Sore heads and smiling faces

Well, well, well. Who would have thought it? England fans expected and the players delivered, rather than disappointed. At work, we allowed people into the onsite bar to watch it and we took an incredible amount of money through the tills!
I’m not quite as euphoric as everyone else around me seems to be this morning. I’m not a huge follower of football, and I’m not someone who will jump onto whatever cultural bandwagon is currently rolling past and dominating social media, but I must confess to feeling a strange amount of pride and a certain swelling of enthusiasm. As Ted eloquently put it to me – “Those f**kers have been letting us down for years. I’m probably one of the only people in the country who remembers a f**king final with England in it.”
It has reminded me a little of my own experience with the Super Bowl in 2013, and again in 2020.
Yes - sorry – I’m going to make this all about me, because that’s what modern people do. (I refer you again to the aforementioned social media).
I love the NFL, and my team is the San Francisco 49ers. They are historically one of the most successful franchises in the sport, but all that success happened before I was able to watch it and involve myself in it. I started following the team more passionately and being able to watch them on British TV during a long, horrible, uninspiring lean spell for them. So when they made it to ‘The Big Game’ 8 years ago, I was ecstatic. It was a chance to prove themselves as the best team playing that year, but also a chance for me to ‘revisit’ glory days that I had been too young to feel a part of when they happened. In the end, at the final whistle, they fell short, but that didn’t bother me too much, because I was so proud they had made it that far in the first place.
Now I would never make so bold as to tell fans of a sport I’m not interested in how they should behave, but maybe that’s the attitude England should have on Sunday. It would be such a terrible shame if Southgate and his players were deemed to be ‘failures’ just because they lost their last game in a tournament. That would completely detract from the wonderful achievement of getting themselves to that game; something no-one under the age of 60 in this country can ever remember happening before.
I’m not saying you should just turn up and enjoy the occasion, and be happy to be there, but if you can approach it with the opinion that you’ve already reached a goal very few people believed you would reach, then you can feel less pressure and enjoy every single minute of this once-in-a-lifetime event. And – win or lose – the feelings of pride and elation can continue.

RC 8-7-21