Folk in Scotland, West Indies and several principalities along the Gulf are hereby permitted to band together, whip out tiny fiddles and strike up the world’s most sardonic lament. But the point still stands: it’s hard work supporting England at World Cups.
England are (apologies to New Zealand) the only one of cricket’s big old beasts never to have won the ICC’s most prestigious prize – hark, that lament’s just segued into a furious ceilidh – and that’s not likely to change any time soon. Within 24 hours of this paper hitting the newsstands, England will either be contemplating going home, having suffered their latest ignominious defeat to Bangladesh, or pondering what the world champions, India, are going to do with them at the SCG in the quarters. Which is worse?
Either way, it will soon be time for one of English sport’s most time-honoured traditions: the anguished debrief. Thankfully, there’s no need this time for Albion’s equally beloved custom of tearfully rounding up a scapegoat or two and ruining their lives in the name of cheap catharsis. We already know where the blame lies: with the ECB mandarins who bundled Kevin Pietersen out of the dressing-room window simply because he acts the giddy goat. As anyone who pays for their ticket in the hope of being entertained by genuine talent knows, this situation should have been addressed with a shrug of the shoulders and a weary so-what? You’re grown men; you don’t need to like each other; get on with your job.
The importance of getting on with your colleagues is ludicrously overplayed. Alfredo Di Stéfano thought Ferenc Puskas was a fat, lazy knacker, but it didn’t stop the pair scoring seven goals between them in the 1960 European Cup final. None of the Beatles were talking to each other in 1969, with one of them all strung out on heroin, but Abbey Road isn’t half bad. They even managed to string eight songs together into a quarter-hour medley, for goodness sake.
And journalists getting on their high horse about Pietersen’s supposed social dysfunctionality is beyond satire. Throw a rock in any direction in any newsroom, and you’ll hit someone who everyone else in that newsroom would like to hit with a rock. This dynamic isn’t unique to KP and a few posh lads who aren’t used to folk talking back at them. England should have just gotten on with it, like the rest of us have to.
Though, maybe, the Pietersen problem misses the point. KP or no, England have never been much good at limited-overs cricket anyway. The Twenty20 victory of 2010 remains a conspicuous outlier; they’ve been dreadful at all the others, and that one win had just as much to do with Craig Kieswetter, in any case. Meanwhile, England’s three appearances in World Cup finals came during a very different era, when everyone played a game that, to the modern eye, is far closer to Test cricket than the strike-rate-shattering stuff served up by Chris Gayle and AB de Villiers now or Sanath Jayasuriya in the mid-90s. By way of illustration, England reached the 1979 final with totals of 160 for four, 46 for two, 165 for nine and 221 for eight, off 60 overs. Geoff Boycott was opening.
Thoughts inevitably turn to matters of national character because England’s recent World Cup performances in other team disciplines haven’t been a whole lot better. The footballers have just posted their worst performance at a World Cup finals since 1958, when the team at least had the excuse of having been decimated by an aviation disaster.
The rugby side’s tilt at the 2011 world title, is best remembered for several of the brave boys getting “touchy feely” with buxom blondes at the Mad Midget Weekender, a dwarf-tossing shindig. Ian Poulter is still quite good at pulling irons out of the fire at Ryder Cups, though that’s not quite the same thing, is it? And it was a Welshman who sealed that particular deal anyway. Is there something rotten in this state?
One suspects at least 49 shades of the self-flagellation process are administered by members of the press corps. Your common-or-garden punter harbours more realistic expectations. There’s not a cricket fan in the country who seriously contemplated victory at this World Cup. The football faithful have long given up their dreamy dreams of world dominance, to the point where they can’t even summon mild irritation when the morbidly defeatist coach gets his pom-poms out in celebration of a goalless draw with Costa Rica.
Expectations at HQ ahead of the rugby this year may be a little higher, partly due to hosting rights, but mainly because rugby is the one area in which England, perhaps, over-achieve. Their all-time highlight was the inexplicable, but hilarious, run to the 2007 final – surely a greater achievement than the time they won it, on account of that team’s complete and utter inability to string more than a couple of passes together. But even here, hopes are tempered with realism, thanks to a ludicrously tough group, and flaky performances in crunch Six Nations matches that would give Scotland or Italy pause.
Still, most English sports fans understand their country’s place in the scheme of things. Quarter-finalists, essentially; a status attained, more often than not, before bowing out meekly to the big boys. The Arsenal of international sport – and most supporters are happy enough with that. Anyone demanding anything better is strongly advised to switch their focus to the women, who, in another break from glorious English sporting tradition, appear to know what they’re doing.
