Ian Chappell, the flinty Australian captain, has said that after giving cricket to the world the English did nothing further to develop the game. That original gift, it might be argued, was a fairly significant bequest, but Chappell could point to postwar history. In his lifetime, cricket has been shaped by Australians, West Indians, and Indians.
Oh, the ghastliness of English football! The dim players, detached from the world in their grim mansions
It is harder to challenge the view that the English, who codified the laws of Association Football in 1863, have spent the last century resting on their oars. The national team has won the World Cup once, in 1966, when the country served as host, and has never won the European Championship, though that may change this week. Should Gareth Southgate’s players beat the Netherlands on Wednesday they will play either Spain or France in the final, in Berlin on Sunday.
Their progress so far has been blessed with good fortune. In the group stage they beat Serbia by a single goal, drew 1-1 with Denmark, who should have won, and shared a goalless snore-draw with mighty Slovenia. A grubby 2-1 win after extra time against Slovakia earned a quarter-final with Switzerland, when five successful penalty kicks proved conclusive. Not that such plain fare has bothered the cheerleaders in the television studio, where panellists were seen bouncing around during the Swiss match as though Mafeking had been relieved.
Oh, the ghastliness of English football! The dim players, detached from the world in their grim mansions. Their wives and girlfriends, dolled up for a night in Alderley Edge. And those delightful fans, forever roaring and brawling, high on booze, cocaine, and a self-importance untainted by decades of mediocrity.
Nor should we overlook the sycophantic wittering of journalists and the expertise of illiterate ex-pros who inflate a simple game with dressing-room jargon. This tournament’s gold medal for imbecility goes to the reporter who told readers that Weimar was miles away from ‘civilisation’. That’s right, the city of Goethe, Schiller, and Liszt. How lucky they are, those culture-starved Saxons and Rhinelanders, to receive our ambassadors, with their ballads of the RAF downing German bombers.
The fact is, for all the riches of the Premier League, this land has never been a first-rank footballing nation. England has produced only six genuinely great players: Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews, Bobby Moore, Gordon Banks, Bobby Charlton, and Jimmy Greaves, though Duncan Edwards and Roger Byrne, who perished in the Munich air crash of February 1958, would have graduated to that rank.
Since the first World Cup in 1930 (England opted not to take part until 1950), football has been enriched in its highest moments by continental Europeans and South Americans. One of the greatest teams represented Holland in 1974, when an XI lit up by Johan Cruyff, Johan Neeskens and Wim van Hanegem lost a World Cup final to West Germany in Munich. Four years later the Dutch lost to another host, Argentina, in Buenos Aires.
Unlucky twice, yet like the Hungarians, who lost a World Cup final to the Germans in 1954, those dazzling Hollanders changed the game in a way no Englishmen have done. In 1988 another superb Dutch team won the European Championship, spanking England along the way. They have since lost another World Cup final, in 2010, but for many people with a sense of history the men in orange shirts occupy an honoured place in football folklore.
There are some gifted players in this England side but they have been held back by the coach’s timidity. As an old hand in the Old Trafford press box once said of Manchester United’s earnest manager Dave Sexton, Mr Southgate’s idea of excitement ‘is to open a box of After Eight mints at 7.45’.
Perhaps the most gruesome of many dismal sights in this bloated championship was the Prince of Wales on his feet during the Swiss match, yelping and clenching his fists in the approved manner, to show he is one of the chaps, really. Ich dien, sir. ‘I serve’. Not ‘I join in with the oiks’. ‘We keep finding ways to win’, those tongue-tied players have been trained to say. Enough! Summon the spirit of the great Cruyff, you Hollanders, and bring down the curtain on this English farce.