I have spent too many summer afternoons and evenings hyperventilating in front of the TV to put much faith in England's ability to win the Euros. We are not good enough. As someone said, it's the hope that kills you. And the hope I felt at 1-0 in the Sweden game was still tempered with the frustration of seeing England give the ball away. Again and again. My wife told me to shut up, and so I have arranged to watch the Ukraine game tonight in licensed premises.
Unconsciously or otherwise, the aim of all England managers is to keep their job. They know that in order to do so they must reach the quarter-finals. We, the public, will be satisfied with that. So they play pragmatic football to get us out of the group stage. The trouble is that a pragmatic team never, or almost never - Greece and Denmark are the only countries to have done it that I can remember - wins the competition. So why bother? We know we aren't good enough to win anyway, so why not go out playing the best and most attractive football we possibly can?
Before the 2002 World Cup in Japan there was a debate in the press about whether Sven Goran Eriksson should take the mercurial Liverpool player Steve McManaman. McManaman often flattered to deceive, but then he sometimes deceived opposition defences as well, and was one of the few players we had with genuine flair. OK, McManaman might not start many games, but he was exactly the kind of player we would need a goal down with twenty minutes to go.
In the final group game against Nigeria England only needed a draw. A win however would have enabled us to avoid Brazil in the quarter final, a fixture moreover that would be played in the heat and humidity of the afternoon. But Eriksson's team settled for a listless 0-0; unaccountably the players torpid meanderings around the pitch were unaffected by my shouting at the TV thousands of miles away.
In the Brazil game, England struggled in the heat and humidity of the afternoon. Michael Owen got an opportunistic early goal. Brazil equalised. Ronaldinho beat David Seaman with that amazing lob. Twenty minutes to go. Eriksson brought on Steve McManaman.
Well it would have been nice if that had been true. But McManaman had been left behind in favour of Trevor Sinclair, a good club pro. Sinclair did nothing, and we were on our way home.
Pragmatism does not win these competitions.
A final word about England's woeful ball retention. It's possible that the players, drawn on the whole from the dimmest strata of English society, are too stupid to understand the imperative: don't play the risky pass until the final third of the field. But that seems unlikely given that, on the whole, we don't give it away in the first third. No, it seems to me that English players like to take risks, to have a go, because lack of foresight is part of our culture.
That's why we blew our oil wealth on, well, nothing much (as opposed to the Norwegians who stuck it in a sovereign wealth fund); that's why we have not had a coherent energy policy since Mrs Thatcher's dash for gas; that's why we spend our money on having the patio re-done instead of sticking it in a pension. I could go on. We are the kind of people who say, "Oh sod it", and lump the ball upfield to the big target man. Who has it taken off his toe by the defender. Who passes it to the silkily-skilled playmaker. And so on as long as English football exists.
Whenever this happens, somewhere in the north of England I am screaming, "Keep the &^%$£ing ball!" and my wife is saying, "Will you stop doing that?" Actually tonight I will be doing it in a pub. My wife is disappointed. "It's more of an event if you're there", she says wistfully.
