The total lack of expectation can work in England's favour in Poland and Ukraine this summer. They will arrive as the most overcooked underdogs in sporting history
Football is a game whose followers believe in portents. "And no side have won a European Championship finals match on a Wednesday with a team made up of players whose surnames contain fewer than 62 vowels," the commentator will offer. "And the Croatians here, Danny Mills, can muster just 48 between them. And you have to ask yourself if that will be significant."
This is nowhere truer than when it comes to following England. Every event is sifted through for good omens. You can guarantee that at some point in the next fortnight somebody will offer: "Now, the city of Donetsk was founded by a Welshman named John Hughes. And the England goalkeeper Joe Hart was given his big break in the Premier League by another Welshman named Hughes. Mark Hughes! And what could that mean for England's chances, I wonder?" And they'll have a chuckle in their voice to imply they aren't actuallyserious. But you know deep down they are.
A few moments after the merciful conclusion of Fabio Capello's team's opening game at the 2010 World Cup – a performance so formless and dull that getting angry seemed an inappropriate response, like shaking your fist at custard – a friend called in a state of mild elation. While I had been struggling to break my hands free from the grip they had taken on the arms of the chair, my friend had been busy chiselling out uplifting facets in a manner not seen since the days when Steve McClaren was dynamiting positives from the apparently desolate surface of Middlesbrough's 7-0 defeat to Arsenal.
"This has got to be good for us in the long run," he tweeted dementedly. "I mean, we can't play that badly again, can we?"
His attitude illustrated the madness inherent in supporting the England football team. There is a seed of it in all of us. And while I laughed derisively at my friend's comment, somewhere inside it began to germinate, warmed by the sunny recollection of a similarly desperate game in Mexico 26 years earlier, when Ray Wilkins had been sent off for throwing the ball at the referee (arguably the only aggressive action with a ball in his entire international career), watered by remembrance of Gary Lineker's hat-trick in the next game against Poland, nurtured by the knowledge that in the chaotic universe of football even something as seemingly insignificant as the introduction of Steve Hodge into the starting 11 can result in a tidal wave of national rejoicing.
Luckily the game against Algeria – a yawning chasm of stultifying incoherence the like of which I have not experienced since my last double physics lesson in 1976 – sprayed Agent Orange all over it, saving me considerable psychological pain in the knockout stage.
And now here we are again. "The total lack of expectation is going to work in our favour, big time," is the opinion that has been thunderously gathering momentum in the national football Twittersphere since the announcement of Roy Hodgson's European Championship squad last week. Yes, it appears that England's biggest chance is having no chance at all.
This means that in the coming weeks Hodgson's key task is to keep an eraser handy so that he can maintain England's written-off status whenever somebody tries to use it as a reason to write us back in again. It will be a difficult job even for the venerable Roy, a man appointed, one suspects, largely for his ability to hurl a wet blanket over the sizzling barbecue briquettes of hype, which would likely have burned the shed down if Harry "He understands the mentality of the English footballer" Redknapp had been put in charge. Because when England play even normally sensible people such as David Pleat suffer temporary insanity blathering – as he did six years ago – that "I believe Steven Gerrard can be England's Churchill".
Ignoring the fact that England already has a Churchill – Churchill – this statement conjured pleasant images of the Liverpool dynamo wearing a bow-tie, sucking on a cigar and sitting in the hole behind a lone striker writing A History of the English Speaking People, but otherwise made altogether limited sense except as a signifier of the fathomless madness.
Hodgson has acted with obvious shrewdness in bringing in Gary Neville as his assistant. The former Manchester United man seems unlikely to excite anybody – except Liverpool fans, obviously.
As a right-back his trundling no-frills manner was neatly summed up in 2002 by the then BBC pundit Graeme Le Saux who informed us that "Gary is the sort of player you only really appreciate when he is not there". Strangely enough, this is also true of Le Saux's commentary.
Hodgson and Neville have their work cut out. Because the current fear in the England camp is that if national belief in the advantages of an absence of burgeoning presumption starts to accelerate, while faith in the abilities of a team unburdened by the "fear factor" rises (for in football there is no factor to fear, but the fear factor itself), and excitement over just going out there and playing our natural game on the off chance that with a bit of luck and a following wind we can maybe put a smile back on the face of the Three Lions spirals upwards out of control, England will arrive in Poland and Ukraine as the most overcooked underdogs in sporting history.
Although that could just work in our favour, if you think about it. Read More
انسخ الكود التالى و ضعه فى موقعك او مدونتك.
