Hi I’m Dan and I think I love the England team.Well, not 'love' love them. More like love spending time with them. As much as you can enjoy spending time with a group of lads who’ll happily batter a provincial DJ for not playing that “yes sir, I can boogie” song and then sneak off to give your girlfriend a walking impediment while you’re trying to sort out the shit storm they’ve created, that is.
Let me fill you in on me. I was born and bred in London and hadn’t been anywhere near a plane until I was 19. I like beer (the pissier the better), I can get sunburnt in October and I enjoy nothing more than finding new and exiting ways to incorporate swear words into other words. But I’ve never previously been an England fan. Why? Because I’m third generation Irish. I can claim my drunken stupidity on St Patrick’s Day is entirely legitimate, several hundred years on the very mention of the name Cromwell brings bile up to my back teeth and, like any good little lapsed Catholic, I have an almost superhuman ability to feel sudden and inexplicable guilt.
The strongest I’ve ever felt about an Englishman at a World Cup was back in that wonderful summer of 1994, before a red-eyed pisshead in Tipperary explained to me in very colourful language just who I was, when my nine year-old self watched Ray Houghton smash the ball into Italy’s goal. To say I hated England is probably to go too far, but it would be very fair to say that the sight of Beckham being dismissed for kicking out at Diego Simeone in 1998 and the ball sailing over a hapless David Seaman’s head four years later elicited the same sense of schadenfreude in me that many previously dyed-in-the-wool Englishmen will smugly feel when John Terry inevitability bursts into tears this summer.
Now, perhaps it depends on what circles you move in but you’d have to be living under some sort of sports-oblivious rock to have not got the sense that people don’t really like the current England team. Ashley Cole had the temerity to repeatedly cheat on the racist with a heart (and rack) of gold, Frank Lampard is the fat bastard who gets to knob the woman tipped to usurp the future ex-Mrs Cole’s role as the nation’s favourite Saturday night presenter, Wayne Rooney has actually handed over money to perform the sort of things teenage boys joke about to geriatric women, Steven Gerrard has someone managed to avoid getting done for a crime video evidence clearly shows him committing and John Terry … well, John Terry is almost impressive in his own way. He doesn’t like to be beaten, and that apparently goes for everything. Especially being a cunt.
I think my brain must be wired the wrong way though (I think doctors are calling it ‘being a Chelsea supporter), because it’s for precisely these reasons that I’ve taken a shine to England. Every little boy played at being a pirate, right? That’s what the England team are; a watered-down gang of sea-fairing vagabonds. Think about it. They’re greedy beyond comprehension. They steal other people’s women. They violently attack people for little to no reason. And children LOVE them for it. Rio Ferdinand is (EDIT: was at the time of submission) essentially Captain Jack Sparrow, but if Johnny Depp had decided to emulate Keith Richards' copious cocaine-snorting rather than the foppish mannerisms.
And then there’s how much it will upset people if England do go on to win. Imagine the look of absolute confusion on the faces of people in a pub in Highbury if John Terry, reinstated to captain following Rio’s second-round admission to rehab and Steven Gerrard’s incarceration for reacting violently to the PA choosing to start the games with the national anthems and not ABBA’s greatest hits, courageously dives to header in a 120th minute winner in the World Cup final.
There’s nothing that makes me love a team so much as the fact that everyone else despises them. And for that reason, I’d absolutely love Capello’s England to finally vanquish the ghosts of ’66.
Daniel Kelly
No comments:
Post a Comment