Memorable, historic, unifying. This is England

What better reason to give in to the unrelenting clamour for me to restart blogging (an off-hand remark in passing every few months) than potentially the greatest night in England's glorious sporting history?

In a single night, 11 heroic and passionate warriors sacrificially gave their all to unite not just the nation but the whole continent. At a time of almost unprecedented political turmoil and cultural upheaval, what else could have brought about such a sense of togetherness and universal agreement? What else could have brought Wales, Russia, Iran, Australia, South Africa and the whole of Europe to share an undivided opinion? 
What other unifying force could have led to people from all spheres of life and from across the full political spectrum to be so unanimously of one mind? No longer are we debating formations, starting line ups, tactics or even what might constitute success. Such was the scarcely describable performance and result of the English national football team against Iceland. 

Unquestionably it will go down in history to be discussed, remembered and referred to. A landmark against which any future results even remotely similar (if that is even possible) will be compared. Already the benefits are being felt by the journalism industry, sprouting a plethora of articles discussing every possible angle and perspective. My personal favourite is this creative journalist's view on England's player ratings, he must truly have put his heart and soul into giving every single outfield player a 4/10. 

As the rugby and even cricket teams attempt to sow discord by actually winning, we can thank our footballers for their efforts in the cause of international unity. As we turn our attention to Wimbledon, the Olympics, the Ryder Cup (essentially anything to distract ourselves from what we just saw) let's be grateful that we potentially move on from a manager who has only lost one match in the Euros (Roy) to someone with his own outstanding record at the Euros (Gareth):



Exciting times ahead...

Who's Daring to Dream?

Among the many things I love about the World Cup is the huge variety of opinions, articles, talking points, disagreements and perspectives it provokes. Go on any decent website and there are as many different articles as you could hope to read, discussing every possible aspect of the tournament. You can read about the teams, players, previous tournaments, the infrastructure, the impact on the hosts, impact on previous hosts, basically anything.

But without doubt the best thing (possibly including the matches, that remains to be seen) is the debate (yes I mean arguments). Who's in your All-time XI, who's in your fantasy team, who will win the Golden Boot, do Messi/Ronaldo need to win to be considered among the best players ever, who should start for England and how far will we get? There is virtually nothing on which you'll find yourself in complete agreement with someone else. If you do, the only thing I can recommend is you debate things a bit more.

Of all the contentious issues, there is one that most clearly identifies the optimists, pessimists, realists and idiots. How will England do? 
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about England's chances going into Euro 2012. Before the tournament, there was a genuine sense of realism about the England football team and our chances in such a way that there was no huge feeling of devastation when Diamanti tucked home the decisive penalty. Winning the group failed to inspire any genuine hope and rightly so given the insipid performance produced against the Italians.

So with it all kicking off on Thursday evening, how are we feeling this time around? There's a certain satisfying symmetry with England starting where they left off in the Euros, aiming to avenge that defeat and put right the dour and lacklustre style of play from 2 years ago. Lots has been made of the exciting young talents of Oxlade-Chamberlain, Sterling, Lallana and Barkley but whether they're quite enough to inspire blind optimism in a naturally wary nation remains to be seen. Surely it will be the same old story. Surely warm up draws against the might of Ecuador and Honduras tell us all we need to know. Surely...

I can't help myself, I'm going to put it out there that by 1am on Sunday morning, there'll be the faintest of glints in the eye of even the most cynical of England fans. 

Why Aren't We That Disappointed?

And so, after two weeks of increasingly disappointing performances somehow produced an increasing level of logic-defying but futile hope, the inevitable finally came on Sunday evening. 

England were very much as England were expected to be; relatively solid and disciplined, fairly uncreative and generally hard-working. They also profited from good fortune on a number of occasions - the Swedish goalie choosing to fall over rather than save Walcott's shot, the byline referee proving himself utterly redundant in failing to achieve the specific role for which he exists against Ukraine, and Italy apparently having watched an 'Art of Finishing' video by the offspring of Emile Heskey and Andy Carroll. 

Despite the temporary and somewhat diluted joy of winning the group, the whole tournament had a decidedly resigned feel to it for an English fan. Admittedly, there will be some of you reading this who should hang their heads in shame because, despite my best warnings, you allowed yourselves to believe. One such regular reader (an assumption grounded on absolutely zero evidence), Sir Bobby Charlton, appears to have allowed the inhalation of some Olympic fumes to cloud his rational judgement.

But I trust the majority of you did not succumb so easily to such a moment of weakness, instead holding fast to a steely and negative resolve, thoroughly founded in both reality and experience. I do not pretend to be any kind of national sentiment thermometer but the pervading attitude seems to be more of melancholy acceptance rather than outrage or bitter disappointment. Of course there might be a number of reasons for us generally taking something of an 'oh well' attitude:

1) Losing to Italy saved ourselves the embarrassment of what would surely have been Bloemfontain Part 2. Personally I couldn't see Gomez, Klose et al. replicating the same profligacy as Balotelli and Cassano. 31 shots and 0 goals isn't exactly a devastating return.
2) We are truly taken in by the frankly absurd positivity coming out from both media and management, after all, we didn't even want to win, we were just there for the learning opportunities and as character building for the young players (by the way, Welbeck is the only player under 25 who started the match, and 4 players were over 30, but let's not mention that).
3) We just didn't expect that much. We recognised that the reality was that we were outplayed in 3 of the 4 games, and pretty unconvincing in the other one, so although we were miraculously unbeaten, we didn't deserve to go any further, and can just be satisfied that we had a go. But even that doesn't really hold up to scrutiny...

Heading home -
probably a good idea

As I looked at before, England were never going to win with glorious passing or attractive attacking moves, we just don't have the technical ability. What was so disappointing to watch then on Sunday was that we seemed so slow and tired as well. Where was the pace, power and stamina that the English Premiership is renowned for? Instead, the slow and not exactly attractive Italian build-up wore us down and by the end we were too weary to even chase after them having given the ball away (one thing we proved experts at).

Yes it was penalties, and yes, things could have been so different. Of course I would much rather be supporting England than Italy on Thursday night but the truth is we were pretty dismal all tournament and I think we can all agree that it's not the end of the world that it ended when it did.

Reasons to be Fearful

As English football fans, we (this weekend I suppose that's some form of Royal 'We') seem to be stuck in some form of sadistic biennial cycle, which we can observe and discuss but ultimately do absolutely nothing about. Every other autumn, we forget the summer that's just passed, and start again with fresh belief. New players, often a new manager, new qualification campaign, new hope that this time things will be different. Generally speaking we qualify convincingly (Steve McLaren aside) and often pick up narrow victories in thoroughly irrelevant friendly matches.

Consequently, we normally have reason to be relatively optimistic about our chances heading into major tournaments. Despite history not being in our favour, we do have one of the strongest domestic leagues and genuinely world-class players (and theoretically managers).

It's all very promising until we actually play, at which point a mixture of ill-discipline, goalkeeping blunders, refereeing errors, penalties and just poor performance combine to ensure the return of that sickening anticlimactic dismay and disappointment with which we're all so familiar. And thus the cycle is completed again, with cries of "the same old story", "there we go again" and "I knew it" echoing out in pubs and lounges across the country.

And yet, 2 years later, against our better judgement and logical reasoning, we believe again that this could be our year, and maybe football will come home after all. Then the tournament goes down we all knew it would and the players have an extra week or two of summer holidays. The same old story.

Well this year, leading up to Euro 2012, it's different. Maybe I'm faithless but I can't see any reasons to be cheerful. More like a few reasons to be fearful.

The main one is our squad. When announced it made most of the country grimace and want to close the web page or turn off your phone. It was like when you're watching a match and it becomes increasingly obvious the team you're supporting is going to lose, all you want to do is leave the stadium or turn the TV off and forget about it.

The originally named squad was bad enough, complete with the inexplicable omission of Micah Richards and Aaron Lennon, alongside the equally inexplicable inclusion of Stuart "I bring absolutely nothing to the team" Downing and Andy "I played a bit better in May so that's good enough to start for England." Carroll. But now that the physio's room is like a scene from Saving Private Ryan, we're calling on pretty much anyone who can even count the Lions on our shirts. In all honesty I'm nearly ready to check I've got my passport handy in case the barrel-scraping gets out of hand.

Welbeck demonstrates to Carroll
the general idea behind being a striker

Make no mistake, wins over Norway and Belgium are not sufficient to convince us that maybe there is a shred of hope after all. All this talk of being the new Greece '04 and taking the title with tactical defensive displays is absurd. Yes, we did contain the opposition well and keep two clean sheets, but we weren't exactly playing Spain or Germany were we? If we can do the same against France next Monday, maybe then we can discuss it. I am glad that endless cycle of hope and despair is broken, even if it is by having zero hope and zero expectation. So much so that even that well-known nation of "soccer" analysts, the USA, has picked up on our dismal chances this summer.

I'm a fan of Hodgson, I think he's an astute guy and should ensure we don't embarrass ourselves, but I doubt he's ever going to have the nation on its feet in elation. That said, I don't subscribe to the view that we only want to win if we win well. Look at Spain's results from the World Cup:
Spain 0-1 Switzerland (Groups)
Spain 2-0 Honduras (Groups)
Spain 2-1 Chile (Groups)
Spain 1-0 Portugal (Last 16)
Spain 1-0 Paraguay (QF)
Spain 1-0 Germany (SF)
Spain 1-0 Holland (Final - AET)

If we come away with a semi-final appearance, and only a few goals scored, it'll be our most successful performance since '96 and no-one should complain at that (we will though)