….for a big-ass vial of Calm The Fuck Down Pills. 1966 aside, who has achieved less
yet demanded more in international football than England? Following Sunday’s thorough capitulation to Germany, The Indepedent’s Rhodri Marsden observed a national outpouring of profound anger/grief that led him to scold, “if you place your potential happiness into the hands of a group of erratic human beings, regardless of how much they™re paid, it™s not always going to come off.” Jay Horowitz couldn’t have put it any better.
The online fury that met England™s exit from the World Cup yesterday afternoon was staggering. Calm, measured people were hammering on their keyboards, expressing the kind of disgust that you normally see from swivel-eyed loons reacting to made-up news stories about illegal immigrants raping British cattle. And I found it difficult to absorb, still less to join in with. I started worrying that if you scale up this kind of fury, the kind that™s being expressed by sane, rational people, all the red-faced idiots with anger-management issues in pubs would be implementing a mass annihilation of vertical sheets of glass via the propulsion of heavy objects accompanied by roaring.
The only emotion I was experiencing was a mild sadness, and I found it impossible to access anger. Without wishing to be an insipid, hand-wringing irritant, I don™t believe that the team did it on purpose, or that the manager was shit, or that the referee was a prick, or that FIFA should substantially re-evaluate the rules of football in the wake of the disaster. OK, I probably think that footballers are overpaid, but you don™t hear people complaining about pay-packets when the recipients are slamming the ball into the back of the net week-in, week-out. Everyone seems to looking to blame someone for the loss, but barely anyone seems to be blaming Germany for scoring more goals than us, and to me, they appear to be particularly culpable