Television
Brothers on the pitch
James Delingpole
Every Sunday morning rain or shine I head off to play football in the park with my two boys — Ivo and Rat — and whichever locals happen to have turned up. This probably makes me sound like a caring dad, but I’m not; I do it for utterly selfish reasons. I’ve belatedly realised at the age of 40 that a game of footie with the lads is one of the greatest pleasures on earth. Right up there with bridge and foxhunting.
What I enjoy most is the camaraderie. It’s quite rough in places, where I live, and if you saw some of the kids who play footie out of context — say, lurking after dark on one of the street corners not covered by CCTV cameras — you’d beat a swift retreat. The second we’re together on the pitch, though, we’re all brothers under the skin. There’s no violence, no aggression, there’s not even any swearing. Everyone’s there just to have a really good game. And to smash the opposition into tiny pieces, obviously.
If you wanted to be smug and say ‘I’m not a racist, me’ and ‘Goodness! What a splendid testament to Multicultural Britain’, you could very easily. On any one morning you’re likely to get Somalis, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Brazilians, Portuguese, Poles, Germans, French, Spanish, Pakistanis, West Indians, Bulgarians, Scots and English all mucking in together and respecting one another like the best of mates. It occurred to me that maybe I should write a book about it: a feel-good combo of football and meltingpot pieties — the market would love that kind of thing, wouldn’t it?
Really, though, of course, multiculturalism has nothing to do with it. The reason we all get on is that football is the universal language which transcends everything. It requires a bit of skill, a bit of teamwork, a bit of strategy, a bit of effort — like war, really, only with all the horrid bits removed. And even if, like me, you’re not very talented, you can earn your team-mates’ respect in other ways. Say, by not making too big a fuss when the ball whacks you hard in the goolies. ‘No, I’ll be all right,’ you have to say. ‘Just give me a few moments.’ And everyone pats you on the back.
We expect the same sort of behaviour from our kids when they come a cropper. I don’t think I’d ever quite realised before how much store chaps set by stoicism. It’s no accident that we clap injured cricketers who choose to play on. It’s part of our cultural indoctrination. Another thing I enjoy about these football games is watching people’s national characteristics come to the fore. The Africans show great flair but can be very lazy; the Latins are so addicted to the beauty of their footwork they forget to pass; the Eastern Europeans are solid, muscular defenders; the Germans are lightning fast in attack and almost suicidally committed in defence. Our German is called Andreas and I’d follow him anywhere. When he’s leading you, you know how it must have felt to have sat in the turret of a Panzer rolling across the Steppes in the summer of ’41. Not that I’ve ever mentioned this to him, of course. They can get quite sensitive about that sort of thing, Germans. ‘I only meant Lebensraum in a nice way,’ I tried explaining to him once.
Anyway, I was thinking about Andreas quite a lot during World Cup Stories (BBC2, Sunday), the first of what promises to be an excellent series on great national sides. The opener was on Germany and came up with a very plausible thesis as to why we always so desperately want them to lose. Nothing to do with those two world wars; rather it’s that, on at least two of the three occasions when they’ve won the Cup, they did it against a much more simpatico opposition. The first was against Hungary in 1954, whose magnificent team was known as the ‘magical Magyars’, and who were led by the ‘Galloping Major’, Ferenc Puskas, who, despite being small and tubby, was the greatest striker the world has seen, scoring 83 goals in 84 international appearances. Everyone, apart from the Germans, wanted them to win. But they didn’t.
Far more depressing, though, was their victory over Johan Cruyff’s Netherlands team of hippie playboys in 1974. Not for Cruyff’s boys the dreary asceticism that has since become de rigueur: whenever they won a game, which was all the time, they’d celebrate with booze and fags and baths with topless beauties who weren’t their wives. And they got away with it because they played possibly the most fluid, exciting game the world has ever seen — ‘total football’, so inspired it made even the Argentinians look clumsy. So, when the Germans went and beat them in the final, it seemed like an affront to everything in the world that was poetic and joyous and good.
Purportedly an objective account of how George W. Bush’s administration has tried to suppress evidence of climate change, Panorama (BBC1, Sunday) was in fact just another of those hysterical eco-fascistic rants predicated on the notion — so depressingly common at the BBC — that anyone who dares even question the science of global warming must perforce be a Nazi lunatic. Are not licence-fee payers entitled to demand something a little more nuanced and clear-headed on so important an issue?
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