England versus Sweden, by George Szirtes

George Szirtes has written this report exclusively for the Impala blog. George writes his own excellent blog here.-Ed

It was a great disappointment to me at the age of eleven when I discovered, or thought I discovered, that, having been born Hungarian, I could never play for England. I had been in the country just three years and was centre-forward, occasionally right-wing for my primary school in a team that had won the local primary schools cup at Wembley. No, not the stadium but a playing field not too far away, my school being in the same borough. It was 1960. By this time I had fallen for the post-Munich Manchester United team and was about to embark on a ten year love affair first with Bobby Charlton, then with Best and Law as and when they came along.

I don’t think I was carrying any cultural baggage at the time: love was love. I never did think I would play for Hungary. Hungary had sunk under the North Sea of memory. Nor did I think, curiously enough, that I would ever play for Manchester United. United were fable: England was all around me. And of course I wasn’t that good a player anyway, indeed it was part of the heady feeling that I was any good at all when I never expected to be. Romance was in the air.

We watched England, my dad and I, mostly on black and white television, but a few times in the flesh. Including two games during the World Cup in 1966 when Charlton scored one of his specials. It was a surprise England winning the Cup that year because, frankly, neither my dad nor I thought England were that good. Dad referred to Roger Hunt as “az a falábú” (Hungarian for “that peg-leg”). Alan Ball scurried. Hurst was OK but work-a-day, a one-day wonder.

The fact is, never once have I, or indeed anyone I knew in England, thought that England were an outstanding team. One or two excellent performances here and there, a few months of promise, but there was always someone better. Almost everyone agrees that the 1970 team was superior to the 1966 team but they lost to Germany and that was it.

The reason for England’s general mark of B-, according to my dad, was that the players were not intelligent enough. All kick and rush, he said. Not very imaginative, the English proletariat, he thought.

Then there was the psychology. It was as if the shadow of the past, of foregone possibilities, hung over the team psyche. The team psyche did not support the arrogant and graceful though such qualities were occasionally available. It did not tolerate, let alone trust, brittle genius. It demanded the committed, the grafting and the solid, and when the solid wasn’t solid enough disaster would slip down the wings, exchange a couple of neat passes with tragedy and calamity would unleash an unstoppable shot past the heroically diving English goalkeeper (it was a country of great goalkeepers and solid centre-halves). Even God intervened with his Argentinian hand. Maybe it was punishment for Empire, the psyche serving its time.

Everyone says – and says rightly, in my opinion – that the current English squad is the most gifted in living memory. Four or five of those players have figured in the official world top ten at various times. And they can play. Just watch them in the first half against Sweden, buzzing, moving, shooting on sight. That Joe Cole goal! In fact Joe Cole, full stop. And Rooney, still recovering, but fast, strong, brilliant and fearsome. Beckham’s use of the dead ball. Crouch, half man-half spider, playing skilfully and confidently.

But then, after half-time, the collapse: the ghost in the psyche returns. The spectre had stepped onto the pitch the moment Owen was injured in the first minute of the game and had only been waiting its proper dramatic entrance. The whole team falls back, a vast chasm opens up between defence and the one or two forwards left upfield, so it’s back to pumping hopeful high balls. Panic sets in. Defenders used to cruising like battleships are frantically paddling tiny canoes in turbulent water.

I have often wondered how it might feel to be watching England if you didn’t care who won. I cannot help caring.. No one would blame me if I supported Hungary instead, as Mr Parkes, our sweet-natured local butcher who is flying a dozen flags of St George in his window, imagined I would. And I might. I could and half do. Nor was it a choice of any kind supporting England. It was the streets I walked on my way to school, the buses I hopped on in London, the boys I played with in the primary school and later the grammar school team. It was where I was, the people I was with.

Clarissa, my wife, watches the matches with me, but on the evening of the England v Sweden match there was also Michael, an Irish poet and scholar working in Liverpool, down for two nights. I don’t think Michael exactly wants England to lose – at least he doesn’t say so – but he watches with a certain amusement as I grow tense and absorbed. He does have a proper interest, as a Liverpool supporter, in Carragher, Gerrard and Crouch. He too admires the performance of Joe Cole, but he is benignly relaxed throughout.

If I were a Swede, I think, I would be disappointed at the end of the first half. Nothing has happened to encourage me, and yet I might think that given past England’s second-half performances, it would be worth giving the match a real go. I would fear Cole and Crouch and Rooney, but less so as the game wore on. If I were a Swede I would be chuffed as hell with my team’s second-half performance, a performance not remarkable for overwhelming grace or open play, and yet simply overwhelming in spirit and energy. Ljunberg is always a danger, in fact anyone taking a corner or a free kick is positively threatening. The blood is up.

2-2 is a fair result in the end. The Swedes could have won it in the second half, but the English should have been further ahead in the first. Now if I were supporting neither England nor Sweden, what would I make of it? Too early to tell. One always finishes up supporting one side or the other and the next night there was Croatia-Australia. Now there was a game!