The English are scary warriors

In case you’ve forgotten, it was pictorial evidence of England striker Crouch’s foul on TT defender Sancho in last Thursday’s football World Cup game as he headed the ball into the net for the first of England’s two winning goals that put us out of the running.

Newsday told the story in creative style. Right across the page, in a beautifully laid-out series of three vivid pictures, the white and black England colours are suspended in mid-air above TT’s red, Sancho’s forearm across Crouch’s midriff as if fending off the white-knuckled tugging of the warrior’s dreads. Some commentators judged it was all part of the game. Others wanted Crouch’s head.

Now, there is a marked discrepancy between the mild tone in which Sancho revealed he’d been fouled and the proven extent of the hair-pulling — even if it was just over-excitement, it was very intense. It made me remark the disparity between how the supposedly cool and dispassionate English actually behave and how we expect them to, especially when it comes to matters of national importance, in this case football.

When I moved to London and was still trying to fathom those people among whom I would spend the next 36 years of my life, an English friend explained to me that I should understand two things: One, that the English are bellicose (warlike); two, they are Protestants (value hard work over hard play and self reliant). On both counts it was good advice.

A recent article by Dominic Lawson, the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, describes as “hellish” his experience watching the 1998 World Cup England/Tunisia game. He and other England supporters stood in the ground allocated to them behind one of the goal areas. He says “they kept up a steady stream of abuse and outrage throughout the game... all I could see were faces contorted with.... anger.” And, of course, those very fans went on the rampage in Marseilles for three whole days after the match, ending up with 80 of them arrested. And that was after England had won.

As I watched the TT/England match last Thursday and a possible nil-nil draw became a possibility I began thinking that this could be really bad news for the TT fans, and even worse if we actually won. All the fun would end in a right ole mas’ if those English warriors decided to revert to type.

Sancho claims he doubted that the referee would disallow the goal so he didn’t make a fuss.

Probably he recognised the foul too late and somewhere in the pit of his stomach he probably knew that it would be a very dangerous call.

Another writer wrote from Nurernberg about the “omnipresent” threatening air created by English fans.

He reckoned there were enough of them “to start a full-scale riot... They move in packs through the town, they chant so loudly ...you think they’re preparing to attack one another — only to find, when they embrace and the whooping war cries combine that they’re on the same side.” He dubbed it a “blitzkrieg of intimidation.” I was interested that he spotted their bellicose nature. To be fair to the England fans, few of them are thugs (they just sound like it), and the trouble so far has been limited, but their reputation for hooliganism is so legend that even a plucky writer found them “scary.” “They could be going to war” he decided, “even women and children.”

It was not by chance that one TV commentator remarked that it was the friendliest game so far. It had to be, or who knows what genie might have been let out of the bottle?

Racism in English football goes back to the early days of John Barnes et al at Liverpool etc, and earlier. I remember the banana skins on the field, the monkey grunts accompanied by the scratching of armpits, the abuse and contempt for black players, the racial attacks on fans.

The “Kick Racism out of Football” initiative did a lot to curb that aspect of the hooliganism, plus the appearance of significant numbers of black players and even the odd black manager at English clubs. Getting rid of the terraces also helped considerably with crowd control.

But the Germans are taking no chances. Who knows how the visitors might behave?

Their entire riot police are on emergency standby and have learned some basic English. The British, for their part, denied known troublemakers from leaving England and sent a number of police officers and Crown Prosecution Service lawyers to Germany, just in case.

The TT fans won the war by refusing to be intimidated and instead seducing everyone with their capacity for fun. As for the warriors, they were brave and we are proud of them. Let’s hope the English will have an equally good story to tell of World Cup 2006.