Sunday 27 June 2010

Mask of Sorrow

If it had finished 2-1, this entry would have practically written itself. It would have been a simple matter of raging at incompetent match officials, the lack of goal-line technology, FIFA intransigence, the agonising and unjustified manner of every England exit from every World Cup, the moon, the fates, whatever it is that we console ourselves with when these things happen every four years. I sincerely hope though, that outrageous as the missed call on Lampard's goal was, it does not blind people to the obvious and fundamental flaws in the England team, and the English game, that resulted in such a lamentable exit this afternoon.

I know that, like hundreds of thousands of other blokes, I get accused of taking football too seriously, of obsessing about it, of forgetting its real place in the great scheme of things. The fact is though, that when I feel like I do this evening, it's because it IS important. It pervades our society completely, it's a huge industry, a good run in this competition would have been great for the national mood and could even play a small part in an economic revival, such is the hold which the game has over our psyche. This would not happen if it wasn't genuinely important to us and, frankly, I can't help it. I don't choose to care this much and feel so utterly stricken when this happens. My reaction is unforced, visceral and genuine, and I won't apologise for it. It's a mixture of a dull acceptance that we were well beaten by a much better team, relief that we weren't robbed as we usually are, and utter despair at the thought that I simply can't see us winning a World Cup in my lifetime.

The same old failings were there. An inflated belief in the ability of our players is perhaps the worst of them. Every World Cup we're among the favourites for reasons which escape me. Millions of pounds are gambled by people either so blinded by patriotic fervour (or belief in the Premier League hype) that our odds shorten way beyond where they should realistically be. The media pump further hot air into this by building up our 'world-beaters'. I'd like to know where the evidence is that backs up this idea that we've got good enough players to win. If we did, surely we'd at least come close occasionally? The self delusion was still there, even in the face of a humiliating defeat by a decent but hardly likely World Cup winning team. John Terry standing there talking to an interviewer and saying that Wayne Rooney is one of the best in the world and would come back and score World Cup goals one day.

Well, for me, this is self-evidently not true. Because the world's best players perform on the highest stage, for the highest stakes, under the most pressure. That's what the World Cup is - the ultimate test of the best in the world. If you play four games in a World Cup finals tournament and fail to perform in any of them, injury notwithstanding, you're clearly not among the best players in the world. One poor game can be understood as an aberration. An entire tournament campaign cannot. But Terry, guilty as the rest of us, still believed this to be the case despite what he'd just gone through, what should have been a chastening experience on the field. No doubt Rooney will now go back to Utd and immediately start performing in the self-titled 'Best league in the world' (TM) and leave everybody wondering where the fuck he was in South Africa. I don't mean to pick on Rooney specifically, having had a go at him in an earlier blog, but he provides the best example of the constant over-praise and over-estimation of our players.

So while an outrageous exit to a goal which should have stood (on a stage which should have had the technology and officiating competence to correct such a fuck-up) would have been much more familiar, like putting on a pair of excruciatingly uncomfortable but extremely familiar shoes that you wonder why the fuck you don't throw away, it would also have allowed us to hide from the simple fact of the matter. England are not, and are not going to be in the immediate future without changes similar to those of the Spanish model, good enough.

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