Where were you at 9pm, the 30th June 1998? I was six,
allowed to stay up late for the first time and bouncing on the damask sofa in
the first house I remember living in.
There are some things you don't know when you are six: that
Argentina means "silver coast", that we had fought a war sixteen
years earlier, or that there's a place in France called Saint-Etienne that you
might one day visit. I'd just discovered who Diego Maradonna was, earlier in
the day and I was outraged.
There are some things you shouldn't know when you are six:
anger, confusion, the fallibility of adults. David Beckham was my hero and here
he was, sent off for lightly brushing Diego Simeone's calf with his boot. David
Batty's missed penalty in the shootout seems merely incidental. I had a
tantrum.
Where were you on the morning of 21st June 2002?
I was in the school hall, watching my heroes half the world away. Watching as
if in slow motion, Ronaldinho's free kick flying off at a weird angle and the
dawning realisation that it was looping over David Seaman's flailing glove. I
felt then that if only I reached hard enough I could help him claw it out
before it crossed the line. Never mind. Brazil are Brazil and they always win
and I was proud of England in defeat: I wanted to console them. To let them
know that we always lose and that was fine.
Where were you in 2004? Penalties against Portugal in the
beautiful city of Lisbon, eyes glued to the television set, one hot summer's
evening: the familiar quarter final outcome, even then, as a 12 year old
amateur pessimist.
2006? Same team. Same opponents. Same result: Owen
Hargreaves the pub quiz answer, the only Englishman to score his penalty. YouTube
is glorious: a nostalgia trap, that lets me relive my youth in shaky camera
angles, dodgy aspect ratios, old commentator's voices and Des Lynam before he left
to present Countdown. I can spend hours
on it, as an amateur pseud, filling in the gaps of my shaky childhood memory. I
can map out my pessimism: how it grew and flourished, watered by the inevitable
tragedy of English football. How they invented disappointment for me.
And it felt like tragedy. Growing up with an interest in
football lumbers you with two teams. Your club and your country. I grew up with
Manchester United in the zenith of their success. I grew up with the English
football team as the unspoken assumption in the school playground. We all
believed. This year. This was the year. It was a camouflage. Boys growing up
are taught in the playground to assimilate. To not stand out, to bray with
bullish confidence, not to have weird interests. We all liked football. It was
just what you did. It was all that was safe to talk about, so it was all that
we spoke about. Growing up, England were the antithesis of Manchester United:
they were the shadow of failure that stalked everything. From my teenage years
I sunk into pessimism, defeatism: a world view informed by the world around me
that whatever happened, we would lose. Whether that was sport or socially or my
exams.
Somewhere along the line I tried to stop caring. We didn't
make it to Euro 2008; I'd discovered birds and books and the surprise first sip
of warm bitter being pleasant, and that sport wasn't really for people like me
anyway: chubby, awkward asthmatics who got bullied by those who were better at
it than me because they could run. But 2010 was my A-levels. I spent that
summer, hot as all past summer seem, with my text books open in front of the
TV. England in South Africa, thrashing about: 11 men with the coordination of a
dying animal, being mercifully put down by a German team who could've won it. I
couldn’t pretend any more than I didn’t care.
I have shaken that pessimism off, more or less, though it
forms the foundations of my life. Subsiding is always a danger. There is
something that will always be attractive, something less painful, about the
premature expectation of disappointment.
England are through to a semi-final for the first time in my
life. The teams that seemed stalk me - Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, Germany -
have fallen by the wayside. I have even witnessed in the last week the great
impossible: a strong handed English keeper. Eric Dier defying his name. A
penalty shootout success. Gareth Southgate’s team have invented something
different, something unfamiliar for me: hope.
