Fellow Roar writer Ryan O’Connell tweeted the other day ‘England back to underperforming in sport. The world is right again’.
No prizes for guessing which sport he was referring to given that the England football team had just found a way to rewrite the chapter dealing with their darkest tournament-related days.
That in itself shouldn’t be underestimated as there have been some almighty cock-ups down the years but it plumbed new depths of ineptitude in Nice for Roy Hodgson’s men to produce a 90-minute performance that was witless, unimaginative, lacking in any kind of spark and, for the want of a better description, pretty shit.
England back to underperforming in sport. The world is right again.
— Ryan O'Connell (@RyanOak) June 27, 2016
So while nationalistic baiting from an Australian would, at any other time, be a cause for a justifiable rise in blood pressure, the sense of deflation was so acute that is was merely another punch to a lifeless torso.
To sit through the Euro 2016 last 16 tie against Iceland was to witness the unfolding of a drama that looked on the cards once Wayne Rooney’s early penalty had been cancelled out then superseded in next to no time.
The ‘easier’ side of the draw England had fallen into as a result of their inability to turn dominance of possession into scoreboard supremacy against Slovakia, apart from being incredibly patronising of the Icelanders, served the purpose of emphasising the substandard nature of what was to come.
I’ve never been one to subscribe to the theory that the players don’t care – an accusation thrown around all too readily in the wake of a bad result. Just listen to a football phone-in show if you don’t believe me – and it is hardly their fault they are paid millions of pounds a year as that is simply the economics of top-level sport.
But it isn’t expecting a lot for a national team to be well-organised, with a recognisable style and pattern of play and possessing the ability and wherewithal to pass the ball to a player in a shirt of similar colour.
Sadly, this occasion can’t be looked at in isolation as it has happened all too often in the last few decades.
Save the World Cup in 1990 and the European Championships six years later where the pesky Germans got in the way in the semi-finals, England have been dreadful in tournament play.
By and large, they have coasted through the qualifying round – 10 wins out of 10 this time around – but faltered badly when the starter gave way to the main course. There have always been some good players involved but as a rule the total has been far less than the sum of the respective parts.
Underperformance on the football field has become something of a speciality and if anything else was, realistically, expected then that would be where the surprise element should be evident.
What hasn’t produced much in the way of a shock has been the reaction to the team’s demise.
In simple terms they lost a game of football and got knocked out of a tournament. Of course, there is a bit more to it than that with any national side subject to a greater level of scrutiny than the norm, but the tone of the comment, in certain spheres, has been atrocious.
If, and this is in no particular order, players underperform because they have advertising deals with skincare manufacturers, wear fashionable headphones, have big houses, get driven home from the airport, use a budget airline to go on a family holiday, date lingerie models, like playing computer games, have tattoos or have kids when still a teenager (there are more) then I must be missing something.
There are myriad factors as to why a team get beaten but putting two and two together and coming up with any answer you want is laziness ands nothing more.
Strangely, some take the efforts of the national football team as a gauge for the mood of the nation as a whole – even Roger Federer was asked whether Marcus Willis, his vanquished opponent in the second round of Wimbledon, had restored some pride to the country – but I doubt that will ever change.
What is incorrect is Ryan’s assertion – tongue in cheek, surely?! – of the status quo of underperformance being restored by the old colonial masters.
The cricketers in this country are doing pretty well, we’ve got the US Masters champion, a handful of extremely good boxers and the rugby team beat a fairly significant opponent recently.
And anyway, the football season doesn’t start for another six weeks.
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