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Catch the fever for a game
the English call football
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
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This is the first of three columns by Stan Isaacs, inspired by a visit to Merrie Old England earlier this month. |
Even a visiting American who regards soccer as an excursion
between tedium and ennui had to be impressed by the intensity
about the sport in England and the magnitude of the upset victory
scored by France over England in an opening round game of the
European Football championships recently.
I was in the thriving metropolis of Wrestlingworth (pop. 467) near Cambridge watching the action from Portugal on TV with my friend David Geeves, a retired army officer, a helluva guy even if he does vote Tory. Geeves is not a rabid sports fan, but he was caught up in the action and, after awhile, so was I. I wanted England to win because my friend obviously cared about England winning.
Though France was favored, England scored a goal in the first half, and then nursed the lead through the rest of regulation play. Fooball (the Europeans scoff at our word, “soccer”) doesn’t end after the regulation 90-minutes. There is an extra period called injury time, usually in the vicinity of three minutes. Well, in the space of 132 seconds of extra time, France converted on a free kick to tie and then took advantage of a foul to score the winning goal on a penalty kick. Teams just don’t score that much so quickly in soccer--er, I mean football--but France did, and it was called “one of the greatest turnarounds in footballing history.”
France’s marvelously-named Zinedine Zidane scored both goals. The dagger stuck deeper in English hearts because their hero, David Beckham, earlier had missed a penalty kick (something that is converted 9 of 10 times, I believe) a goal that probably would have cooked France for good.
Oh, the misery in the British press the next day.
Headlines: “Heartbreak.”…”Broken Lionhearts.”….”Kicked in the Gauls”….and, from Beckham, “Blame Me.” Beckham is the Beckham of the movie, “Bend It Like Beckham,” which inspired this comment that we overheard from a bloke in the underground: “Blow it like Beckham.” (I enjoyed noting that Beckham’s 7-year-old son is named Brooklyn. But I can’t say I am enamored by the huge wing-spread eagle tattoo on the back of his neck).
Newspaper buff that I am, I lapped up the treatment of the game in the papers the next day. Outrageous stuff vied with keen, innovative coverage.
The French goalie said he had been helped to block Beckham’s penalty shot by studying tapes of Beckham’s penalty shot tendencies. This inspired the tabloid Mail to declare that England had not been given any tapes of penalty shots by Zinedine Zidane for the English to study. Only in the lower depths of the story was it reported that there were no tapes of penalty shots by Zidane because he hadn’t taken any of late.
The post-game rioting by English louts led to 12 arrests, one of them getting a sentence of two years. The Sun plastered the pictures of six on the front page, pinning a description on each. Hence. “Halfwit,” “Peabrain,.” “Plankton,” “Thicko,” “Stupid” and “Witless.” Accompanying the story was an analysis by a psychiatrist laying their behavior to sexual inadequacies.
Delightful British wackiness was reflected in the Mirror report about English fans who danced in the main square of Lisbon before the game. “Andrew Luckhurst from the Isle of Sheppey in Kent led Knights of the Realm dressed in medieval costume--including the 42-year-old bank manager as a dancing queen called Sir Dancealot.”
The Express and the Guardian had incisive scorecards on every player, rating them on a scale of 1 to 10. It seemed less than generous for the Express to give game hero Zidane only a 7 out of 10. The Guardian labeled the analysis, “Who was to blame?; the scapegoats rated.” Ouch.
The Telegraph came up with statistics worthy of the best American figger filberts: number of passes attempted and completed.
A letter-writer to the Guardian was so dismayed by the collapse that he wrote, “The salaries of the players should be reduced to the average wage….Perhaps earning 200 pounds (about $340) per week, they might discover pride.”
Not everybody is enamored of the nation-wide passion for the sport. Michael Henderson in the Times lambasted the practice of flying the national English flag, bemoaning the “witless parade of faux-patriots clogging up the highways trailing their flags of St. George.” He went on, “Like so much else in England, the current madness is propelled by football, which has become a substitute for real life. This vain, shallow world attracts vain, shallow people, and is amplified to a deafening pitch by the largely uncritical coverage of the sport by television and radio (and newspapers, too).”
The exposure to the intensity in England about the football championships got me hooked enough to keep following the brief reports here when I returned to the United States. I felt good for my friend, Geeves, when England went on to beat Switzerland, 3-0 and Croatia, 4-2, advancing to the quarter-finals.
But then they lost excruciatingly to Portugal on penalty kicks, 6-5, Beckham failing again. The Associated Press noted that Britain lost on penalty kicks in the 1966 European championships, to Germany in the 1990 World Cup and to Argentina in the 1998 World Cup.
I could only begin to imagine
the hand-wringing, the misery, the caterwauling on the pages
of the British newspapers after this latest defeat.
©2004 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI'S Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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