A very English out-look
08/06/04 | by Alex Walker

There's very little more sickening than attempts to tie football in with war, but, for some, the jingoism gets the better of them. After all, in a country where the biggest selling tabloid newspaper is allowed to use Tommy Gun-imagery to promote an England-Germany game as "WWIII", it is little surprise that some of our less intellectually-gifted citizens cannot distinguish between the horrors of war and a comparatively meaningless competitive sport. Links between football and war should be left to those who put an inflated importance on their nationality, so it with some caution that I now embark on a rather tenuous analogy.

This week saw D-Day anniversary commemorations. 60 years later, England's modern day heroes are preparing once again to land on Europe's shores and face intimidating odds. Okay, so this time we're up against the French and not the Germans, but the average Union Jack-sporting skinhead probably could never tell the difference anyway. The purpose of this comparison is not to drum up nationalistic pride ahead of the game, nor to create combative hatred towards the opposition, but to highlight something good about the English.

We love to back the underdog and like nothing better than supporting a loser. Perhaps it's in our nature, or maybe we draw it from history. When tiny little Blighty took over the world and created an Empire in the century before last, it was probably the fact that the country was so small it was normally laughed at by the rest of the world that spurred the Victorians on.

In these more enlightened times, we still feel the same. Thankfully, we are now able to channel these feelings into the trivial matters of football tournaments rather than Empire-building and slaughtering Zulus. Still, the principal is the same - we are a very small country with a comparatively slight population, so any success we can muster on the football field is against the odds and therefore something to be proud of. My jingoistic friends call it Dunkirk Spirit. I call it sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.

Either way, it's one of the things that characterises the British. We simply love an underdog. And not in the cheesy American way where the born-loser suddenly turns things around and becomes champion of the world in the final 10 minutes of the movie - we don't care if our losers lose, as long as they are our losers. In fact, them being losers helps. If the best sportsmen and women we can produce as a country are rubbish, it makes the rest of us feel less inadequate. If Tim Henman ever does win Wimbledon, he will suddenly become very naff, just as Damon Hill did after he won the Formula 1 world championship. As long as he remains a loser, we will continue to love him.

Perhaps this isn't the best outlook on life for a nation to have. Justifying the shortcomings in our own lives through the failures of those in the public eye is probably a nightmare for the health of the psyche, but it's what keeps the British populace going. We may not share the aspirations of our American cousins, the artistic flair of the French and Italians, the nonchalant permissiveness of the Dutch and Swiss, or the swaggering methodology of the Germans, but it's our way of coping. We can deal with the corrupt politicians and useless sportsmen as long as they get caught with the occasional prostitute and miss a penalty now and then.

But dare anyone else have a go at our bunch of miserable failures, whom we treasure so dearly, they will incur a fury like so many women scorned. Which brings us to our game with the French in a week's time. We all know we're going to lose - absolutely thrashed, in fact. They're going to bloody tonk us! Thierry Henry will think all his Noëls have come at once when he comes up against an England defence without Rio Ferdinand and David James in goal...

We all know it, but we're not exactly going to let the French find out, are we? No, we'll put on a brave face and plough onwards for Queen and Country because we're the English - we beat the Germans on the beaches and we're not going to let a bunch of Froggy gits stand in between us and the glory which is ours by God-given right.

Of course, inside we're all expecting a defeat and that's okay. As you see above, we've already got the excuses lined-up. We're under-strength, so we're the underdogs. We'll give it a bloody good go, but ultimately our chaps will come off as the gallant losers and that's fine with us.

That's what drove the troops on at D-Day. It could quite easily have turned into another Somme and those brave soldiers new that the odds were against them - in all likelihood they were heading out to their deaths in a desperate last throw of the dice. But they also knew that the folks back home would be behind them win or lose. So they gave it a bloody good go and, low-and-behold, they did it! So, sometimes the British attitude pays off and, despite the odds and our expectations, we come out as the winners.

This is the attitude we need to take into our game against France. We should be under no illusion that we can beat them. We should expect nothing else but a sound spanking. We should ask for no more than a gutsy performance by the England team. We should react with nothing but dignity in defeat and express nothing but respect for our superior opponents. And if we do that, then we might just stand a chance of winning.