoghaire and the Republic of Ireland –
to Belfast. I forwent the pleasures of the Irish scenery sailing leisurely by
and simulated sleep on the back seat for a chunk of the journey in an attempt
to persuade my parents to let me stay up for Match of the Day to watch the highlights of the final. There were
no VCRs in those days. Miss the match and you had to wait for the film version
of England's route to Wembley to arrive at a cinema very near you. My parents
weren't fooled, but they let me stay up. It was a special occasion.
Just how special we
wouldn't realise until a few decades and a few penalty shoot-outs later. We're
a little bit nearer to that elusive summit now, but it's still a long way off.
We've reached base-camp now. More realistically, I think Her Majesty should
commission Antony Gormley to erect a set of 11 sculptures on some high visible
ground somewhere in the kingdom – maybe in the 'Northern Powerhouse' in honour
of Ramon Wilson, Nobby Stiles and one-eyed Banksy. An eternal reminder of a
time when England could prove to the rest of the world that we invented 'the
beautiful game'.
In France, they've only
had to wait 20 years for a repeat. They're momentarily on top of the world and,
had I been a little younger, I might have taken the car out after the match and
blown my horn around the neighbourhood. Even here in the heart of the country,
we could hear the sound of distant claxons. And see some pretty, multi-coloured
rockets descending on the meadows below.
In 1998, I watched the
French team beat the Brazilians on home territory. Our telly then was linked
only to a video player rather than to an aerial or satellite dish, so I watched
in the company of the old woman who lived alone in the ugly house opposite us,
which her recently deceased husband had built in the '50s. Being a polite young
man in those days, I feigned patriotic support for our new country, whereas –
being a football romantic – I was still a little in love with Brazil. Hardly
Pele, Rivelino and Jairzinho, but they still played in those lovely blue, green
and blue strips. Neymar, the petulant boy wonder who would spoil the party, was
still a long way off.
This time, though, I
didn't have to feign support. All three of us watched the game side by side on
the sofa and we all three jumped up and down with genuine glee every time
France scored. You had to feel a little sorry for game but under-populated
Croatia in their checked Harlequin-like shirts. Meanwhile, Djokovic the Serb,
their bitter enemy perhaps, was re-discovering his mojo on Wimbledon's centre
court. I would have liked Anderson to win, because he was the underdog and he
has a rescued dog that he loves and he seems what the Spitting Image song denied was possible, 'a
nice South African'.
And now it's all over. The
tennis and football both. I don't watch much 'sacka', as the Americans call it,
but I've been watching footie for a whole month. In this house at least, football's
come home. What are we going to do without it? Normal service will be resumed. Back
to Bargain Hunt? Never!
I shall watch some stockpiled films instead. But this week at least, there's
the British Open. Golf from Carnoustie. A 'demanding' golf course, it has been
described. I can put my feet up for another four days – and enjoy the spectacle
of American sportsmen toiling with Scottish weather conditions.
Sport, glorious sport!/What is there more handsome?
