Colin Sheridan: After age of empire, England’s new faces more than acceptable

England manager Gareth Southgate speaks to his players during a training session at St George's Park. Picture: Nick Potts/PA

When you aim to build an empire so vast the sun will never set on it, one of the — perhaps unintended — consequences will be the cultivation of a few sporting rivalries that provide soundtracks to our summers.

Forget the slaughter and the slavery, it was all worth it just to have Curtley Ambrose bowl a few yorkers at Michael Atherton. Successive wars with France always ensured an antipathy between England and their near neighbours; the enduring legacy of the bloody frogs and les rosbifs. Yes, it was all worth it for the Ashes and the Volvo Ocean Race. Really, we should be thankful. The juice may have been just worth the bloody squeeze in South Africa, otherwise there would be no Lions tour! Such foresight.

As with most non-consensual international relationships, there is the occupier, and the occupied. Logic dictates the balance should always be tipped in favour of the occupier, but, sport being sport, even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day. The worm eventually turns, and when it does, it can be a humiliating experience. When it comes to football, cricket, rugby, and pretty much everything else the British have given the world, I’m guessing they retrospectively wished they just gave us all a fish rather than forcing us to learn how to catch them. 

Was it really worth commandeering the Malvinas, thus poking the bear that was Diego Maradonna into twisting the knife into English backs in Mexico ‘86? If they left well enough alone, they’d likely have half a dozen World Cups by now. Similarly, England regularly hammered everybody at cricket, their dominance at the crease a fitting allegory for their dominance on the battlefields and ballot boxes (for those allowed to vote), but, as Ecclesiastes told us, for everything there is a season. For the last half century or so, it has been England’s time to nearly always, eventually, lose.

As Tuesday night’s showdown with old foes Germany will prove, when it comes to England, you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. The British Empire never included any iteration of what is now Germany, not in the traditional colonial sense at least. 

To the contrary, they have found themselves in the unusual position of being on the right side of history after successive world wars. Germany, adopting a societal philosophy Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coping with the past), wouldn’t even argue this. It makes the schadenfreude we all feel when England inevitably fails all the more peculiar. Let’s be clear, this is not a “why we should cheer for England”. I’m not that daft, but I do recall a period from my youth when my feelings towards the concept of England as a totem for footballing normalcy were at least a lot more neutral. This was in so small part due to John Huston’s cult hit Escape to Victory.

You know the one, the story of a group of POWs who plot their escape from a German prisoner of war camp under the ruse of a football match against their adversaries. This was a movie that Huston himself was so proud of, he completely omitted any mention of it from his biography, likely because directing Ipswich’s John Wark and Kevin O’Callaghan was something he did not want to relive.

For all the movies implausibilities (too many to mention here, but highlights include Michael Caine, obviously using PEDs, captaining the Allies team at 48, and Sylvestor Stallone assuming a goalkeeping style that could only be described as postmodern), it served as a wholesome tail of good versus evil, and even though, by the late 80s the movies felt 40 years old, it took its perch along with Casablanca and E.T. as a Christmas Day classic. 

It became as much a ritual as the carving of the turkey, or fighting with your family. Nobody really cared that it was bad. It was comforting, and, at its heart, it was very English. What Michel Caine was to British cinema, Bobby Moore was to English football. His presence in the movie as Terry Brady, just 14 years after captaining England to World Cup glory at Wembley, added another layer of nostalgia that somehow resonated just as well in west Mayo as it did in Cricklewood.

To me, this was the first installment of a footballing rivalry that will see another chapter written tomorrow night. Remarkably, for the first time in my living memory, England go into this game as marginal favourites. Being the underdog has never really worked for them, save for in Escape to Victory, when the evil Germans were unbackable, making their eventual demise (the match actually ended in a 4-4 draw, but, whatever) all the more humiliating.

Being fancied to beat Joachim Löw’s side, who have endured an uncharacteristically topsy turvy Euros to date, may not be an easy fit for Gareth Southgate’s men, who have looked decidedly German in the execution of their duties. With no goals conceded, no scandals to report and no wifes to distract, England has become the one thing I can never remember them being — boring.

What happened? Managed by a decent bloke you’d probably have pint with, a team populated by players that all seem to get along and be reasonably good at football? Try as they might, even the notoriously poisonous tabloid press have, thus far, given them a pass.

Has footballing England gone through a form of vergangenheitsbewältigung? Has decades of hubris finally resolved itself into a quasi state of blahness — where the team is likeable off the pitch, if a little boring on it, and the men in charge are doing everything in their power not to stay out of everyone’s way? Have they — whisper it — finally reconciled that the sun now sets in London at about 9.22pm, and after that, it’s none of their concern?

Acceptance is the first step to moving on. Maybe they’re ready.