England: the seven-letter word that permits stereotyping of the nastiest kind, not by the English, but of them. This is how Ireland’s foremost news website revelled in England’s defeat by Spain: A NATION HELD its breath. And now we can laugh. Is that OK to say? Can we look at a crestfallen Gareth Southgate in his sponsored Marks and Spencer attire and smile, cherishing this smart-casual defeat? Rinse and repeat. Give us more of these scenes of shrunken English pride, please!
Had any English news outlet written such words about an Irish team, the Irish Ambassador to London would probably weep for a week before being admitted to the trauma unit at the Tavistock Clinic, while the Irish raised the issue in the UN and prepared for war.
Oddly enough, both Irish nastiness and England’s absurd football expectations are based on a profound amnesia that manages to forget both England’s astonishing mediocrity and the amnesia itself that abolishes all memory of how bad England is. It is just five weeks since England lost to Iceland at home, the winning goal probably being scored by a walrus. Since then, England have achieved a series of gripping full-time nil-all draws that had the excitement of a suet pudding slowly settling into a mould.
The morning after Spain’s victory, the English Secretary for Sport and Culture Lisa Nandy declared that all the communities of modern England could take pride in the team’s “achievements.” The what? Moreover, those words, “all communities” are a euphemism for the immigration melting pot that hasn’t melted, so turning most English cities into a series of fragmented racial mosaics.
If the England squad had been an authentic representation of the country’s population, 10 per cent would have been of Indo-Pakistani origin, whereas the proportion was zero per cent. And if the same was true for people of African origin, it would have been four per cent. In fact, players of African origin constituted nearly 50 per cent of the squad and over half the team that played against Spain. Even the white component of the English team owed something to immigration. Three of the England team are ethnically Irish: Harry Kane, Declan Rice and Conor Gallagher.
So what has happened to the ethnically-English English working-class that invented football and which provided almost 100 per cent of the England team that won the World Cup in 1966? Indeed: one may ask the same of the working classes of Wales, Scotland and both Irelands, which had conveyer-belts of brilliant footballers into the 1970s, after which they all spluttered to a halt.
The success of immigrant communities in providing England with replacement-athletes should be a matter of interest: why are so few people from the Indian subcontinent succeeding in sport? Why is the reverse true of people of Afro-Caribbean origins? Why does the English cricket team racially resemble an England team from the 1950s?
These are fascinating questions, to which the easiest answer is also the easiest one to disprove, namely, racism. That is not a factor in team selection anywhere these days, and only an idiot or a race-war ideologue would suggest that it was in this era of equality: but what does that word equality mean anymore?
This is the term that is invoked to justify the identical pay scales between men and women’s tennis tournament at Wimbledon that finished just as the England team’s final humiliation was about to begin. Last year, the winner of the women’s finals at Wimbledon, lasting one hour and twenty minutes, earned the same prize money as the winner of the men’s finals, lasting four hours and forty-two minutes. Wikipedia was too embarrassed to reveal the length of the women’s match. But viewers of the two matches at least got to see the women’s underwear.
Why is this? And why is it never remarked upon? It is as if commentary on the obvious is taboo, which in this case is further protected by invoking the lethal S & M mantra, not the Marquis de Sade’s strange bedfellows, but the doubly-lethal curse of our time, Sexist and Misogynist, which will silence most men like a bazooka-round between the eyebrows.
So, women caper around tennis courts in frilly underwear, which in the high street would prompt horses to shy and would probably cause their wearers to be expelled from a church by a foam-frothing, crozier-wielding bishop, yet their attire is nonetheless treated with utter silence. No other women’s sport has a clothing convention so utterly dimorphic as tennis, with men wearing shorts while women wear tight-fitting and often frilly knickers beneath a flouncily-tailored and ruched skirt, the entire outfit emphasising and celebrating the flesh on the female pelvic girdle, rather like les folies bergère. Yet despite its very clear dissident intent, this bizarre sartorial statement goes completely undiscussed.
Taboo or not taboo: that is the question.
Otherwise, there is no reason why women’s tennis, which compared to men’s is like badminton on steroids, should earn equal pay. Women’s first serves are about the same speed as men’s second serves. The longest women’s Wimbledon semi-final in history was this years’ two hours, fifty-one minutes, after which the defeated player Donna Vekic said that she thought she was going to die in the third set.
Most men’s finals last over four hours, and in the past six years, three men’s finals have lasted nearly five hours. The longest men’s match at Wimbledon lasted over eleven hours, the final set going over eight hours. This set alone was greater than the length of more than four average women’s finals. Even when women’s tennis is between two legendary players, such as Chrissie Evert and Martina Navratilova, expectations should be low: four of their thirteen finals lasted just two sets, whereas a man must always play at least three sets.
This is called equality.
Yet any discussion or definition of this “equality” would be as taboo as discussing the women’s underwear that they so proudly flaunt. That is the nature of taboo: neither its existence nor its underlying “reason” may be discussed, while any attempt to violate either taboo would generate the sort of accusatory female rhetorical heat that most men are capable of only during nuclear fission.
Of course, sport is the quintessence of human inequality. “Fairness” should be the governing rule in all sports, namely, an arbitrary assessment based on shared values of justice. The two winners of last weekend’s finals each walked away with £2.7 million prize money. No-one doubts which player is better, or which one displayed finer and more comely buttocks. So, subconsciously, is that the real reason for equal pay? But of course, even asking such an outrageous question would be to break the otherwise all-conquering S & M taboo. So instead, I shall simply content myself by asking – why is England’s football so consistently awful while its fans remain so idiotically optimistic? That really is a matter of the non-taboo S & M.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Academics and other self-indulgent frauds understand nothing of human nature