England 1-0 Spain. I’ll repeat that. England 1-0 Spain. Whenever we get one of these results, where we either beat the champions or give a decent team a good thrashing, there seems only to be two types of reaction from England supporters. The first (and I believe much less frequent) response is to reach a delirium that inspires the fan to spout ridiculous idealistic predictions, such as “WOO WE BEAT SPAIN WE’RE GOING TO WIN THE WORLD CUP” or “Strewth lads, we must be top of the tree if we can beat them fellas”. I get the feeling that the media likes to paint this sort of picture more than the fans though. I think the reactionaries have become more embittered towards the national team over the years.
The second camp is one of downbeat derision, looking to instantly play down every notion of success in case, heaven forbid, we may enjoy a victory. They’ll say things like “Yeah, we won, but we’ve got a long way to go to be up there with Spain” or “Blimey geezers, this ain’t no World Cup we just won, it was a pointless little friendly”. This type of supporter is desperate not to be seen as one of the ‘reactionaries’, and so their first retort is to frantically detract from the win as soon as the final whistle is blown. As time has gone on, this has seemed to become a more and more common response.
It’s funny that we judge our performances as a national team by our potential. We tend to disregard the game itself, and analyse what every performance ‘meant’ for the future and how this bodes for the upcoming tournament. In this case you could say that it comes down to the fact that the game was just a friendly, but we do tend to look far ahead after Qualifiers as well. The pundits after the game are always predicting where each players’ place is in the squad, and whether or not the performance as a whole was worthy of the next major competition.
When did we forget that we can just enjoy a game? I’d be a massive hypocrite for saying we shouldn’t analyse, but surely the overriding emotion from Saturday’s match deserves to be “What a bloody excellent result”? If we were to ignore the Euros completely, we could enjoy the fact that we beat the best team in the world. We weren’t going to outplay them, but through our grit and determination we pulled off a tremendously unexpected result.
If you were to replicate this situation with a club (Let’s say for example, if QPR beat Chelsea), the response would be completely different. There would be no detraction from the result or worrying over not performing and there’d be no analysis of who has earned his place in the team. It’s just a reaction to the game itself, and usually one of total euphoria. It has nothing to do with crazy hype over the team’s potential in the league, and it has nothing to do with holding back or downplaying the result. It is what it is, and fans celebrate it as that. This is how it should be.
Why is the mentality different though? Perhaps it’s to do with the attitude towards the England team these days, which is lukewarm at the very best. Either way, I’d love to relish England victories in the same way I do Portsmouth ones, but inevitably we get bogged down in the analysis, the predictions, the post-amble, the hype, the anxiety. Let’s not have that for once. Let’s just enjoy the fact that England beat the best team on the planet.
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