Feeling Metro-cidal

I'm not a man who enjoys a morning. I often use this fact to justify the normality of my sleeping through the most of them, but sometimes that early drag of an awakening is unavoidable. That was the case today, as I was on my way back to Portsmouth for a visit to the family, as well as another trip to Fratton Park (which, of the two, was the most enticing draw).

Having got back late from a friend's house last night, and then spending a couple of restless hours on the internet, I finally put my head against the pillow at 3am. My coach was scheduled for 10am, meaning my sleep was cut to about five hours as I had to squeeze between commuters and get the tube from Wimbledon Park to Victoria, where the bus station was. Having fought my body over a potential extension to my sleep, I stumbled towards Wimbledon Park station and unwittingly picked up a copy of the Metro. Boy, that was a mistake. Having used the ounce of energy left within me to snatch at the final seat on the train, I leant my head back exasperatedly and gazed at the newspaper.

'News' being the dubious word there. You could easily replace it with 'mind-crushing depression for the very soul'. Given that this was a paper for commuters attempting to wake their brain up, it was only fitting that the front page had an article about children being accused of witchcraft and tortured. What a sunny outlook to begin the day with. The only mild relief my brain got out of the cover was the thoughtful juxtaposition of the inset picture, which was Prince Charles yielding a gun.

Ignoring the fluff piece about Eurovision on page three, I quickly moved onto the next spread. On page five, I was greeted by a cheery number labelled "A STAGGERING ACT OF CRUELTY" topped with cheery pictures of bloodstained ceramic slabs, a hammer (also bloodstained), a knife and a pair of pliers. The imagination may not be bright in that daybreak stupor, but it doesn't take long to muster up the imagery of this particular crime.

'It can only get better', I dare to think. Moving on to the next pages, we get not one, but two lovely stories of an unbelievably tragic nature. One regarding a terminally ill child that discovered his fate after Googling his symptoms, and one regarding a mother who had gone into labour whilst at the grave of her dead fiance. I can tell you, the stifled smiles and giggles from everyone reading this particular page just lit up the train!

'Wow', I thought, 'That is surely all the human tragedy they can shove into one morning...'. Oh my naive morning self can be so adorable. Turning to the next pages, we get another brace of tragic tales. Lucky me! One regards the suicide of PC Rathband, a unspeakably awful story, and the other talks about Holly Willoughby's live TV breakdown last night as she became tearful during a guests' recount of a cancer tale. Having a good morning yet, Londoners?

Editorially speaking, today's issue of the Metro was a disaster. I couldn't possibly make a judgement about it on a whole, as I don't pick it up often enough to get a complete picture of this paper, and today could easily have been a one-off. But in truth, this does seem to be a bit of a trend with all media at the moment. Tragedy makes for the best entertainment unfortunately, and you only have to look at some of the gawdy women's magazines for evidence. Some of the headlines on those tripey publications are completely laughable. "My dead husband's ghost raped me and then everyone I knew died" (That is an exaggeration, before you put that into Google).

Even with books now, we see that there is a market that plays to the morbid. Hundreds of books are now published which relay the every brutal act of a real-life childhood of abuse and pain. Often these books will have a title like 'That miserable kid' which is put in handwritten font, and there will be a picture of a child's face in the Sky above a lonely boy walking down a beach in the distance. Some of them chart a triumph over adversity, which is always nice. But a lot of them get hung up on the grizzly details, which grabs the attention of people like a car crash.

I'd like to think that as a society we're not so downbeat and despondent about everything. However, sales tell tales, and what we can learn from the most successful media outlets is that bad news will get more attention than good news. I suppose I'll have to learn to accept that. But please, in a free paper for morning commuters, can I not maybe get a happy thought somewhere in the first nine pages? Or at least a picture of a lovely cat?

The England Mentality Paradox

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.