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Reports from Euro 2020 (4): England’s fear of the penalty kick
2021-07-13
By John Williams
Look, I know it is not the most important thing that has been happening in the world right now. I’m not blind. On Covid, should we vaccinate children, keep wearing masks and maintain social distancing after 19 July? How can we save the arts and the travel and hospitality industries from ruin? And what about those crazy temperatures and fires in California; and the problems faced in Afghanistan as UK and US troops withdraw? And those mass children’s graves in Canada which provoked the locals even into ripping down statues of old Queen Vic. Not to mention George Galloway prancing around recently in the Batley and Spen constituency, spewing out bile in the guise of political debate. So, I do know something about what has been going on. It’s just that football has been on most English people’s minds recently, mine included. And it is now.
On Monday morning, the front page of most UK newspapers carried a picture of a bearded white man in an emotional embrace with a younger black guy. Potentially a very positive media story here, perhaps about a new openness in cross-cultural men’s relationships? Even the Daily Mail carried it. Sadly, no. Gareth Southgate the England football manager – a man described brilliantly in one press report as having the air of a junior cavalry officer on his way to a country wedding – was pictured consoling Bukayo Saka, a 19-year-old player who had missed the crucial spot kick in the European Championship final against Italy. It had cost England the match. The message of the photograph was actually about the desolation of another England national sporting disaster. On penalties.
Back in 2004 I wrote a book with the Liverpool player Alan Kennedy about English and European football culture in the 1980s and the Merseyside club’s dominance of it. We started with the story of Kennedy scoring the winning goal in a penalty shoot-out at a European Cup final in Rome in 1984 in front of mainly Roma fans, Liverpool’s opponents. It was the reverse of what happened on Sunday when Italian fans were swamped by the English. I was there in Rome in 1984, sat chewing my fingernails as Kennedy walked slowly towards us to take the kick. He had never before taken a penalty like this, barely practised one. I asked Alan later what he was feeling. He said he was petrified: he had rather that Roma had won the match in normal time than face this trial. He had carefully watched all the other kicks to see how the Italian keeper had reacted, but forgot everything as he walked forward in a daze. So, he told me, he closed his eyes, kicked left and to his astonishment the Roma keeper dived right. Kennedy became an instant hero. Such are the vagaries of penalty kicks.
So, what did we learn from the past month and the nation’s obsession with football, even if we, England, fell once again at the final hurdle? Well, that football, above almost all things, can still pull us together, define who we are, capture our collective imagination. The words of Arthur Hopcraft in his brilliant 1968 book on the game, The Football Man, still seem to me to apply today. Football, he argued then, really matters to ordinary people, as poetry or fine art matters to some, and alcohol does to others. Its fusing of the aesthetic with the visceral, the collective with the individual, is hard to match. The combined love of alcohol and football, it goes without saying, can be an especially potent mix, even in today’s globalised era of sanitized stadia and increasing online consumption.
But we also learned from the Euros about a new way of doing Englishness. Astonishingly, around half of the 26-man England squad could have chosen to play for another nation. The Italians called us the ‘hyphenated’ English, such was the range of cultures and heritages reflected in this group of talented young, modern Englishmen. Arguably, it is this fusion of different heritages and backgrounds that has made this particular England squad so successful, helped it escape from a more traditional and narrowly suffocating sense of English reserve (though Southgate’s junior officer caution may sometimes have kicked in, including negatively on Sunday).
We learned, too, that although these players are young millionaires and sometimes seem to live in a vacuum, a different universe from those who watch them, they also have values: they care about the world and the fate of others. Southgate has insisted that his players reflect on matters of inequality and injustice, and many of them have been active in the BLM cause, in supporting communities through Covid, and in challenging poverty in inner city areas. Much of the self-obsession of the recent past and the WAGs era, seems to have been punctured by a new social awareness, even as excessive consumption is taken by the British tabloids to define social worth. These England players actually seem like decent guys, not cossetted and thoughtless stars.
Which is not to say that everything is fine. Far from it. The scenes outside the stadium on Sunday as ticketless fans breached security, and inside, as Italian fans were attacked, are very much residual and entrenched features of ‘old’ football. So, too, was the racism later experienced by the England penalty-missers, though its mode of delivery – social media – is different now from when I first began researching England fans abroad 40 years ago. But the general chatter around the game in this country today – and the gender and ethnic makeup of those delivering it on TV and radio – has shifted even over the past five years. We are more inclusive in our expressed concerns and priorities around the game, which is at least a start. Maybe now we just need to learn to take penalties more the Alan Kennedy way to ensure success: forget all, close eyes, sweep left. It works.