If you have watched television recently Pat you will have noticed millions, yes millions of English people taking enormous pleasure in the World Cup and England's success in it. I'm willing to bet that a large portion of those people support football clubs to some degree.
The difference is that they are all rational and socially functional human beings. Quite unlike Monty.
It's all contrived. No-one cares anywhere near as much as they claim. All these scenes of fans going crazy is heavily confected. Of course they are having fun, but the football is an *excuse* to have fun. That's because international football is inherently incapable of eliciting the same kind of visceral passion as club football. In a country like England, it simply lacks any real sense of tribalism.
No, you just say you are better. If we were all what we considered ourselves to be then England would have won the World Cup.
If you genuinely think all that passion is contrived then you just do not understand people at all. And the idea that a country like england lacks any real sense of tribalism is laughable.
Of course there is a wider audience who are not football fans who get heavily involved and latch on to the sentiment but this is not the same thing at all. I think you are just getting yourself a bit confused.
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.