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Reports from Euro 2020 (3): Germany calling
2021-06-28
Deep down, those football supporters among us probably knew, all along, that it would come to this. Of course, the draw for the current Euros looked rather strange and unbalanced from the outset. Why did Italy, Spain, England, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany get to play all their group games at home, while Belgium and Sweden traipsed around Europe, and Wales ended up in Baku and Rome?
By the same token, last week’s Group F finale made it seem, at various moments, as if England could end up playing any one of the four countries involved. But, like a rigged fruit machine, it was always set to end with only one outcome: Germany in the last-16, at Wembley. A little history is in order here.
It is worth remembering at this juncture that England versus Scotland in 1872 was the first international football match played anywhere in the world and that, for 30 years, matches between the Home countries were the only international fixtures. That is, until Argentina thumped Uruguay 6-0 on 20 July 1902. Thirty years is a pretty big head start, so when in 1904 a small group of European countries set up a new international body, FIFA, to manage fixtures between rival countries, perhaps it is not too surprising that the British were reluctant to join this cabal of late-comers in an organisation charged to oversee a sport that the Victorians had invented.
Britain maintained its role in devising the international laws of the game, but for almost 50 years it continued to have an uneasy relationship with the world governing body, joining and withdrawing from it at regular intervals. The English, especially, were always concerned that foreigners (and the lower classes) had a rather underdeveloped notion of ‘fairness’ in sport, second nature, of course, for gentlemen in the English elites.
But officially, the key issues here were loose definitions abroad of ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’, a key stumbling block for the ex-public schoolboys at The FA who wanted clear lines drawn between high-born ‘gentlemen’ and the working people who had now taken up the game. And the contentious matter of using sport to improve international relations – for example, by reintegrating Germany into the international community after the First World War. For the British, sport and politics should always be seen to be kept at arms’ length, a position which would prove mightily divisive later, of course, in relation to the South African question.
So, having decided on these grounds to forego participation in the football World Cup finals in both 1930 and 1934, The FA was then totally outmanoeuvred in the diplomacy stakes by Hitler and the Nazis in 1935 into hosting the German national team at White Hart Lane. It was a contest designed by the Third Reich to convey symbolically to the world what a thoroughly decent group of people this new regime really was. That Germany had no professional league and comfortably lost the match was of no matter.
This error of English judgement was compounded in 1938 when on the eve of war, not only did England repeat the fixture, this time in Berlin, but the England players were instructed by diplomatic officials to perform a Nazi salute on the field before kick-off. It remains perhaps the most shameful image in British sporting history.
This combination of sport, class and politics meant that Scotland and England first played in the FIFA World Cup finals only in 1950 before, in 1966, England won their only major international football honour by controversially defeating West Germany in the final. A Russian linesman sanctioned an England goal that much of Germany still disputes.
Since then, England have lost painfully to iterations of ‘the Germans’: in the World Cup finals in Mexico in 1970; on penalties, in the World Cup semi-final in Turin in 1990; again, on penalties, in the Euro 96 semi-final; and in the World Cup finals in South Africa in 2010. I was there on those 1990s’ occasions. They were horrible.
So, Germany is a recurrent figure in English football history, either because of its importance politically and ideologically, or because it is seen as a recent dasher of English football dreams, especially by the lottery route of penalty kicks. Here, familiar stereotypes fall easily into place: the mechanical efficiency of the Germans in converting their opportunities, set against the romantic decency and refusal of the English to take anything quite so anarchic, seriously.
And here we are again in 2021, where we knew it would all end up. There will be much less of the ‘Achtung Surrender!’ tabloid headlines from 1996 – though I’m afraid many England fans’ favourite song remains one about shooting down German bombers – and generally the climate around the international game has markedly improved since the 1990s.
But, for England, playing Germany in the Euro finals still feels politically charged because war tropes still linger, but also in the recent light of Brexit. It also feels overly-important in a sporting sense, because Germany in different guises has won four World Cups and three European Championships compared to our one moment of home glory by a blanched 1966 England team that fewer and fewer people can recall and which looks nothing like the English today.
We need, as a country, to move on so that when we reminisce about great sporting occasions against our historic rivals, smiling images of Sako, Sterling and Grealish first come to mind, and not the war, or those of a gambolling, toothless Nobby Stiles celebrating after the first technicolour final. So, come on England 2021 – seize the day, and release us.