It has to be said that I don’t particularly care for Soccerball. I would go as far as to say I don’t know my Arsenal from my Elbow!
Which is why on days like this morning I feel slightly isolated from the Water Cooler talk about David Beckham’s imminent return, or something called a 3-5-2.
In fact the only part of last nights England International I did catch was the fantastic moment when the Goalkeeper forgot how to kick a ball and watched it trickle into his own net.
It took me back to my own school days, where many a games lesson was ended by me being locked a kit cupboard which was slowly being filled with fire extinguisher foam.
But of course I was never a professional sportsperson and so my total lack of hand-eye-foot-head co-ordination is justifiable. If you are being paid £50,000 a week to play football, it should be too much to ask that you be able to kick a ball with your foot!
While I was at the Water Cooler expressing this opinion and generally mocking the entire team, I was fixed with a gaze and asked “But where’s your sense of national pride?”
Has it really come to this? Has the idea of pride in our Nation been reduced to nothing more than wearing a white shirt and singing “Football’s coming Home” or “Ten German Bombers in the Sky”
There was a time when everything about being British was great. Brunel was building the world, and Queen Victoria was running it. London was the centre of Science and innovation and our Industry was the envy of the World.
Now our cars are built by the Americans and the Germans, our industry has been knocked down and replaced by Retail Parks or Designer Housing. Even the Queen Mary 2 - the flagship of the merchant fleet and the very symbol of “Britannia rules the waves” - was built by the French.
The French are a country who know how to exhibit National Pride and Ambition. Just look at the Tarn Valley Bridge: £270million, 1.5 miles long, 36,000 tonnes and 270 metres up in the sky. The clouds actually float under your car! They could actually stand the Eiffel Tower underneath it but it would probably piss off the people of Paris.
The last Bridge we built across the River Thames had to be closed after a day because it was too wobbly!
We don’t know who we are or where we’re going because we just don’t look at the big picture. If that bloke with the crazy sideburns from the Space Flight centre in Leicester announced that Britain would by 2017 land a man on Mars, would we get behind the project and reach for the stars? No, we’d moan that the money grabbing git was taking beds away from the NHS, books out of Schools and Speed Cameras off the M4.
The football team is just a reflection the nation at large. Tired, uninspired and quickly falling behind the rest of the world whilst still bleating on about long-past glories.
As a Nation we have been asleep for a long time. Perhaps it’s now time to Dream again. Remember, The Tarn Valley Bridge may have been built by the French, but it was dreamt up by a Brit.
And if we can Design a road that flies above the clouds, I suppose we might even manage to Qualify for the European Football Championships.
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