The Greatest League In The World

So when it really mattered, Spain dispensed with the fannying around. Perhaps it was incisiveness brought about by the mumblings of criticism, or by the recent memory of an Italian side that had matched up during the group stage, or by the fact that until the final Spain had simply been prepared to go through the motions, aware of their superiority and content to keep the best for the last. Whatever the reason, in this Olympic year Spain played with the gods. The Italians were mortals and other teams were condemned to a life in the underworld.

Paco and Manu didn't disrupt broadcast communications. Their manic shouting was quietened by that to which they were bearing witness. "¡Somos campeones!" You could forgive them this combination of their one eyes in forming a commentating "we". They were, they are champions; Spain, that is. There was no singing and not even a burst of the greatest musical horror known to sports events the world over, Queen's "We Are The Champions".

What will it change, though? Very little where the boys with the Three Lions are concerned probably. The very insistence on the continuing invoking of Skinner and Baddiel, now formally translated it would appear to the national team, makes ever more apparent the limitations of a lionhearted spirit, inadequate when confronted with the feline lusciousness of the stroking of a football. The lionhearts dance a bump and grind of heavy boots hoofing on the turf and hoofing the ball, while the Spanish are fleet of foot, a flamenco meets salsa, a movement of joyous inhibition. Finally, and in the final at any rate.

In a few weeks The Greatest League In The World will start up again. Back will come the misplaced pass, the inability to control, the stuttering motion. The replica shirts will fill with Bar Brit beer, and from their mouths will come the encouragements to "go on, my son" and to "get it up there" and the admonishments to "stop fannying around". A Spanish team can fanny around, content in the knowledge of superior ability. A Premier League team can fanny around, only if it's called Arsenal.

For the English or British observer, be he or she tourist or resident and sometimes unacquainted with footballing nuance, Spain's success and the resultant celebration were the stuff of the patronising or the plasticity of temporarily having gone native. The regular English football fan, however, and this fan in a replica shirt on tour takes on more brutish an Englishness than at home, will still extol the virtues of, say, a Stevie G. Like Garth Crooks has. The team of the competition, in Garthland, includes Stevie G, yet Gerrard is no creative genius. He should be a component of a midfield rather than its focal point, a David Platt to Gazza.

Rare exceptions apart, e.g. Glenn Hoddle's youthful Owen-Beckham team, England have failed to produce sides that can stand comparison with European sophistication since the days of New Order and Pavarotti. But initially in 1990, it wasn't so. I was in a bar in southern France for the England-Ireland match. The half-time analysis said it all. In one word. "Primitif." It was primitive, dire and embarrassing. But then what happened? The players took the initiative. So much for English players only being capable of 4-4-2. They changed to a sweeper system, and Mark Wright became one of the players of the competition. 

That was a team of players blessed with an openness, one that had taken them abroad or would do so. Lineker, Waddle, Platt. Gazza probably never learned much while at Lazio, but they were all of an era before the money, selfishness and "excitement" of The Greatest League In The World put an end to players broadening their horizons (Owen and Beckham being exceptions) and put an end to England ever being capable of being more than eternal quarter-finalists.

Hang on, though, will say the replica shirts of Bar Brits. There's Jack Wilshere. To the Three Lions' rescue will come a new fake Messiah, like the Second Coming of the one-time young Joe Cole. Alas, poor Wilshere.

Past apostles of The Greatest League In The World have goggled at Bar Brit's Sky while England have suffered their ritual humiliations. But had the channel changed during one previous championship, they would have seen a game from a different tournament. It was played in Cala Millor. Between Spain and Germany. The ball never went above head height because had it, it would have been penalised. The movement, the passing and the control were all exemplary. The pitch was small and so were the players. They were 12 years old. 


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Wear Your Shirt With Pride: Football returns

England play Hungary this evening. On Saturday, the Premier League kicks off again. Rarely have two football occasions been greeted by such a lack of enthusiasm. By me, at any rate. Not so by the local Brit bars. There is at least one that counts the number of England matches through the tourist season; days when it can expect a full house and empty barrels come the end of the evening. It won't be the only one.

The dependence upon football, England or Premiership, seems a bizarre way of running a business. But it's not so bizarre when one witnesses the hordes that take to the bars when Saturday (or Sunday or Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday) comes. Has anyone ever attempted to measure the level of "ancillary" business that football creates - the takings in the bars of Mallorca and elsewhere?

One wonders, though, at the enduring capacity of footy to entice tourists into parting with good money to demonstrate affiliations with teams unworthy of the price of a pint of Saint Mick. During the England game against Slovenia, I started to contemplate the peaks of beer buying during a match and the average pint consumption per punter. I never arrived at a scientific figure, but the peaks were rarely troughs and the consumption seemed massive. There are a lot of cold drinks imbibed in the name of ... in the name of what?

Come the day of a match, the football shirt is ritually removed from the hotel or apartment drawer. Wear your replica shirt with pride. In England's case, it's the last thing anyone should be admitting to, let alone donning. Affiliation? Ah yes, a team run by an Italian, increasingly being exposed as an idiot, and populated by numbskulls such as Potato Head. Premier League and affiliation? Ah yes, to whole African tribes and a European dribbling diaspora handed fat cheques by representatives of superpowers, past and present. Rod Liddle in "The Sunday Times" at the weekend raised the possibility of Premier matches provoking nuclear attacks. To the USA and Russia, we must now, in all likelihood, add China, to say nothing of the threat of Islam.

Why does anyone care any longer? My own team, Spurs (who it might be said were to blame for a movement towards football fan alienation when they grabbed footballing aliens - Villa and Ardiles), do at least have an English manager and a smattering of English/British players, but it's not the club of Greaves, Mullery, Gilzean and the rest. Yet, curiously, alienation has never quite caught on, despite the hopelessness of success for any club unprepared to spend the equivalent of an African nation's GDP on ... on an African player, and despite the not infrequent references to the size of those cheques and the disproportionately lamentable performances they pay for.

It's all due to marketing, one presumes, a process that can result in a red-cheeked English child walking the streets of Alcúdia in a Messi shirt. Why? The only good reason I can think of is because it's not a Rooney shirt. Marketing, constant and exhaustive media coverage, the 24/7 outpouring of inanities and also, just as important, the weird tribalism of football, one that is not just reserved for the English. Wear your replica shirt with pride. It's a statement, one of lurking confrontation and of territorial bravado, like a dog urinating against a lamp-post. When England played and I hacked along to the bar, I felt under-dressed not wearing an England shirt, akin to turning up in jeans at a wedding and finding everyone else in morning suits. The replica shirt sends out a message not just to supporters of other clubs, it does so also to Johnny Foreigner. Once upon a time, a foreigner in a foreign land was advised to keep his head down, unless there was a pith helmet on top of the head and he was running the foreign land. Not now.

One can understand the Blackpool supporter turning up at a bar with an orange torso and a bright pink face. An affiliation to the totally lost cause. He's likely to be bought drinks out of sympathy. He also knows that this season will be his only opportunity. But for most of the others, it's an exercise in compliant manipulation, in the pressure to affirm a marketing concept rather than a football team, in tribalism disguised as support, symbolised by the replica shirt and shouted over the constant chasing of yet another pint. Not, though, that the bars will be complaining.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.