England Tonight

Ambivalent about tonight's big game? Me too. My latest for Guardian Comment.

I approached last year's World Cup bent on getting into the patriotic swing. Enough of your writer's lofty detachment, I told myself. Enjoy the thing. Join in. After all, there were things to be glad about. The pond life element of England's travelling fans seemed to have shrunk, while at home St George's flag fever appeared, on the whole, to represent a more generous expression of national identity than before. Among the England players were characters that personified aspects of Englishness I could warm to: Crouch the plucky underdog; Beckham the boy dandy; Gerrard the swashbuckling hero. My reward? The usual constipated plod to quarter-final defeat.

Actually, it was worse than usual. Customarily in the big tournaments, there's one satisfying win or honourable defeat along the way to ending up just OK, but England's matches in Germany produced few moments to take pride or pleasure in. And the road to qualification for next year's European Championship in Switzerland and Austria has been similarly rutted with indifferent and embarrassing displays. Had Israel not surprisingly defeated Russia last weekend, manager Steve McClaren's team would by now have been eliminated and tonight's game against already-qualified Croatia but a painful formality, mocked by the opulence of the new Wembley stadium where it will take place.

Compared with Scotland's ultimately failed yet truly brave endeavours in its qualifying group against far stronger opposition, England's efforts have been flat and forgettable. Odium has been heaped on the

uncharismatic McClaren, but much of the criticism seems glib. More persuasive is the argument that England's players are neither up to it nor truly up for it.

The former reason is no surprise. With the great winning exception of 1966 - and we had a few slices of good fortune then - we've never reached the final of an international competition and only rarely come close. It's been acknowledged for decades that rival nations coach better technique and if that's changing it has yet to transform English results. And the attitude thing? Telegraph sports columnist Sue Mott put the boot in something brutal yesterday. "They don't work hard enough," she wrote of our superstars. "They don't want to work hard enough." Her thesis was that this symbolised an English national self-deception, and not only about its football team: "We are positively delusional with grandness. The England team must be good. They have the expensive watches to prove it."

Well, up to a point. No one makes it in the Premiership by lying in bed all day and while it's certainly the case that fame and crazy money goes to some players' heads, it is the game and the media that thrusts these things upon callow young men in the first place. In that sense, they aren't solely to blame. As for England players' recurring inability to gel as a team, there may be factors other than arrogance to consider. The positive eagerness of big clubs, as the payers of those huge wages, to withdraw their employees from the national squad hardly helps England managers to pick their first choice team, let alone weld it into a unit. And should we be surprised if a little edge was taken off a player's commitment by his fear of returning to his club boss from international duty with an injury he wouldn't otherwise have had?

Yet the feeling persists that big-time English football could only be improved by a good humiliation. The one outcome I can imagine rejoicing in tonight would be a stylish victory in which the mighty, modest Crouch scores at least one goal. A scrappy win or draw would only underline that a big reward hadn't really been earned: a suitable symbol, perhaps, of a land where the very rich are allowed to live by different rules from the rest of us. Defeat, by contrast, would at least provide the bleak satisfaction of seeing a bloated bubble burst.

See it at Comment Is Free for the usual mixed bag of comments, from the stupid and vicious to the thoughtful and wise.

Comments

[Francis Sedgemore]

Why is the England footballer pictured doing an impersonation of the Manx flag?

[molasses]

Entering the fray in the CIF comments section in a fairly robust mood there David. Always satisfying to see.

[molasses]

Sorry!! - Dave rather than David. ... don't want to end up sounding like your mother!

[DaveHill]

Hello Francis. Ho ho!

Hello Molasses. Not sure what good it does me to enter the Cif comments fray. And if you want to sound like my mother, I don't mind. It's a free country.