In cutting the ground from beneath all social distinctions, carnival affirms the absolute equality of all things; but in doing so it sails perilously close to the excremental vision, reducing everything to the sameness of shit […]The morning after the merriment the sun will rise on a thousand empty wine bottles, gnawed chicken legs and lost virginities and everyday life will resume, to without a certain ambiguous sense of relief.
Terry Eagleton, Humour
It’s finally here. England’s football team have reached their first final in 55 years. Baddiel and Skinner’s ‘Three Lions’ blasts from car windows across the capital. It’s coming home… Its coming…
You’ve come to central London to see the commotion. After a deafening ride on an already swelling Piccadilly line, you sneak into Montage Pyke Wetherspoons for the loo.
Two middle-aged men–voices, more gravelly than Ray Winstone dashing down his front drive–discuss what gear they’ve done, and the two lines they’ve rationed to keep them going during the game. Judging by their current state, they’ll be going out with a squeak.
Coming out the back exit you turn left toward Leicester Square and follow the noise down Shaftesbury Avenue to the press of bodies by Prince Charles Cinema. You round the corner: Burger King’s forecourt right through to the Odeon has become a slurry of beer packaging, broken bottles and bodily fluids. Your feet stick to pavement. A piebald mosh pit has opened where chancers run across, dodging lobbed cans and bottles.
Centre stage: a young teen, who’s slipped and caked himself in the sludge. Picked up by his two mates, he’s clearly distraught. You wonder what possible consoling words they can be offering him? “Only 5 hours till kick-off lad!”
Walking to the nearby Tube you see the banners of the #RiotSquad. A police cordon pins in the most raucous of proceedings. You watch the action through a pizzeria window that’s dressed up with the obligatory peace offering of St. George flags. The smell of burning flares fills your nostrils. Blasts of fog horn punctuate:
Don't take me home Please don't take me home I just don't wanna go to work I wanna stay here and drink all your beer Please don't please don't take me home
The crowd swarm the street to the logic of fluid dynamics. They’re climbing traffic lights and whatever other obstacles come into their sway. Atop bins and electrical boxes, teenagers and their adult imitators wave round Santander bikes and traffic furniture. A green light from a traffic signal has been torn off by one fan, marginally more arseholed than the rest. Dangling by its cable… fuck it… it does for an arcade punching machine. He swings, slips and falls over. By the grace of St George, Chumbawumba starts playing just in time to get him back to his feet.
In 16th century Strasbourg, a different type of plague gripped the city. Instead of causing fatigue, fever, and boils, the so-called ‘dancing plague’ induced a form of collective mania in which the city’s residents danced through the streets until they dropped dead of exhaustion.[…] a period of hardship may have created a form of psychotic contagion, not uncommon in societies experiencing a period of extreme stress, and manifested in this case in the form of incessant dancing.
EVAN ANDREWS, What was the dancing plague of 1518?
Making it to the opposite side of the road you take refuge in a station foyer. Someone’s made it onto the roof though… Pelted glass bottles rain in on them, exploding everywhere. A girl next to you has a small chunk of flesh ripped from her forearm by the shrapnel. The trickle of scarlet blood on white skin appears some grim, chameleonic gesture to the surrounding fanfare.
Following said casualty–now nursing her arm, and tended to by her friend with all the sedulous care of the Distracted Boyfriend meme, the drug of belonging the girl in red–you move down the alleyway by the theatre, dodging the estuarine meanderings of piss.
Here a mum consoles the youngest of her three sons. He can’t be older than 6 or 7. He hugs her, sobbing, red-faced and exhausted. His dad–Small Man Syndrome personified–ushers the boy’s two older brothers to one side, before complaining to his partner: “He’s milking it alright.. I don’t wanna go home now, we’ve got a table booked.. He’ll get over it.”
Simon Critchley, What We Think About When We Think About Football
We are free to subsume ourselves in the twisting elaborations of fate – and perhaps the free submission to fate is the only real experience of liberty that is possible to us. […] Football is a theatre of identity – family, tribe, city, nation. But it is the presentation of identity in its ever-twisting, complicated, collapsing and doubled-over forms. Football is the theatre of the differentiation of identity that plays out with the players and fans enacting their drama watched over by the forces of fate. It is this fateful drama to which we freely submit in watching a game.
Excerpt taken from: Tory MP to boycott Euro 2020 final over players taking the knee by Will Taylor (July 8th, 2021, 16:24)
Tory MP Lee Anderson is continuing boycotting England games over players taking the knee and told LBC he will be unpacking boxes instead of watching the final.
Speaking to LBC, the Ashfield MP said he will carry on with the boycott, despite Gareth Southgate’s side making their first major international final since the 1966 World Cup – and only their second in history.
Instead, he will check his phone for updates and cheer them on without having the momentous final on TV.
Asked what he will do on Sunday instead of watching, he told LBC: “We’ve just moved house. I’ve got plenty of work to do in my house over the weekend, lots of boxes to unpack, plenty to be getting on with… I will be supporting the team, I want them to win, I wish them all the best.
“I hope we bring it home. I’ve never seen England in a final in my lifetime… fair play to them, they’ve had a great tournament.
“They’ve got a great set of young players, a great manager, and I think we’re going to do it.”
He has taken issue with the pre-match anti-racism gesture because of its perceived connection to Black Lives Matter and refused to watch their games.
Rome saw itself as an embattled island of civilisation surrounded by a savage world. The arena turned this worldview inside out. Here the savage world was surrounded and contained by the civilised. It was a living demonstration of the power of Rome, and the people who challenged that power were thrown into the savage space beyond the frontiers. That savage space was down there on the sand. Criminals, including Christians who refused to acknowledge the Emperor as divine had to be shown to be powerless in the face of the savagery that only Rome could contain.
Terry Jones, Gladiators – The Brutal Truth
You’re in the relative calm of Covent Garden now. Relative. A busker is shut down for daring to deviate from the England football hymnal, the opening bars of Ed Sheeran drowned out immediately by the belted words of Sweet Caroline. He meekly (and wisely) packs up his guitar and equipment to jeers.
In the public toilets just across, an Essex lad, coked to the eyeballs and racking up lines in the open, swaggers around slurring his own deranged catechism. Various dodgy one-liners: “I fucked one of my nan’s mates, she loved to 69. I cheated on my girlfriend,” to the refrain of “but I’m a nice guy!”
Excerpts taken from: England’s Football Team is Changing Because England is Changing by David Wearing (July 8th, 2021)
Something is changing around the England football team. On the pitch, an ability to control possession, to manage games, to perform under pressure – all of this is new. But there’s something else as well, something more profound. The fandom around the England team is changing – slowly, painfully, but tangibly – from a hostile environment for those of us whose faces didn’t previously fit, to something kinder, more inclusive and more welcoming.
[…]
The England team has been booed by a section of its own fans and lambasted by several Conservative politicians for taking a knee before each game in a show of anti-racist solidarity. Shaista Aziz writes of how the team’s refusal to back down in the face of this intimidation has created a space for her and her friends – hijab-wearing Muslim women – to share in the enjoyment of England’s run in the tournament. She is clear that the threat to people like her of verbal and physical abuse from England fans has not gone away. But she is also clear that something is changing, thanks in part to the leadership of the players and management.
You stop in a corner shop for some beers. Echoing some bygone colonialist, a brick shithouse of a drunk asks the Asian shop attendant, “Is it coming home mate? Is it coming home?” to which he gets a smirk and the response: “No, I don’t think so.” Enraged, the patriot calls him a nob. This clearly wasn’t the pre-agreed script. He stroppily reprimands him: “All you had to say was yes.” Mercifully for everyone involved, his attention is distracted by the chants from outside of “You can shove your paninis up your arse”, to which he adds his own booming voice. Entering the store this new group are warned: “No Italian beer yeh lads.”
Not having a table booked in central, you go to a hostel to watch the game. You arrive five minutes late to see Luke Shaw has already scored. You feel the early goal can only be bad news. What follows is underwhelming.
The rest is history. Owen Jones wrote for our sins.
A stripping back of the veneer of inclusivity that had been lacquered and liquored up with each passing tournament stage. Racism and online trolls for the three young black players who missed their penalties. The splintering contradictions of patriotism, torn to red and white ribbons: bloody tendons in a butcher shop front window.
Who’d have thought this possible? This, the country that gave us the Windrush scandal, Seventy-Two Virgins, and Priti Patel, “the one woman in Britain who can orgasm imagining a slow puncture at sea.” Philosopher kings it seems wear football boots. Southgate is typically magnanimous and calm. Gary Neville skewers Boris in a TV interview. Tyrone Mings reveals its Patel who gets his nomination for this year’s Cognitive Dissonance Award, though it’s rumoured to be as hotly contested as the Ballon d’Or this season within Tory party ranks.
The dust settles. Priti vigorously applies the return label to her worn-once England shirt from Sports Direct, delighting in the dopamine rush of sending something back. Boris Johnson, ‘clown king’, changes costume to condemn racists from his oxymoronic pulpit. The same inconsistencies dully glimmer in the discourse heralding the rush of Olympic medals from Japan in the weeks following. Now in the name of a soon to be clumsily devolved ‘Britishness’ Olympian success is celebrated. Immigration stories are reduced to an unread small print, the T&Cs of which are soon to be thrown in the trash.
Tiring from the necessity of purveying the obvious? Try Floradix.
Tiring from the necessity of purveying the obvious? Try Floradix.
It’s still coming home. Only a year from now, World Cup 2022 already beckons. But assuming it does, and the eternally vilified Raheem Sterling carries the England team to a final again? To just what home is it coming? What’s in this dissipating mirage of England? Are we to have faith in Southgate and believe that history is on the side of progressivism? Or rather, 55 years from now, living in a flooded hinterland akin to Children of Men, will we tune in to Ethnostate 4, and after a muttered grace to ‘sovereignty’ over our microwave dinners, watch highlights of when “it’s coming home” was last tantalisingly tangible… the incandescent names of Saka, Sancho and Rashford read out like war criminals, immigration having long since passed over into an illegitimate folklore.
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