This World Cup couldn't have come at a better time 🟢 The England team can help us to rise above this winter of discontent and disenchantment ✍️ Simon_Kelner for ipaperviews
, mortgages are sky high and, any day now, Matt Hancock is going to return from the jungle and be among us again.
Each England team which has gone to a World Cup since 1966 carries a weighty, and generally unrealistic, burden of national expectation. But this time, more than any other time, there is a genuine belief that Gareth Southgate’s class of 2022 might give us a reason to be cheerful. Yes, England thus far have only beaten an Iran side playing most of the match with a reserve goalkeeper, but if you were standing on the platform at a station with no sign of a train, or you’d been told your doctor couldn’t see you for six weeks, their victory, and the entertaining manner in which it was achieved, must have done something to lighten your mood.
And so, all those who complained about this genetically-modified World Cup, scheduled for the dark days of winter for the first time, may have cause to change their minds. This tournament couldn’t, in fact, have come at a better time – at a moment in British history when we feel disheartened about our politics, when the nation’s finances are threadbare, and our international standing has fallen.
It has been difficult to give England teams of the past our unqualified support. They’ve represented some of the worst aspects of football: spoilt, entitled, under-achieving players and supporters of a nationalist bent who wreaked havoc wherever they went. We saw at the final of the European Championships at Wembley in 2021 that
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