Dreaming of England: nationhood, football and the World Cup

With the tournament almost upon us, England fans expect – but the game has changed over the decades, and the country with it

Given all that has happened since, it is easy to forget that four days after the UK voted to leave the European Union, England’s football team provided a brief taster of how that might feel by crashing out of Euro 2016. Losing to Iceland, a nation, as Gary Lineker observed, with more volcanoes than professional footballers, seemed, metaphorically and emotionally, to presage the kind of brutally hard Brexit at which even Jacob Rees-Mogg might blanch.

As the pound collapsed on world markets, the much-hyped stock of Joe Hart and Wayne Rooney nosedived irreversibly. In the short term, England not only needed a new prime minister, but also a new football manager. Both David Cameron and Roy Hodgson departed the scene of humiliation refusing to answer questions about grievous tactical blunders – Harry Kane taking corners? Will Straw masterminding the Remain campaign? – and with hardly a backward glance. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, with an immediate sense of the wider parallels, tweeted on the night of the football defeat: “England 1-2 Iceland. Winter starts here.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2J4ngMN