England won’t win till its players know the meaning of ‘playing for your country’

On Saturday, I fantasised about the idea that Divine Providence might somehow have decreed that it would be England’s turn to lift the cup at South Africa 2010! So much for all that, then.

What sort of providential reading can I make of England’s 4-1 drubbing (correction, 4-2 drubbing) at the hands, or rather feet, of our greatest adversary? Well, I guess it wasn’t meant to be, as they say. But if you believe in Providence – the idea that everything that happens in our lives is the manifestation of a divine ordinance that ultimately works to the benefit of all – then another way of saying the same thing is that it was meant to be: it was our turn to lose, again, and the Germans’ turn to win.

The Germans have been gracious in victory – rather more than the English popular press has been magnanimous in defeat. And perhaps their ability to accept victory modestly, and the unwillingness of many in the public eye in England to accept defeat without blaming others, provide the moral justification for the Germans to have won the tie at all, even if the match did turn on a moment of injustice.

What sort of just God, one might ask, would allow the travesty of England’s disallowed second goal, when the ball was a foot or more over the goal line as everyone watching around the world could plainly see? Well, not everything that appears unjust to us is God’s fault, nor does it appear unjust to everyone. God allows ‘human error’, and that was evident in spades yesterday; and, after all, it’s FIFA president Sepp Blatter who’s put up a one-man defence against introducing goal-line technology, not God. Perhaps God, who was also watching the match, was sending us and Sepp Blatter a little message about the absurdity of not using the technology and common sense at our disposal.

And the Germans certainly seem to be viewing the disallowed goal as ‘justice’, albeit of the poetic, providential kind: as pay-back for Geoff Hurst’s second goal in the 1966 World Cup final that did not cross the line, according to them, but was allowed all the same, and which provided a crucial turning point in the match, which we went on to win. A 4-1 win for Germany (actually, 4-2, as we all saw) in apparently unjust circumstances to reverse that previous 4-2 win for England that equally appeared to turn – depending on your point of view – on an injustice.

It would be almost impossible not to see the ‘hand of God’ in such an ironic twist of fate, or Providence. Yes, the hand of God can reveal itself through a refereeing error and the act of cheating of a football genius, especially if the right and best team still wins at the end of the day, as Germany did yesterday.

Will two wrongs now make a right? Have old scores finally been settled, and are we now even – level on aggregate, so to speak? Can we get over 44 years of hurt alongside the wounds of the present?

These are the questions yesterday’s game is asking of us at a moral level, or that God is asking us through yesterday’s events. If football, in the words of the legendary Bill Shankley, is more important than life and death, what do we do when we pick up the threads of our collective life as a nation once the football and the shouting are over? What lessons if any can we, the English nation, learn from our failings on the football field?

Well, it seems to me, the two things our players lacked most of all, apart from cohesive team work and a coherent game plan, was passion for the country and the will to win. Passion and determination cover a lot of footballing sins and have often carried the England side through gruelling World Cup duels in the past. They briefly flared up in the ten-minute spell when England scored twice (but only once officially) at the end of the first half, but we did not maintain that spirit in the second half.

The players in our national side often say they feel it is an honour to put on the shirt and wear the Three Lions on their breast. Yes, it is an honour – but it’s an honour that has to be earned by the manner in which the wearer conducts himself on the playing field and is not something to which that footballer is somehow entitled through the mere fact of having been selected to represent the nation.

Our footballers need to learn what it means to play for England. This isn’t just some feather in their collection of international caps: something that merely enhances their CV of footballing accomplishments, and boosts their egos and bank accounts. It’s something that confers duty and a serious responsibility: to play for the country and not just for themselves and their personal roll call of success.

If our players really believed in their hearts that ‘England expects each man to do his duty’, then there’d be no such lily-livered, spineless performances again: every man would genuinely give their utmost, and focus every thought and strain every sinew towards the task of winning for the sake of the devoted England fans in the stadium and all their compatriots back home.

But you can’t blame the players alone. In a way, they merely reflect England’s national malaise. It’s not just our footballers who lack ambition for the country, it’s the country itself that shies away from greatness. We can’t expect our footballing ambassadors to project pride in the English nation and to demonstrate the unwavering will to win if the English at large do not have the will to be a great nation and to win on the world stage.

It’s nobody’s fault – least of all, God’s – that it has come to this for England: ignominy on the greatest stage on earth, and a political and liberal establishment at home that despises the very concept of the English nation, let alone the idea of taking pride in it. But if the England team is going to be restored to the position of pre-eminence that was once rightly its own – dodgy extra-time goal notwithstanding – then this will have to be the consequence of a collective reawakening of English self-belief and a restructuring of the game of football in its home country so that players, fans and lovers of England alike unite around the common task of making the national team a statement of collective pride in England and all it has to offer to the world.

We need now to stop looking back nostalgically to a golden age of the past, which only allows us to wallow complacently in the inadequacies of the present. We need to focus on a planned future of success: not for the FA, not for Wayne Rooney, and not for the hundred and one corporate sponsors – but for the country.

Bill Shankley was right: football could mean life or death for England – the nation that invented it and whose very identity it is so central to. And if football is ever to come home to England, and the Three Lions that never roared are to be shaken from their slumber, then the whole country must back the changes required and make it clear what we expect of those who play in our name.

And if that happens, then yesterday’s disappointment may well have served its purpose.

What does the Cross of St. George say about England?

There has been much ink spilt and HTML spewed about the patriotic displays of the Cross of St. George, which we see fluttering from houses and cars across the land at World Cup time. Most of this has focused on what you could call the sociological significance of the nation’s flag: whether it betokens a new, benign, inclusive nationalism; a harmless, football-focused patriotism; or a disturbing manifestation of xenophobic nationalism owing to the flag’s alleged, but in my view mistaken, association to far-right, racist movements.

I am not going to adopt the sociological approach here but rather carry out a semantic analysis. This asks: what does the Cross of St. George, as a visual symbol and icon for England, make us think, consciously or subconsciously, about England and the English?

First and foremost, it seems to me, the Cross is a reference to England’s Christian legacy: the reason why St. George’s symbol is a cross is that it refers to the Cross of Christ. The Cross of St. George is, therefore, a visual statement of the fact that England is historically a Christian country, rather than a secular state like France or many other European republics that do not include crosses on their national flags. For many, of course, including myself, England remains a Christian country – which doesn’t mean it can’t also tolerate a plurality of other religions and philosophies, including Islam, so long as that religion’s proponents do not seek to impose their views on the rest of society.

The reason why the reference to Islam is so important is that the Cross of St. George is also associated with the medieval Crusades that sought to expel the Muslims from the Holy Land. We in our turn may wish to build our own New Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land – but this must be an enlightened society that turns its back on the religious intolerance and prejudices of our medieval past, while nonetheless remaining proud of all that is good and true in our tradition.

Apart from the association to the Crusades and a battling English past, the fact that the Cross itself is red in colour contributes to the fear it provokes in some. As I have written elsewhere, red is the colour of violence owing to its association with blood; and this tie with blood may also be a reason why British-liberals erroneously think of the Flag as a token of violent English-British ethnic nationalism. But the red cross is also associated with the Blood of the Cross: the blood shed by Christ in order to save humanity.

This link with the idea of saving, safeguarding and defending life is one of the reasons why the Red Cross was adopted as the symbol for the humanitarian organisation of the same name. And while the red cross embodies a specifically Christian association, the link between ‘red’ and ‘saving life’ is also intrinsic to the connection between ‘red’ and ‘blood’: blood is essential for life, so it is ambiguously associated both with violent destruction of life and with preserving life, and all that is most precious and sacred in life – just as the death of Christ (i.e. Life itself), in Christian belief, paradoxically saves all life.

In the specific English context, then, it seems to me that the Cross testifies to the willingness of English people to fight the good fight in order to safeguard and protect the lives of other English people, and to save Christian England itself. And that combativeness implies both a determination to spill the blood of England’s enemies and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own life in defence of the lives of loved-ones, and for the sake of England.

But these associations to violence in the cause of Right and of country are against the background of white, with its associations to peace and non-aggression – so much so that the white flag is of course the sign of surrender. You might say that the superimposition of the red cross on the white flag signifies ‘no surrender’ – but equally, it betokens the fact that, at heart, the English are a placid, peace-loving people: preferring nothing so much as the quiet enjoyment of their homes and gardens, or the more gregarious, social and essentially peaceful past-times of going down to the pub, sport, trade and shopping.

So the blood-red cross on the white background says that the English will fight to the death if necessary to preserve what they have and who they are – but that they’d rather co-exist peacefully and tolerantly with other peoples, and take part in sporting and economic competition with them rather than fight them on the battlefield. And that’s one of the reasons why the Cross of St. George is such a fitting and potent symbol for English sporting teams: it points to the role of sport as channelling nationalist aggression into peaceful competition between nations on an increasingly global scale, which is in fact one of the great legacies that England (the inventor of so many of the world’s great sports) has bequeathed to the world.

Many people would reject this assertion that the English are essentially peace-loving, pointing to our imperial past and violent subjugation of our Celtic island neighbours. While I’m not denying that the English have a violent streak, I would say that they are by no means unique or even the worst in that respect, certainly among the nations of Europe. But that would be missing the point I’m making: the important thing is not whether a country or people is violent (ultimately, all human beings are capable of violence) but what they do with that aggression and what values they promote around it. And I would say that it is the British flag, more than the Cross of St. George, that actually celebrates the aggression that English and British armies and colonialists have wrought upon other nations. It is, after all, the flag of the British Empire and so the symbol of British-imperial domination.

By contrast, the fact that it is the Cross of St. George rather than the Union Flag that English people have now espoused as their national flag symbolises the fact that the English have disengaged their national identity from the British Empire and, in its latter-day incarnation, the British Crown and state. We are content now to be ‘merely’ England and not all-conquering Great Britain – which means we can now celebrate England and Englishness for and in themselves, and not as a glorification of conquest and power. So while the red Cross of St. George proudly proclaims our willingness to fight for our country, this fight is no longer an imperial war of conquest but rather a defence of all that we hold to be precious, indeed sacred, about our land and its people; and of all that we have contributed to the culture and economy of the world at large.

I have a theory, based in a faith in Providence, that the country that wins the World Cup is in some way the most fitting one to do so at that time: that there’s a kind of poetic and divine justice that manifests itself in footballing glory. I think it was symbolically fitting and ‘just’, for instance, that the French won the World Cup in 1998 in their own country, having been arguably robbed of a deserved crown by bruising semi-finals with West Germany in 1982 and 1986. Similarly, it was right that Brazil won in 2002, as they were the only team whose world class was not in doubt, and this was a just recognition of the merit of players such as Ronaldo and Ronaldinho, and the fact that – but for Ronaldo’s nervous crisis on the day of the final – Brazil really deserved to win in 1998, based on footballing merit. Italy’s triumph last time was perhaps providentially decreed to ‘save’ the beautiful game in the country that is one of its leading exponents, engrossed as Italy was at that time in scandals around corruption by leading club officials.

Is 2010 perhaps England’s turn for a providentially fitting triumph: a token of divine blessing for a new peaceful, non-violent and inclusive English nation; and a victory that in itself would help to accelerate the formation of a new England: a country that is proud of all that it has contributed to the world – particularly, the game of football itself – recognised as a stand-alone nation in its own right and no longer symbiotically confused with Britain?

Such is the stuff of dreams – but of that is football made. Maybe that dream will flounder against the rocky realities of iron German determination or fiery, England-hating Argentinian passion. But then there’s always the World Cup in England, in 2018 . . ..