The last refuge
Michael Henderson
OPINIONS, as Brian Clough, the great football manager, once said, make the world go round — and Cloughy should know. He had a few. When contrasting views appear in the same newspaper, as they have done recently in the Mail on Sunday, they make even more interesting reading. Before the World Cup, which ends — hoorah! — this weekend, Peter Hitchens took issue with the 'bogus patriotism' of England's supporters. Victory, he said, 'would make precisely no difference' to life as it is lived in this country. Football, he pronounced, with the certainty of one who dislikes being contradicted, 'does not matter'.
When England lost tamely to Brazil and returned home, Patrick Collins returned serve. Collins, the paper's star sportswriter and a columnist of exceptional quality, wrote that, for the moment at least, we are living in a different country'. Ho-hum, are we really, Pat? It looks pretty much the same to me.
Pat, I know. I have never met Hitchens, although I have read his book, The Abolition of Britain, which should be compulsory reading for all A-level students, or whatever the exam is called these days. One doesn't have to agree with all of his opinions to recognise the book as a valuable piece of social history. Nevertheless, I side with him, and not Collins. The land to which Pat
returned is the one which he left four weeks ago. The obsession with football is still as intense, as idiotic, as corrosive. England's progress to the quarter-final provided some pleasure — of course it did — but it would be unwise to put it higher than that.
Wandering around England in the last month. I haven't noticed a greater spread of happiness. Giddiness, yes. But as I weaved through a crowd of drunken young men and women cavorting in Oldham town centre, watched by dozens of police officers tooledup to deal with miscreants (this, mind, was three o'clock in the afternoon), it was not happiness I saw on those booze-addled faces.
Even the appearance of so many national flags is disconcerting. There's nothing wrong with honest patriotic feelings, but you've only got to walk into the pub to see that many of the flag-wavers only feel patriotic when there is football on the box — and that's not patriotism at all. Politicians, spotting an easy route to goal, pander to this. Tony Blair said after England's defeat that he was 'devastated'. Just consider that use of language. If he had a sense of proportion, or decency, he would feel ashamed. England's footballers play poorly and lose a game, and the Prime Minister is devastated. What sort of man is this?
The newspapers are just as had, putting football on the front pages as well as on the back, day after day. Television is worse. BBC and ITV have led their news bulletins with breathless reports from the England 'camp', bumping everything up to a level that is unsustainable. As for the pundits . . . no, it has all been said.
This has been a bad World Cup, for all sorts of reasons. Sociologically, though, the English response has been interesting. Anthony Daniels, that piercing observer of modern British life, once accompanied a group of England supporters to a game in Rome and wrote a superb article about the trip and the downwardly mobile aspirations of his fellow travellers, for whom aping supposed working-class behaviour was a symbol of true virtue.
So Hitchens is right and Collins, for once, is not. In the meantime, could the BBC ask Daniels to give the next Reith Lectures? Nobody knows more about his subject.
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