Monday, June 28, 2010
WHEW!
That was close.
For just a moment there yester-day, we thought we might find ourselves morally obliged to launch a campaign to have England included as the ‘ninth team’ in the World Cup quarter-finals.
Yes, we could see ourselves, ever so humbly if a tad reluctantly, asking that nice Mr Blatter if he couldn’t somehow find a way to accommodate the Three Lions in the last eight, after those nasty officials in Bloemfontein decided to wave play on when Frank Lampard’s shot crashed off the underside of the crossbar and landed a country mile over the German line. What better way to prepare the ground for the historic visit of Her Majesty, we thought, than for thenation which suffered so gravely from injustice in France to be the first to show solidarity with a neighbour done so badly wrong in South Africa.
But, fortunately, Germany went on to bang in four, so sparing our blushes, if not those of the Premiership’s ‘golden generation’ as, from a position where they briefly found themselves in the unaccustomed position of having the sympathy of the world on their side, England contrived to serve up perhaps their most spectacular pratfall yet on the greatest stage on earth.
Someone – an English person, as it happens – said recently that he could sum up the reason he didn’t want the country to win the World Cup in four words: "arise Sir Ashley Cole".
That eminently understandable sense of relief was doubled yesterday by the margin of Germany’s thoroughly deserved victory because, had the scoreline remained at 2-1, we would frankly never have heard the end of it from the Sky pilots and their fellow passengers. Consider how, 24 years on, they’re still banging on about the ‘Hand of God’ and conveniently sidelining the small matter of Maradona’s ‘other’ goal in Mexico in 1986.
No, out here in the wild waters on the edge of Europe, there’s only room for one nation to play the role of eternal victim and that, courtesy of the efforts through the years of such as Mr Oliver Cromwell and Mr Thierry Henry, is us, thanks very much.
There had been a preposterous English media consensus going into this game, one fanned by the previously sensible Don Fabio as it happens, that England had finally found themselves at this World Cup, the implication being that the zeroes against the US and Algeria had suddenly turned heroes against woeful Slovenia. Not so. Any dispassionate reading of their tournament graph before yesterday would have shown that they had gone from zero to a high of maybe plus one. Yesterday, Germany ruthlessly condemned them to their true level as the lions went like lambs to the slaughter. But if it had never looked on for England to go a long way, even their most ardent critics could not have foreseen the abject manner in which they would barely scramble out of their group before going down in a blaze of goals to a German side which has hit on a blend of youth and experience without quite convincing yet that they’re ultimate world-beaters themselves. But even though Klose, Podolski and Muller ensured it would be no more than a startling footnote to the game’s main narrative, we can’t let the ‘goal that wasn’t’ pass without, once more, lamenting football’s simply Luddite refusal to give referees access to the same kind of video technology that’s instantly available to armchair fans thousands of miles away.
This isn’t a bandwagon I’m suddenly jumping onto but one I’ve been driving pretty much ever since the technology first became available.
And now that we don’t have to waste our time pleading with old Sepp to hand England a special pass, we can happily get back to pillorying him for stubbornness which - as events in the Argentina v Mexico game only served to confirm - continues to bring the game into disrepute.
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