The woman who lives at No 42 says she knew, just bloody knew, that Eric Dier was going to score his penalty as soon as he stepped up to take it. The two guys in the dry cleaners can’t agree on whether Raheem Sterling should be in the team or not. The kid next door has been practising Three Lions on the piano. The bus driver’s whistling it. A friend emails a meme he’s made of the song playing over the top of the dance scenes from the Big Lebowski. I Google “how to lose an earworm”. Dad, who hasn’t watched a match since Trowbridge Town folded back in ’98, texts to say how much he’s enjoying it all. The lunacy gets infectious.
All the best summer stories are set in a heatwave. It was 30C in London last Saturday but felt hotter, like “the sun was a huge fifty-cent piece that someone poured kerosene on and then had lit a match,” Richard Brautigan wrote, “and said, ‘here, hold this while I go get a newspaper’, and put the coin in my hand but never come back.”
Everything is a little woozy and delirious and feverish and a bunch of nutters have invaded Ikea and the Band of the Coldstream Guards are playing that song at Buckingham Palace and no one’s entirely sure whether this is actually a dream. It just might be. It has all the logic of one. Has anyone checked to see if the spinning top’s stopped?
They say 24 million watched England v Colombia, 19.6 million saw England v Sweden. These are the days when everyone’s a football fan, when, ahem, journalists who haven’t written a word about the game in the last decade shamelessly decide that it’s suddenly time to start. It’s a strange business, right now, writing about any other sport, like working in a bookshop that refuses to stock the bestseller everyone’s reading, a butchers that only serves imitation meat – “it bleeds pink just like the real thing, it’s the beetroot juice that does it”. The World Cup’s an indubitable reminder, if anyone needed it, that England is a football country that plays at other games.
The armchair view
Which channel is Croatia v England on? ITV, from 6pm. Emmerdale, Coronation Street and Paul O’Grady’s Animal Orphans have all been shifted from the schedule, it’s that big a deal. Whereas the 1990 semi-final against West Germany in 1990 was shown live on both channels, this time ITV had an exclusive pick, under the same agreement that gave BBC the Sweden quarter-final.
Don’t England always lose on ITV? Not any more – last Tuesday’s win over Colombia was live on ITV, lifting England’s win ratio since 1998 to 23% (compared to 67% on BBC).
Who’s anchoring? The channel that brought us Matt Lorenzo hosting from a Dallas bunker and Adrian Chiles in his shorts on the Copacabana now has the polished Mark Pougatch. Incisive and gets the best from his pundits.
Who else will we see? ITV’s chief pundit Lee Dixon and Sky’s chief pundit Gary Neville (on loan, getting to wear casual shirts for once) with Ian Wright, the one to watch in “how they reacted in the studio” clips.
Who’s behind the mic? Clive Tyldesley, who has been ITV’s main World Cup commentator since 2002, and Glenn Hoddle, whose name is likely to be trending by 7.15pm.
Was it always like this? Flick back to the Guardian’s Monday edition after 30 July, 1966. Mary Peters broke the national record in the women’s shot put that weekend, at a little meet in Kingston before the Commonwealth Games. England’s lawn tennis team thrashed Ireland 8-3 in Scarborough. Derbyshire were bowled out for 157 in Southampton. The British & Irish Lions beat Auckland 12-6 in New Zealand. Great Britain & Ireland won the St Andrew’s Trophy in Bilbao, and lost the Curtis Cup in Hot Springs, Virginia. The Guardian carried long reports on it all. And they ran two-thirds of a page of football, too. Well, England did win the World Cup that Saturday.
The match only just made the front page, in a single column down the left-hand side, all about how the players would share a £22,000 bonus despite the Wilson government’s wage freeze. The lead story was the latest development in the Nigeria coup d’état. Skip ahead a generation to 5 July, 1990, and England’s defeat by Germany in the semi-finals shared the top billing with a story about the poll tax. Inside, the match coverage filled a single page, the same as Goran Ivanisevic’s run to the Wimbledon semi-finals and only a little more than the news that Phil DeFreitas wasn’t going to play the third Test against New Zealand.
A generation on again, and England’s World Cup run has become so utterly irresistible that other sports are contorting their schedules just so everyone involved can get it all over with in time for kick-off. There were emergency committee meetings in the cricket leagues last week to rush through agreements about early starts and extended tea-breaks for last Saturday’s matches.
Gloucestershire and Kent have brought T20 game forward to 3pm. Yorkshire – intractable, obstinate, old Yorkshire Cricket Club – have kicked their match against Derbyshire into another week altogether.
They had the football up on the big screens at Silverstone, too. Wimbledon, so sure of its status, is the one to hold out. It refuses to show anything but tennis. Whisper it, but when he was first told that the men’s final was likely going to clash with the World Cup this Sunday, one of the All England Club’s officials is supposed to have said, “well, why can’t they move theirs?”
The club has a Tory minister’s gift for reading the public mood, never mind that the tennis players themselves can’t stop talking about it, that Kyle Edmund said how happy he was to wrap up his Tuesday match early because it meant everyone could go watch the football.
So there were a lot of empty seats on Centre Court on Saturday, which, the club insisted, were “a consequence of people taking natural breaks between matches”, natural breaks that just happened to overlap with the time it took England to go 2-0 up. It seems that scared the club into making one concession.
It is now going to allow fans to watch the game on their mobile phones. There’s no competing with the football, after all, no resisting its spread-through-the-admass culture. We’re all football consumers now, so best just give in and go along. This country needs something happy to shout about right now, after all.
