World Cup: Don’t mention the media

You may not be aware of this yet, but England will play Germany in the last 16.

When it became clear that it was England v Germany next up, I had mixed feelings.

I very much like Germany as a country, and a people. I have learnt “ein bisschen” German, but not as much as I would like. I also have Germanic ancestry from the 18th century.

So in a footballing and a personal sense I am greatly looking forward to the match on Sunday. May the best
team win and all that (I don’t think that means England, but who knows).

On the other hand, I am sorely vexed at the prospect, entirely because of the ashen media volcano that always erupts around this fixture.

You see, England and Germany have twice played each other for keeps on a far larger field.

Most likely you, or quite possibly even your parents, were not even born when the full time whistle was blown on those encounters. Yet they still influence your life every day in ways that you cannot understand.

Football is for many an escape from the trials of life, a chance to throw their weight behind a cause that can have no ill effect on their day-to-day lives beyond work place banter.

Yet, when it comes to the England team, that becomes impossible. Every encounter, it seems, carries with it some socio-political or historical undertone, be it a hand-me-down from imperial prejudices or the remnants of some distant conflict.

As Simon Kuper wrote in the Financial Times recently:

The team is engulfed by warrior rhetoric. “Their finest hour (and a half)”, was The Sun newspaper’s headline before England-Algeria. The reference to Winston Churchill’s wartime speech of exactly 70 years earlier was typical. In England, the football team is usually discussed as if it were fighting a war. The tabloids produce this rhetoric, but many players and managers – great consumers of tabloids – swallow it. Hence all the talk in the England camp about the need for “spirit”. This irritates those who believe that British soldiers of the two world wars are not the only possible ideals of masculine behaviour.

Sport, it was once said, is war without the guns. To the Victorian sporting codifiers and missionaries this was certainly true – sport was a way to foster the rugged manliness that they so craved.

Much of the rest of the world has left this attitude behind. Yes, sport still excites passions and tempers, but it is not informed, for the most part, by the rhetoric of war. The England football team is one of the exceptions to that rule – the same cannot be said of our cricket team, where international relations with supporters of other nations are of mostly good natured banter.

With all of this in mind, it is no wonder that a match between England and Germany will bring out the worst in our media, and this is not always limited to the tabloids.

The days of the infamous “Achtung! Surrender” front page in the Daily Mirror before the Euro ‘96 semi-final, may seem behind us – unless you “read” the Daily Star, in which case you are not reading this – but the general theme is the same.

We will still get a full dose of “don’t mention the score”, “our brave boys”, the great escape, dambusters and all the rest, from both media and fans. Hopefully the vuvuzelas will drown out the chants in the stadium, but don’t bank on it.

There is no relevance to any of this filth beyond the names of the “protaganists” (whoops, there we go again). Neither country or it’s football team bears any relation to the nations of 1914 or 1938.

The current German team is a very multi-cultural outfit, a fact that is celebrated amongst Germans in a way I strongly suspect it would not be in England. You might argue about the youthfulness and vibrancy of the England team, but it’s players too have a their own multi-cultural roots, if not as diversely.

Additionally, our “great footballing rivalry” with Germany is almost completely one sided. Yes, there is a footballing significance to any match against another major footballing nation, but otherwise for most Germans it is just another game. They are aware of the footballing history between the two nations, of course, but it does not inform their view on the outcome of this one.

It’s not as if our nation is free of skeletons in the closet, but I doubt the American newspapers, for instance, were full of references to Kings Mountain or Yorktown before the opening game in Group C.

So this really is all about the English. Are we able to support our national team without descending to the lowest common denominator?

If the reports of English fans’ good behaviour in South Africa are anything to go by, then yes we can, yet this is a fact entirely lost on much of our tubthumping and moronic media.

For England this can never be just a game, or even a healthy footballing rivalry, until we shed ourselves of the need to equate football with war.

Perhaps if we did, we might just find that football becomes a much more enjoyable game.