Romania’s players agreed to take the knee for the first time at the Riverside Stadium as a gesture of solidarity with their English hosts. As loud, angry boos rang out around the ground the Romanians must have wondered what they’d stumbled into here. What kind of weird, contorted, backwards kind of country is this England anyway? Didn’t they used to be someone? Welcome to England 2021. Divided, belligerent, set against itself – and reduced now by the formalities of a football match to debating the idea of “Englishness” until it falls apart at the seams.

It isn’t Gareth Southgate’s fault that the schedule has been so brutal, that the players have been passed to him in a state of fatigue, that the country has managed to generate and encourage so many people who are still clearly confused by the meaning of words such as tolerance and equality. But this is where we find ourselves. At the end of this muddled, chancy 1‑0 defeat of Romania England have a week to go until their first Group D fixture against Croatia. They’re being booed by their own fans. The first team haven’t had a runout since March.

What to do with this now? There are issues with knee-taking. Nobody has to agree with anyone else about anything. You might feel this is not necessary, or believe that discrimination is overplayed, or – who knows – a good thing. You might feel there is something odd in football as an industry preaching about inequality, or men who earn 350 times the national wage in a country where people go hungry. These are points for discussion.

But the public booing of a simple anti-racism gesture is a shameful, hurtful act. Doing so to young men, your own players, who are regularly racially abused is doubly shameful. Pretending this has something to do with “keeping politics out”, or that creeping “Marxism” is a threat to your way of life in Britain (Conservative majority: 83) is cowardly and disingenuous.

It is worth remembering in the middle of all this that football is just an amplification of what is out there. If there are racists, boneheads and people without compassion at England football matches, this is because these people exist in England. The harm they do is not confined to, contained by, or even that relevant to football. Football has to live with it, because no other physical human activity offers this soapbox, this visible theatre of hate.

And in reality the people who need to answer for this level of dissonance and rage are those in power: governments of the past 20 years; a sickly strain in the British media; and all those diffuse clumps of intolerance and ignorance wherever they may be found.

There was also a football match at the Riverside – but not much of one. The starting team was another England B, another Duchess of Sandwich XI affair. It is pointless to criticise Southgate for this when he has full knowledge of his players’ levels of fatigue and readiness. There has never been a season, or indeed a football tournament quite like this.

But it is hard to avoid the feeling of a slight loss of focus. The 26-man squad has allowed a kind of lacuna for woolly thinking, the overmanning in some areas, the presence of injured “good blokes”, the use of pressed-men to pad the warmups. At the 1958 World Cup in Sweden England’s squad was joined by a businessman called “Chalwyn”, a friend of Stanley Rous who joined in training as it pleased him. Are we in Chalwyn territory here? These are still good players, England still a good team, and as such there were still positive to be drawn. Jack Grealish was willing and bold and fun, and won England’s decisive penalty with a clever piece of play. An induced foul, but also poor defending.

And so on we go into the great unknown, the overwhelming excitement of a kind-of home Euros. There are no rules here. England have never looked so rushed before a tournament. But they are resourceful and talented; and in an odd kind of way all the more bonded by the hostility of a very audible group of their own fans.

Source: The Guardian

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