Those Feet by David Winner

Author:David Winner [WINNER, DAVID]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO000000; SPO040000; SPO066000; SPO019000; SPO041000
ISBN: 9781468309294
Publisher: ABRAMS (Ignition)
Published: 2014-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

6. THE PHANTOM LIMB

When Italy-based Swedish coach Sven-Göran Eriksson was appointed as the first non-English manager of the England football team, Jeff Powell of the Daily Mail denounced ‘this insult to our national pride’ in sumptuously morbid terms: ‘The mother country of football, birth-place of the greatest game, has finally gone from the cradle to the shame. England’s humiliation knows no end. All that is left for the football men of England is to pull the sackcloth up over our heads and let the grave-dancers pile on the ashes.’ England, he declared, had been ‘lowered into the ranks of football’s banana republics’ and the ‘rest of the world would be laughing at us’.

Admirably, Powell held to his anti-Eriksson line even when it became clear foreigners weren’t laughing, English football hadn’t died and Sven was actually quite good. Powell is often mocked for his jingoism, but his writing fizzes, and here he evocatively captures the essence of something which is never far from the surface in England: the almost biblical sense of loss, of a nation gone to the dogs. ‘Mother country’ … ‘shame’ … ‘grave-dancers’ … ‘humiliation’ … ‘laughing at us’ … ‘banana’… As the psychiatrist said of Basil Fawlty, there’s enough material here for an entire conference. But the notion of English football as a vehicle for national degradation is widely held. And it’s really not Jeff Powell who’s the basket-case. It is the English themselves, or at least the side of them which loves to wallow in the idea that they are, collectively, washed-up.

As we shall see, such feelings are shared to a large degree across the spectrum. John le Carré observed: ‘We have gone down the slide of materialism into something close to self-hatred. We’re in a national psychological condition. When you come back from abroad, you are aware of how unhappy and dysfunctional our whole country has become. It’s like visiting a much-loved old relative who has fallen on hard times. It isn’t just the weather. We look like a nation in mourning. Coming here from affluent Europe to me is reminiscent of arriving in Eastern Europe from Western Europe.’

During Euro 2000, when English hooligans disgraced the nation off the field and the England team performed feebly on it, Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett reflected on the near-universal ‘preoccupation with the awfulness of being British’. The tabloids had taken ironic comfort from a new study which seemed to claim that on average, the sex act in Britain lasts twenty-one minutes—seven minutes longer than in Italy (‘We’re Champions of Europe—at Nookie!’). Closer reading of the statistics showed this wasn’t quite true. Brazilians were the world’s sex champs (more than thirty minutes on average) and the French had sex more often than us. In fact, the only sexual arena where Britain really scored was in its huge numbers of unmarried pregnant teenagers. Almost every day, reports confirmed the British sense of being useless and depraved. Surveys depicted the UK as the worst country in the world for kissing, asthma,

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