How Football
The summer of 2018: England sweltered in the most sustained heatwave for 42 years, the government tore itself apart over deals and no deals, and hundreds of miles away, in a taciturn and strange state, the national football team did the unthinkable in the World Cup: they didn’t screw it up.The England team that touched down in Russia for the 2018 World Cup was a new-look outfit: there were no real stars, no overblown egos, and no dickheads. Still reeling from the wincing exit to Iceland in the 2016 Euros, expectations were at an all-time low. Qualification had been smooth if not spectacular, and pundits and fans alike were lukewarm about the team’s chances. Just avoiding embarrassment would have counted as some kind of success. As the tournament kicked off, a stunningly stage-managed occasion by Putin and his cronies at FIFA, we all took a deep inhale of breath and waited for the inevitable: technical ineptitude and crap penalties.How wrong we were. Over the next three weeks, as back home we dissolved in the heat, our football team gave us reason to believe. We squeaked a win against Tunisia, trounced Panama and had a great tactical defeat to Belgium to open up the draw to the final. We all bought waistcoats and eulogised Southgate’s calm, fatherly manner. We all fell in love with ‘Slabhead’, aka Harry Maguire. And we did it all to the tune of ‘It’s Coming Home’.Barney Ronay was there through the whole tournament, criss–crossing over Russia as he followed the England team, and the rest, on their quest for glory. Here, he captures the sights and sounds, the twists and turns, the bad food and the great football that contributed into making this World Cup one of the greatest of all time.
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
FIRST EDITION
© Barney Ronay 2018
Cover layout design by Steve Leard © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
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Source ISBN: 9780008324070
Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008324087
Version 2018-10-22
To Kate, James, Ed and Max
Contents
5 Weâre On Our Way, Weâre On Our Way
6 FIFA: The Men Who Sold the World
8 Spain, and Coming to the End of Things
9 Colombia, and the End of All That
10 Brazil and Being the Bad Guys
7 June 2018
There were times during the endless World Cup summer of 2018 when it was impossible to escape âThree Lionsâ, or âFootballâs Coming Homeâ, or whatever the song is actually called. Two days after England had beaten Sweden in the heat of Samara, as the World Cup wound down through to its endgame, a press release popped up in my inbox around 11.30 pm Moscow time, one of many that appeared every day during Russia 2018. This one was called âNot Just Footballâ and it said that a survey by something called Vanquis Bank had discovered that 86 per cent of people believed an England World Cup win could âunite the countryâ. More than half felt âgenerally happierâ since the World Cup had started. Ninety per cent of people felt more proud to be British. Most unintentionally sad of all, in the middle of all this unintentional sadness, more than a quarter of pensioners said they felt less lonely because of the World Cup.
Reading this on the late-night Moscow metro, eating a packet of Russian cough sweets in lieu of dinner, after three weeks away from home chasing the World Cup around this massive country what leapt out at me was: thatâs a lot of lonely pensioners. Also, before the World Cup came along a lot of people seemed to feel the country was disunited. And once the World Cup was done more than half of the country would go back to being significantly more unhappy.
On the plus side, at that point it was hard to see any real end to the World Cup summer. A few days later three thousand people would gather in Hyde Park to leap and bounce and hug each other and drown in the evening sunshine as Kieran Trippier put England ahead against Croatia. A combined TV audience of 62 million people watched Englandâs last two matches. The motorways fell silent. The band of the Queenâs Guards played a brass-instrument version of âThree Lionsâ outside Buckingham Palace. Meanwhile Civil Service World magazine published an article by Sir Michael Barber comparing Englandâs manager Gareth Southgate, who previously played as a centre-back for Aston Villa and Crystal Palace, to JFK, Tony Blair and Clement Attlee. âGareth Southgate showed us a different way. Unfailingly polite, thoughtful, humble, self-reflective and calm â and at the same time obviously passionate, iron-willed and determined,â Sir Michael swooned. Online data analysts recorded that on a single day in July somebody in England tried to buy a waistcoat on average every twelve minutes.
How did we get here? Or rather, how did we get to here from there? Itâs time to rewind two years. Letâs go back, for a moment, to the worst place.
*
The thing that really stood out in Nice, June 2016, England versus Iceland, was the way the England playersâ faces seemed to collapse as the game wore on. Watching from close to the pitch you could see the eyes widen, the lips tremble, a look of sadness settling over the blue shirts even as they trotted through their patterns like sad, dutiful, dying horses.
Itâs easy to forget that England had gone 1â0 up against Iceland early on. Itâs easy to forget too how beautiful it was an hour and a half before kick-off, strolling down through the trees and the scrub by the roadside on one of those evenings where the air turns damp and warm and a little sickly-sweet as the light dies away.
