A distinctly English problem
Jack Wilshere snatched the crown by popping a fag in his mouth, then cemented his standing by misjudging the wind when blowing smoke about English identity.
An easy mistake. For we are at a time of some flux in England, as the final touches are put to their plans to lift the 2022 World Cup.
A week ago, the banishment of John Foreigner from their fair land still topped the agenda.
We’ll call it the Get Micah Richards Regular Football strategy. Shove out the men who can make space for themselves to make space for more Englishmen.
But in the wake of Serbo-Belganian-Turkovan Adnan Januzaj’s brace for Man United on Saturday evening — a rather handier route to World Cup glory has presented itself. A world XI in England colours.
A week ago, the Premier League was England’s nemesis; now it may have nine years to naturalise a team for them.
As you might expect, it was Roy Hodgson who first hinted at the new plan, on Match of the Day. If a natural ability to deflate expectation seemed to be Roy’s chief asset at the England helm, he may prove even better suited to his revised brief; kicking expectation down the track. A man for the long ball or the long game.
It certainly bought him a quiet week.
So they must wait now for Adnan, who undoubtedly can’t wait to come on board after all he has seen and read this week.
After all, as their former Prime Minister Henry John Temple once put it: “If I were not English, I would wish to be English.” And he didn’t mean because Belgium are already well stocked in the wide areas.
Alas, nobody sent Jack the memo.
Before we get to Jack’s thoughts on the broader, more delicate matter of nationality, we might reflect on his idea of Englishness, which combines the realism of Thomas Hardy with the stoicism advocated by Rudyard Kipling into what we now know to be the belief system of the Latter Day Church of JT.
Where worshippers may bend the knee, but only to lunge. “We are English. We tackle hard, are tough on the pitch and are hard to beat. You think of Spain and you think technical but you think of England and you think they are brave and they tackle hard. We have to remember that.”
A statement that may have brought on an epiphany for anybody wondering why Jack is constantly falling on his arse.
Looking at him play football against West Brom last Sunday, one could only speculate about what kind of malaise was affecting him. While Mesut Ozil glides through his early weeks in London without dirtying his togs, Wilshere — previously Arsenal’s Ozil — is sliding and scrambling and feuding.
And giving the ball away.
A man well capable of dropping his shoulder to set himself free is running up blind alleys begging to be mugged.
And now we know why. It turns out this was a crisis deeper than confidence. Jack is forgetting everything he knows and remembering who he is. Jack is lunging for his identity.
“The only people who should play for England are English people,” blurted Jack, trying to make some sense of how things should be organised, but tossing a nice line to the lunatic fringe who are never far away when any kind of national question is debated.
In one sense, an era of nationally-flexible players like Januzaj would reboot international football and bring about a welcome dissolution of all the old preconceptions, so everyone could start fresh.
But that solution wouldn’t really suit us, since England, Spain, Italy and Germany would end up with all the best players. So we must hope that England work out their identity crisis another way.
And we have skin in that game too.
Whatever happened in Cologne last night, it’s unlikely to have Joachim Low revising his ideas about our own identity.
“It really doesn’t matter who plays for Ireland or who wears an Ireland shirt because at the end of the day, they are more or less similar. They all play the same way and it’s in their DNA that they all play the Irish way.”
And of course this Irish way is a mutation of the English way; own-label lunging.
We would like to think we once had our own way. In his new book, Eamon Dunphy argues again that it was Big Jack who killed off the ‘distinctly Irish culture’ embodied by men like Carey, Giles and Brady.
But grafted as we are to them now, all we could do this week was welcome the establishment of a task force charged with reviving the English game.
At least, we could welcome it until we heard who was chosen to represent modern football on the commission; one of great lungers, a man who played for Gilesy’s team but drove him to distraction over the years.
A man who once told us that “wasn’t a mistimed tackle, just very, very late”.
Never mind who succeeds Kinger, our identity is now in the hands of Danny Mills.
We may as well lunge on our swords.
We learned this week that Alex Ferguson’s new office isn’t based at Old Trafford. Or Carrington, Manchester United’s training complex. Instead, Fergie spends his days at the HQ of his son John, so as not to cast a shadow over Moyesy.
It may or may not be a related matter, but the week also brought us this message: “Beckham — Arguably the greatest ball player of all time.”
The message was accompanied by a photograph of Becks, taking a free-kick in his Manchester United shirt, assuming the pose that would later become a logo.
The source of this pretty unwinnable argument? The official Manchester United Twitter account.
Six months ago, Manchester United didn’t have an official Twitter account. Even if it did, could you imagine a young buck in marketing typing out those words without looking over his shoulder and being very afraid? “He couldn’t put on a coaching session to save his life. He couldn’t even put out the cones,” spluttered Joey Barton, about Fergie this week, another man growing braver at this time of great change.
He won’t worry too much about Becks, or Twitter, but Moyesy will have to keep an eye out for brave men running with their own ideas.
Fergie kept more than cones in their place.
Knew his central defensive partners well, judging by this line in Dennis Bergkamp’s new book Stillness and Speed. “People say massage only came to us when David Platt came back from Italy but David O’Leary was doing self-massage almost 20 years earlier.”
Genius on Schteve McClaren… “In this age when everyone wants a foreign accent in the dugout, Steve deserves another chance.”
The Long Island education authority has banned all ball games from its playgrounds to avoid injuries. Soccer balls, footballs, baseballs “or any other equipment that might harm a child or school friends” are now forbidden. Foam ‘nerf balls’ may be used with caution.
Gilesy knew this day would come.
