England’s Dreaming

English fans and commentators are making a far better effort than Scotland’s in reflecting on their time at the Euros. Having made the tournament’s final the English manager has decided to stand down, having been turfed out after another abject and dismal tournament at the bottom of the group, the Scottish manager remains.

One nation is soul-searching the other is navel-gazing.

Making the case for Jürgen Klopp to take over Gareth Southgate’s role Barney Ronay argues that “The England manager is still the single most culturally and economically important figure in English football” which is strange but true, but also, in a searing indictment of the culture surrounding the game in England: “If this group of players and that embedded culture, boosted by one of the great coaches of the age can’t get closer to winning something, it probably is time to ask whether the problem, in the end, might just be us.”

There are things to be learnt from another losing final he argues.

“It is worth remembering just how dark, how grim, how poisonous some parts of the last European Championship final at Wembley were. The nation had spent the previous year and half sweating in its cave, dreaming of escape. It came out in joy, release, arse-rockets above the skyline, and finally in rage, tantrums and racist abuse. Some of the players still don’t seem to have fully recovered from the experience. The abuse, the questioning of competence and character, is an echo of that same inarticulate rage.”

Then – as now – the amount of racism thrown at Bukayo Saka and other young black players (like Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho after the defeat to Italy) is extraordinary and disgusting. If Southgate represented the antithesis of old-school English football culture in which racism is hard-wired, he never managed to wholly overcome this, nor could he. 

Getting philosophical, Ronay continues: “And moving a little deeper, it is probably worth having a think about the culture the England team is required to reflect. There is a basic contradiction at the heart of football coming home. What kind of home is this exactly? What would it really mean if England had won this tournament? What method is the rest of the world supposed to admire and copy here? Create celebrity players. Have no coherent coaching school of your own. Rinse your national sport as a cash cow. Neglect your grassroots. Perhaps the real reason football can’t come home is because no adequate home has been constructed.”

You don’t get that in the Daily Record.

As England blundered their way to the final to the tune of Ten German Bombers and the inevitable failure, it was not the ridiculously over-hyped players or the crushing weight of national expectation for which there is almost no other output for English identity, but because of the reality that there is a chasm between England’s view of their footballing place in the world and their actual place in the world.

Having been given the most patsy qualification group ever and then the easiest group in the tournament, England stumbled into the final “high on the irresistible fumes of their own heroism” as Jonathan Liew had it.

The Southgate-Clarke dichotomy presents two very different footballing and national cultures. One is made-up of an air of expectant superiority – who else could talk (endlessly) of “58 years of hurt”, and what could that possibly mean in any other country than England? The other is one with an ingrained underdog status, (very) low expectations and a cringeworthy commitment to a caricature of the Tartan Army and a steadfast belief in glorious failure. Both are crippling outlooks to carry forward for different reasons.

The differences between footballing worlds north and south of the border used to be less, but are now vast – not just in expectations but in the sums of money swilling around. A few years ago the Scottish game had no sponsor, none at all, the people (nominally) in charge of it just couldn’t find one. Not one. The English Premier League famously has so much tv money it’s created a corporate monster of library-stadia and mobile phone-gazing fans with little or no connection to their clubs. Many have gigantic ghost-squads of players ‘earning’ eye-watering sums of what we still call ‘wages’. The Premier League, and its ridiculous amounts of cash, is both the driver for England’s great expectations, and the root cause of its own problems As Ronay writes: “… while England have some very good players, this can be misleading. English players win things, but they do so with Rodri, Luka Modric and Erling Haaland next to them while being managed by Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti.”

England, post-Brexit and now post-Southgate, doesn’t know what to make of itself. Scotland, post-indyref and post-Euros doesn’t either. We are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the story we tell ourselves here is: “We aren’t very good, we shouldn’t expect to be any better. This is fine.” This is self-fulfilling. The story told in English culture is: “We are the best in the world and have only been denied footballing victory for 58 years by some cruel hoax against us.” This is increasingly – as ANOTHER Golden Generation goes by – just very funny.

But at least England have scribes and pundits able to really write and think about all of this. Here we have a culture of low or no expectation, complete deference to our national manager, and a governing body committed to a duopoly. We are a small country with a (relatively) poorly-funded league. Steve Clarke has actually got us to two consecutive tournaments. I get all that. But we did REALLY poorly and there has to be some consequence for that. We were 24th out of 24. He is direly / dreadfully negative and hyper-defensive (both on and off the pitch). Other small countries or our equivalent do far far better than Scotland – think of Iceland, Ireland, Denmark or Portugal. Yes they are all independent countries, well spotted. But as in everything else we can’t just suggest that everything will be solved at some future date.

Also, I don’t believe that we have terrible players at all, I think we have some of the best players for a very long time. We also have a domestic league which, despite being under-funded, under-sponsored and criminally governed is, miraculously very well supported. Now we need a national team to match the quality of that support.