All very nice, a, but you fail to spot the glaring contradiction at the heart of your argument.Originally Posted by Ash
Part of the 'charm', if one might use that word, of international football is precisely that it does, or should, allow the tribal rivalries to dissolve for a short while and for fans of the game to be united behind a team which is local to all of them.
Perhaps deep down we tire of the compulsory hatred for people who follow a team with a different colour shirt from another part of town. I met a bloke at the cricket last week - a fellow Middlesex fan watching them play the Surrey rivals - who was Spurs, and as he said: "It's ok - it's the summer".
The other thing is that World Cups are a chance for non-football fans to experience, and maybe enjoy, the ups and downs of football.
I admit to having my doubts about the Spurs component of this team, but eventually decided it was actually preferable to the collection of supposedly word-class thundercùnts of previous years who achieved rather less than this group of more modest abillity.
One way of measuring 'passion' is how hard it hurts to lose and long it hurts for. It hurt quite a bit last night, but not much, if any today. So I care a lot less than the two days of hurt I expect when Arsenal go out of something, which I would expect, but others might feel differently.
What is notable is that the people who hate England the most here are perhaps the three with the most proudly and robustly held right wing views, with a strong sideline in misanthropy. Interesting, that, should they ever question anyone's patriotism.
You admit that you find this England team preferable to its predecessors containing said ‘thùndercûnts’. In doing so, you concede that your affection or otherwise for England teams is negotiable based on the individuals they contain. Which means that, in essence, you concede that the principle underpinning my distaste for this England team is valid. You are, in other words, no different to me in principle, we just happen to have different criteria.
Speaking personally, though, what really bothers me about England football teams is the sheer level of conformity they tap into. I’ve always despised unthinking, reflexive conformity and that is at the heart of what you choose to call my misanthopy. That isn’t to say I’m not outwardly conformist in many respects, but I can say with my hand on my heart that where I conform, it is as a consequence of thought and self-examination. So for instance, I am patriotic because there are many things about this country which are admirable and worth defending. However, those things do not include a mediocre football team teeming with Spurs shítcùnts. And, if I may say so, I find the notion of assessing patriotism based on support for a sports team patently ludicrous. And it’s no less ludicrous when you propose it than when Norman Tebbit does.
For natural-born conformists who have never examined an idea in their lives, of course, England supporting in World Cups is second nature. They are quite able to reconcile hating Spurs 204 weeks out of 208 and then cheering on ‘Harry’ and ‘Alli’ the other four because they’ve never actually bothered thinking about it. Confront them with the parent absurdity of their position and they become enraged and start indulging in convoluted post-rationalisations for their own intellectual inconsistency and reflexive conformity. They will attack you because you have not done the same and use as justification for their attacks that millions of people agree with them and not with you. Because, to the conformist, if everyone’s doing it, it must be right.
I’m afraid I’m just not built that way.
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