Collect together all those who were surprised England lost the World Cup and you probably couldn’t form a football team.
The painful truth is that at most games requiring physical skill English Saxo-Celt is basically rubbish. A fact fully recognised by our Victorian fore-fathers and the reason they invented the mantra “it’s the playing that counts, not the winning”.
Even those of our closest kin, having spent a year or so chewing eucalyptus leaves and travelling a hundred miles for a darts match, return home just long enough to humiliate us before going back to properly chilled beer.
Which is why it’s so difficult to get a place in an English footy team if the fans can pronounce your name.
Sometimes we succeed
Of course, we have our occasional triumphs. Immediately trumpeted in the press as a return to some entirely fictitious golden past. And girding up our foes to inflict even greater humiliations on us in the future.
What English Saxo-Celt is good at however – or at least was – is inventing games.
Games ranging from tiddleywinks to rugby to tennis to cricket to netball to footy to conkers. And so on,developing for each some quite complex rules and writing them all down in an important Rule Book.
A Bible which had under any and every circumstance to be obeyed if One was to be considered a Gentleman.
And as a result of our once – world empire, kiddies everywhere watched in awe as the god-like white men chased about doing complicated things for no apparent reason before retiring to the bar for a jolly good booze-up afterwards.
Fancy a game?
It was all very important, obviously, so when white master kindly offered to show the local lads how to do it, they eagerly accepted.
And that was the point at which English Saxo-Celt stopped winning.
Soon after World War 2 had ended and International Test Cricket had resumed, a delegation from the West Indies asked if they might be allowed to join in. To which the lordly folk at the Centre of Empire replied, quite kindly, that of course they couldn’t, but as they were so keen we might be able to fit in a game with them every other year or so. Just to try to get them up to scratch as it were.
Boy oh boy, did we superior white folk get a kicking as a result of that choice bit of condescension.
Come on you Spurrrr ….. urghs
And I remember standing at the bus stop after school and watching the crowds streaming away from the Spurs ground, where our glorious team had been showing the Moscow Dynamo Russkies how the game should be played.
Another thrashing for the English Superman then. The first of many to come.
There is hope however. When we are able to fill our national team with names we can’t spell, just as we have our club teams, then perhaps we can at last claim to be what we have never been before, Champions Of The World.
Image: Ewan-M under CC BY-SA 2.0
