They’re glad it’s not over: Where would the English newspapers be without ‘1966 and all that’, ‘the penalty curse’ and other lazy narratives?
A loss was secretly the best result the English media could have wished for…
Previously: Woke Nil: The same papers who attacked taking the knee are now claiming England's success proves them right
What would the newspapers have done if football had “come home”? 55 years worth of narratives about the England men’s team’s heroic failures and embarrassing pratfalls would have been made instantly old hat.
A young, talented, and admirable group of genuinely good players — both on the pitch and off — reaching the final but just failing to make it over the line, stopped in the end by the indignity of penalties — echoing the manager’s inglorious experience at Euro 96 — is the not-so-secretly perfect result for tabloids and broadsheets alike.
Just like Baddiel & Skinner1, now guaranteed another avalanche of royalties at the World Cup in two years when England will once again hype itself into a state of wide-eyed delusion, the newspapers benefit far more from a painful defeat than a euphoric win. Especially as the behaviour of a portion of England fans out in the world and at the barriers of Wembley yesterday gives them an easy contrast between dignity on the pitch and stupidity on the streets.
The ‘curse’ of penalties is one of the football narratives that the papers would have struggled most to give up.
Like the so-called ‘curse of Strictly’ — the shocking news that some people cheat on their partners when placed in close contact with obscenely attractive professional dancers day in day out for weeks — the penalties ‘curse’ is far more prosaic than the rhetoric would have it. And maybe, just maybe, the endless claims that the spirits are against England when it comes to spot-kicks contribute to the insane pressure on young players to break the hoodoo.
And the curse will continue: The Times goes with Penalty curse denies England their dream. Its tabloid sibling The Sun opts got It’s Gone Rome: Brave Three Lions lose Euro 2020 final after penalty shootout heartbreak AGAIN and WHAT A HANGOVER: Distraught England fans wake with puffy eyes from night of tears after penalty curse strikes at tense Euro 2020 final.
While The Telegraph doesn’t explicitly mention ‘the curse’, it chooses an equally hyperbolic headline, seemingly composed from a magnetic poetry set of football cliches — The ultimate agony: England suffer Euro final penalty heartbreak against Italy — while the equally cliche-loving gang at The Daily Mail go with Lionhearts to the last, Southgate’s battlers fall to heartbreaking penalty loss — AGAIN: IT ALL ENDS IN TEARS.
Both The Mirror and The i go for the same headline on their print editions, “Heartbreak”. It’s probably the most fitting of the bunch. Despite the well-worn cliché of England fandom being the ongoing triumph of hope over experience, the media spent the days leading up to the final leaning much, much heavier on the hope. Experience only gets a look in after a loss.
Across the papers, writers cling to the security blanket of the “55 years of hurt” as though the same England team, reincarnated over and over again, has been subjected to the same indignity; Groundslog Day marked by the clock radio blasting out Baddiel, Skinner, and poor neglected Ian Brodie every morning forever. And columnists who generally only care about football when it’s tournament time scrabble around for ‘meaning’ and narrative…
In The Telegraph, cursed potato man Nick Timothy — living proof that the most ageing vice is evil — contributes a piece that was obviously filed long before the final’s final whistle. The all-purpose condemnation of people who ‘make’ football political, under the headline It's absurd to project personal political ideals onto the England team, makes it apparent that Timothy didn’t read the paper’s Saturday edition which went big on a screed from Camilla Tominey which argued The Euros have destroyed the Leftist myth of backward, racist England.
Timothy, who writes with all the joy and passion of an estate agent ‘reaching out’ to tell you that the landlord won’t be fixing the broken boiler and that you might want to consider buying some new jumpers, contradicts himself throughout the article. One moment he is solemnly commenting that “the projection of politics onto the team is not only unfair to the players… but also highly selective,” and the next he’s writing paragraphs like these:
But then Southgate committed the cardinal sin. In an interview before the final, he mentioned the war. “People have tried to invade us,” he said, “and we’ve had the courage to hold that back. You can’t hide that some of the energy in the stadium against Germany was because of that.” He went on to complain that, “we are always looking at the negatives of our own country.”
This did not fit the narrative at all. On Twitter, academics and armchair diplomats fell into a pit of anguish and despair. But the politicians and pundits hell-bent on appropriating the team simply ignored it. For them, there was a bigger picture: the need to use the football team to legitimise and promote their own political beliefs and denigrate those of their opponents.
The underlying message of Timothy’s column is not that the England team are apolitical but that he doesn’t believe that most of the players are interested in progressive politics or inclined to a moderately left-wing world view. This is the old classic Tory talking point that the ‘default’ position is on the centre-right.
Timothy fields the usual team of strawmen and makes to cut them down with what he imagines to be precision tackles but have the lumpen quality of Boris Johnson barrelling over a Japanese school child. This isn’t about politics, he cries, while using taking every sentence as a chance to snipe at the imagined Left who haunt every corner of his turnip head.
The Daily Mail, of course, just sees today’s chance to rage at its own favourite spectre — “the liberal metropolitan elite” — in a leader column that could have been written by a trained dolphin selecting coloured balls with a mix of angry and ‘patriotic’ phrases pasted onto them.
The column, headlined Even in defeat our footballers have given a lesson in unity and dedication that should inspire us all, is quite an achievement in itself — by turns jingoistic, angry, dismissive, saccharine, lacrymose and vengeful.
As befits a paper that never feels complete without a double-page feature about some long-ago war, preferably World War II but any tale of ‘daring do’ will… err… do, The Daily Mail leader writers head back to the beginning of football’s history to assert that it doesn’t need to come home because it’s England’s anyway:
This was, after all, England’s national game before it was anyone else’s.
If English peasants (all right, many were of Germanic or Norse stock) hadn’t begun kicking around a pig’s bladder in the 9th century – and the Victorians hadn’t codified the rules of engagement a millennium later – football may never have developed into the world’s favourite sport.
And even as the newspapers report that Saka, Rashford and Sancho have been racially abused online, the Mail is back on its “racism doesn’t really exist bullshit”:
[Southgate’s] squad – multicultural and meritocratic – represents every corner of the English map.
Not only does this expose the great lie of those who claim this country is steeped in racism. It also reflects the best of 21st century England: Tolerant, compassionate, inclusive and increasingly at ease with itself.
The Mail leader represents that tolerance by dragging up once again the row over Emily Thornberry’s tweets about a flag covered in England flags back in 2014, raging:
Too often, pride in country has been sneered at by the liberal metropolitan elite, who consider it unsavoury to the point of shameful.
Remember the contempt poured by Labour shadow minister Emily Thornberry (aka Lady Nugee) on a man flying the English flag? The Left are of course happy for the Scots to display the Saltire, and the Welsh the Dragon. Draping oneself in the Palestinian flag is positively de rigueur.
But to these hypocrites, the English standard is anathema – prima facie evidence of racism and bigotry.
You see, England’s success in the Euros is unifying and proves how great our country is and proves that the Left hate England and that they don’t deserve to live on this beautiful, perfect, shining isle in the middle of the true blue British seas. Don’t question that too closely. Don’t consider that British history is studded with examples of when left-wing activism brought change that stolid conservatism would never have considered. Just let the jingoistic jism wash over you; John Bull’s big British bukkake2 in action.
But the right-wing papers do not have a monopoly on ridiculous rhetoric this morning. In The Guardian, Hugh Muir gropes around for meaning with a piece headline England may have lost, but Southgate’s team shows us the nation we can be. Inevitably, he turns to the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony — which has long been 1966 for the FBPE centrist crowd — for inspiration. He writes:
… we projected ourselves through Danny Boyle’s extraordinary, daring opening show, fusing a pride in our history with a warm, honest and clear-sighted account of who and where we are now.
…The ensuing tragedy was that we didn’t exploit the potential of that moment and before long we were consumed by the painful divisions of austerity and the social splintering of Brexit.
Yeah, if only Leave voters had been cleansed of all their false consciousness by being strapped into a chair like Alex from A Clockwork Orange and shown Boyle’s bombastic opening ceremony on repeat they’d have seen the error of their ways.
Or perhaps that whole show was a sticking plaster applied to an already gaping wound and those who bathe in bizarrely myopic nostalgia for 9 years ago should read a little more about the context of how that Olympics was built and who got shafted in the process.
Even when Muir makes a good and uncontestable point about how beautiful the England team and their spirit are…
As a British, black Londoner, son of Windrush generation, working-class parents, I – like so many others with different stories – find it has never been easier to support an England team. It’s southern, it’s northern, it’s black, it’s white, it is of mixed heritage, it’s young, it’s experienced, I’m guessing it’s multi-denominational. It has players who excel at their jobs and earn a fortune doing them but try in various ways to ground themselves in the lives of the society of which they are a feted part.
… he undercuts the sentiment with some patronising guff (“They sport silly tattoos, some have silly haircuts.”) It’s the classic columnist move of clapping heartily for the football while making sure to imply the whole endeavour is a little bit beneath you but you’ll join in this time.
Over at the i Paper, Ian Dunt engages in a similar exercise, employing the skill shared by all political hacks for imposing a rigid narrative onto a fluid story, to write a column headlined Euro 2020: The new ethos of England represents the future not the past. He writes:
We have witnessed a generational change, encapsulated by the England team, which stripped down the complex dynamics of social progress into a single easily-understood storyline.
But that’s really what columnists want to have happened, the hard yards of social and political change — the fight — smoothed on by the relatively simple action of a football tournament. We are actually living through dark days where the harnessing of symbols like the England shirt by a populist, nativist, deeply cynical government is more dangerous than a lot of people want to accept.
Dunt concludes his column stretching for hope with the ungainliness of a keeper trying to tip a shot over the bar:
This new generational approach isn’t just kinder. It is also more successful. If the feel-good buzz of this summer can trigger lasting change, it’ll be because we recognise that off the pitch as well.
To that I reply with two images: An England fan in Leicester square with a lit flare in his arse crack, red smoke billowing from it like Satan’s most impressive fart, and a second entirely nude England fan over in Wembley with the PC World sign just behind him as he, in a thoroughly un-PC act, waved the England flag and attempted to windmill his cocktail sausage dick3 at the crowd below him.
I should remember the dignity of the England team in defeat yesterday. It’s what I want to focus on because I’m really moved by their solidarity and soundness on the pitch and off it. But my brain — ruined by the internet — keeps returning to those two England fans and the accidental metaphors they create for what is really happening in the country that both right-wing and centrist commentators cartoon in their columns.
England is not the solid, stoic sincerity of Gareth Southgate and his side. It is Boris Johnson, a flare protruding from his arse, chuckling at the smoke and hoping it distracts from everything else.
It is Boris Johnson, stood outside Bugger PC World, windmilling his over-used organs and waving his box-fresh England shirt over his head, demanding respect from the world while declining to give it back. The newspapers give us narratives in defeat to distract us from this naked truth.
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They were ubiquitous during the build-up to yesterday’s game but I was just glad that they had left the pineapple and the boot polish at home.
If this term is not familiar to you, do not Google it.
When I originally tweeted about the video I called it a “chipolata dick” and was told I was being far too generous. Consider this amended version me taking “editorial feedback”.