This Is England

When they talk about commitment to a country, as in commitment to that in which one lives, there is one thing that cannot be re-committed or from which the old commitment can be taken. Sport. The Spanish national football team may have my support for the coming Euro championships but only because of the absence of any British Isles representation. It's sort of like the Tebbit test, and I fail, as do pretty well all other localised Brits. Get behind a football team here? Real Mallorca? Couldn't give a damn except if maybe they were good enough to make a European championship and Spurs got to play them.

It's a strange thing this sporting affiliation through distance. It's as though you are a spectator watching the spectator watching the game. There is a sense of third-hand engagement. Much of the involvement becomes imaginary unless glued to Sky for hours on end. Even the Internet doesn't always give an element of the first-hand as streaming of many sports commentaries are blocked outside of the UK. Perhaps it's just as well. Having endured Matt Dawson frothing at the mouth at England deciding that a bit of wind and rain was sufficient to not bother playing against Scotland in Edinburgh, it would have been too much to then hear Geoff Boycott having paroxysms as England succumbed to the might of a bowling attack that would struggle to make the County Championship a few hours later.

You can still feel the pain of dire English sporting performance but it doesn't somehow hurt as much from a distance. The occasional shafts of light - Tottenham's Carling Cup win, Aldershot being ten points clear in the Conference and likely to rejoin the league from which the team was dumped for non-footballing reasons - seem, nevertheless, to glow with less intensity than they might. It's support without involvement, commitment without the responsibility of suffering; as though one can pick and choose the degrees of fan-based intensity safe in the remoteness from ever having to actually subject oneself to high and lows at The Lane, The Recreation Ground, Lord's or Wembley.

There are those who do of course very much wear their shirts with pride, and not only the tourists. On a match day a bar can be filled with expat-clad kit replicas. Even the walls wear their shirts with pride. But the tribalism of individual team support does not create the sense of unity that is to be found in a bar when one of the national teams is playing - and usually being humbled. For all this though, one still feels disengaged. It's the distance thing again. So the shrug of the shoulders when Wilkinson makes another hash of a kick or Harmison launches the ball into the slips is ... just that, and you go on about living your life at a distance because perhaps it doesn't matter quite as much.


QUIZ
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