Primarily, Saturday night in Rustenburg offered England supporters a whistlestop tour of tournaments past: featuring as it did irrational player choices, injuries, goalkeeping howlers providing the requisite scapegoat/tabloid hate figure, perceived national humiliation against a perceived national enemy, and a manager acting like an archetypal malfunctioning England boss. It was, as the stadium chants have yet to observe, “just like watching England”. If you only had tickets for the Rustenburg game, you can console yourself with having had the entire traditional England World Cup experience in microcosm.

—Marina Hyde World Cup 2010: Saturday was the night Fabio Capello became an England manager, The Guardian

Football, the World Cup in particular, does tend to inspire writers toward poetic brilliance, though I’m a fan of Marina Hyde’s writing anyway, this piece is particularly exquisite. She provides a little peek inside the English football mind, and perhaps—just for a moment—might allow readers from other nations to glimpse into the complex we have with our team and country. For a brief moment you might understand why it is that 44 years without a major international achievement we continue to show up every four years just as bafflingly unrealistic as the past.

Last week, every incidence of sarcastic, pre-emptive gloating toward my American hosts was punctuated by my pausing, sighing and sad-eyed admission that this is exactly the sort of scenario that England tend to trip on. I don’t think I’ve seen Robert Green’s indescribable goalkeeping error at the real speed. Even as it happened live, everything slowed down around me. The roar from the Americans muffled, everything that an Englishman suppresses about International Football rising up like indigestion as the ball trickled over the goal line. As humiliating as the incident is, I couldn’t help feeling most embarrassed at myself. For all my pragmatism, and past experience, I had still shown up in my England jersey, stood amongst my American friends and genuinely believed that we could step out and knock three past them.

It’s understood that emotion and rationality are always somewhat at odds with one another. The cost is the crushing low of defeat, occasional embarrassment, and all those times that the ignoramus you anointed as your star player gets themselves petulantly dismissed at a decisive climax of the game that will inevitably send England home early. But the highs? They’re my favourite childhood memories of Paul Gascoigne’s goal against Scotland in 1996, they’re Michael Owen ripping Argentina apart in 1998.

It is our deeply engrained belief that sooner or later, an England XI will be able to pull off their own moments of euphoric brilliance without counterbalancing themselves with a humiliating cock up at the other end. Sooner or later.

Rationally, I should accept that it’s getting on for ‘later’ by now. Emotionally I’ll be stood in a bar at 7:00am on Wednesday June 23rd, wearing this shirt, emersed in whatever the England Complex has to offer. Via: Guardian.