Me and Sterl and the Crying Girl
Every tournament, I tell myself it will be different. I tell myself that this time I will be objective, I will be dispassionate. History has taught me that they will break my heart in the dullest way imaginable— they will put my heart through a meatgrinder for 90 minutes and leave me with nothing but an advert for Gazprom and a couple of nice memes. I tell myself that it’s eleven multi-millionaires kicking a ball at a goal, in the name of a country that is becoming crueller and colder by the day. I roll my eyes as Mark Pougatch’s drab voice drones on about maybe this being “our year”, I shudder a little as the flags come out, I steer a wide berth from Kieran Trippier’s terrifying face appearing on boxes of beer. I tell myself that we’re a dull team, justifiably hated by the neutrals, wildly overestimated by our inflated sense of self-worth. I tell myself that this time, I will not care.
And then they kick off. And I’m sucked in. It’s over. I’m England ’til I die.
Let me be clear: I don’t love England — it’s more that they imprinted on me at a young age and now the scent’s never going to wear off. That night in St Etienne in 1998 when they played Argentina at the World Cup — I was done. Owen’s run, Beckham’s red card, Campbell’s disallowed goal, Batty’s penalty miss — for some reason my nine-year-old heart looked at that relentless pain and said “This is it for you. You will never be free from this again. Inexplicably, your happiness is going to be tied to this cursed side. Sorry about that.”
And I mean that, by the way. The English football team is cursed. From a football perspective, they have been at the exact most infuriating level of ability throughout most of my lifetime — too bad to actually win anything, but not bad enough to fail to qualify for tournaments and stop giving people stupid, ugly hope. I started watching football in 1998 — between then and 2016 we qualified for nine out of ten major tournaments but only won two knockout games. Watching England has been like pushing a rock up a mountain for two years, and just when you think you’re going to get it to the top, a defensive lapse by Phil Neville lets the Romanians in to steal it and chuck back down again.
But the England team is also cursed from a cultural perspective. We know the trade-off, the awful alliance that supporting England forces one to make — we have to accept the fact that we’re now on the same side as idiots who trash city centres, who sing songs about German bombers and who make women feel unsafe at grounds and online. Football has united us in an unholy bond, and it’s shameful. It’s almost like a Greek tragedy — when England lose, I’m miserable; but when England win — everything I’ve ever wanted — the worst people in the country are unleashed, and that’s infinitely worse.
And so it was on Tuesday, in the heady, delirious aftermath of England’s greatest win of my lifetime, that we had to come to terms with a very simple but upsetting fact — a substantial number of England fans are complete dickheads.
At the end of the game, the camera panned over to the German supports in Wembley and fixed on a little girl in red, yellow and black, with little German flags on her cheeks, sobbing her eyes out. Now you could argue quite reasonably that it was Very Weird of UEFA to show this footage at all — but then seeing distraught children at a football match is something that has, weirdly, become normalised over recent years. Sky Sports seem to insist that every “final day of the season” package involves at least one child (no older than 10) just screaming in existential pain as they watch their team get relegated. I don’t completely know the reason why — maybe they think it’s good TV, or maybe seeing a child in distress is something that keeps Rupert Murdoch young. Who knows? Besides, if we’re starting a list of moments of questionable footage that UEFA shouldn’t have shown at this European Championships, this wouldn’t even crack the Top 10. The point is that it was gross and sad and I’m not going to link to it here, because honestly, who wants to watch a child cry?
As it turns out, a lot of England fans at Wembley. As the footage was shown on the big screen, a huge cheer went up around the ground. Some tried to claim it was for Thomas Muller being substituted (because, sure, OK, we cheer German substitutions now? In the 88th minute? Right?), but it’s clear from watching it that, yes, that is the sound of 40,000 English people laughing at a traumatised young girl. If there’s one thing that makes a really, really big win suddenly feel awful, it’s that exact sound. I would argue that the sound of 40,000 English people laughing at a traumatised young girl is one of the worst sounds there is. You could play it to any animal and they would be immediately embarrassed for our entire species.
It’s heartbreaking, it’s shameful, and what’s worse is I know there are going to be people reading this even now and thinking “it’s fine, it’s just banter! It’s just England fans getting caught up in the moment! They’re letting out fifty five years of frustration!”
Firstly, I don’t think you get to do “banter” near a crying eight year old. If an eight year old is crying and you’re trying banter, something’s gone wrong. Secondly, “historic football rivalries” is not carte blanche for you to act like a dickhead. You can’t be cruel to a child and say it’s fine because her team beat your team seventeen years before she was born. This is basic stuff.
And if you thought the reaction in the stadium was bad, it was, inevitably, worse online. I’m not going to link to them here because honestly just reading it makes me very sad, but expect the usual references — Nazis, World War II, grown men generally loving the fact that a small child they had never met before was miserable. While it wasn’t universal — many England fans were suitably disgusted and a Gofundme has been set up in honour of the crying girl (exactly for what it’s not clear) — it’s callous and tragically consistent with a fan-base who has booed other countries’ national anthems, and their own players for trying to combat racial injustice.
What is it about us that makes us uniquely petty, bitter and pathetic when it comes to football? What is this loathsome urge that makes us so predisposed to revelling in other people’s misfortune? It is, sadly, very English — clinging to past glories and, having little identity of our own to embrace, seeks to tear down everyone else’s.
Because what is England’s identity in 2021? Internationally, it’s the same as Britain’s — the two are frequently used synonymously (one of the German papers even referred to Thomas Mueller’s miss as whistling past the “British net”). At home, it’s a more uncertain one. According to a BBC study into English identity three years ago, it is one of conservatism and nostalgia — one which, compared to the Scottish or Welsh identity, sees its past as infinitely more glorious than its muddy future. 45% of young people in England identify as English — that’s compared to 82% who identify as British — and that, perhaps, is the best indicator. England has an identity defined less by substance, more by absence — Britain, minus Scotland and Wales.
The England football team, then, is somewhat unique — a national team for a nation that barely exists in the minds of a lot of people living there. And whereas the success of most international teams unites a nation, England’s success divides one — the schisms between the other countries in the United Kingdom are always laid bare when England start to do well. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor show their support in tweets for England but not for Scotland or Wales, while the BBC starts to obsess over England’s chances, seemingly forgetting that three out of four countries in Britain do not care in the slightest. It’s a conundrum that’s not unique to football — somewhat inexplicably, British Airways sponsor the English rugby team, which led to embarrassment last year when they wished England luck on social media against Wales, another British side. While Wales and Scotland can define their own sense of nationality against “Britishness”, for England it’s too all-encompassing, too entwined. What is England without Britain? What is Britain without England? As the United Kingdom begins to crumble — with Scotland threatening independence, Wales finding its own progressive national identity and Northern Ireland cut off from Britain by Brexit — England is left, confused, nostalgic, inward-looking, falling apart at the seams.
This defensive, fragile national identity is reflected in what the country chooses to mythologise about English football in the modern era — we are a country that traditionally revels in defeat instead of celebrating victories.
Look at Italia ’90. The overriding memory isn’t the incredible extra time victories over Belgium and Cameroon — it’s the defeat to West Germany. Gazza’s tears, Lineker’s look to the touchline, Pearce’s penalty miss… numbing, terrible defeat.
Euro ’96 (before Tuesday, the competition that featured England’s only knockout victory in a European Championships) is remembered less for the wins against the Netherlands and Spain, and more for how it ended — Gazza’s miss in extra time, “quickly Kevin will he score?”, the tame penalty, Southgate’s hands behind his head… numbing, terrible defeat.
I could (and will) go on. France ‘98? Beckham’s sending off. Euro 2000? Neville’s last minute foul. World Cup 2002? Seaman chipped by Ronaldinho. Euro 2004? Beckham’s penalty misses. World Cup 2006? Ronaldo’s wink. World Cup 2010? The ghost goal of Frank Lampard and annihilation by Germany. Euro 2012? Pirlo’s panenka. World Cup 2014? Gerrard’s mis-header, Suarez’s last minute goal. Euro 2016? Iceland. Every damn time, numbing, terrible defeat.
To be fair to England fans and media, part of the reason we revel in our misery is because there’s so much more of it in the modern era than success. And one could argue that it’s natural to focus on how a tournament ended rather than how it started — it’s ultimately pointless to rave about Michael Owen’s goal against Argentina in 1998 or Wayne Rooney’s performance against Croatia in 2004 if you don’t win anything. (And plenty of Scots and Welsh people would say that we rave about those two moments plenty enough as it is, thanks very much.)
The point is though that for England fans, the crushing, awful pain defines the experience. It’s how we see tournaments — not as a chance to win, but to delay that pain for as long as possible. Obviously this isn’t unique to England — it’s how Euro 2020 will end for 23 out of 24 teams competing, after all. But perhaps because of that lack of identity outside of sport, or perhaps because of the unexciting football we traditionally play, for England the pain is all there is. I sobbed my eyes out at every tournament exit from 1998 to 2004, and I know plenty of other England fans who were exactly the same way. We’ve all been that little German girl, which makes the glee at her misfortune all the more confusing and abhorrent.
If England’s fragile national identity comes from sport alone, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Sport is a zero sum game — there can only be one winner, and if you’re seeing your opponent crying, that means you’ve won. If football is a game of pain — as it is for England fans — passing the pain on to your opponent is all you can do. But that schadenfreude is a toxic, petty trait that is upsettingly English (albeit with a German name). We’re so insecure, so defined by what we’re not, so pessimistic in sport, culture and politics, that we cannot imagine a form of joy that isn’t dependent on someone else’s misery, a form of pride that isn’t dependent on someone else’s humiliation, a form of hope for the future that isn’t dependent on the cruelty of the past.
But there is hope for the future — one that’s far away from the tabloid fixation on the “old enemies”, one that isn’t defined by pain, one that is actually progressive and looking forward. The England team playing now are pioneers — not just in how they’ve performed on the pitch where, let’s not forget, they’ve already achieved things that no England team have done for more than half a century. They’re effecting social change — from Marcus Rashford’s campaign for free school lunches to Raheem Sterling donating money to the victims of Grenfell Tower, to the team’s decision to take the knee even in the face of (manufactured, manipulative) outrage from right-wing pundits.
They’re building a new identity under the banner of England. Is it an “English” identity? Not in a traditional sense, in that it doesn’t define itself against Scotland or Wales, nor does it obsess over its European neighbours and relish their failings. It doesn’t demand loyalty to itself alone — many players are proud of their heritage, be their family from Jamaica, St Kitts or Ireland. It understands that England is not a monolith — that there are children growing up, as many of these players did, in abject poverty, in conditions that politicians who tweet their vapid support for this team couldn’t begin to imagine.
It is trying to make football a more inclusive family, a place where all fans — black, white, straight, queer — are accepted and loved. It is an identity which doesn’t seek to change history, but learn from it and seek redemption from it — the narrative of Gareth Southgate, the man who missed the penalty in 1996, being the manager to lead England to their first win against Germany in 55 years, embodies that entirely.
It is an identity which rejects the premise of the flag-waving nationalistic populists who seek to sow hatred and division among us: “We are the best because we are English, and we’ll fight anyone who says different.” Instead it seems to say: “we represent all of modern England — its flaws, its contradictions, its hope — and we will do our best to make everyone who calls it home proud.”
Will it work? A football team cannot forge a national identity alone — especially not one as complicated and insecure as England’s. But this Southgate team deserves credit for trying to bring our fan-base kicking and screaming into the 21st century. While the reaction to the poor German girl shows we have a long and painful way to go, it’s clear that no matter what this team achieves at this Euros — if it ends in unlikely glory or in the customary heartbreak — they may just have shown the way forward. Perhaps in a few years time, when I say “I’m England ’til I die”, it won’t be with sad reluctance — but with the tiniest glimmer of hope.
