True commitment: football the Shankly way. Or Brazil's.

‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that,’ said Bill Shankly, legendary manager of Liverpool Football Club.

Bill Shankly, football legend and model of commitment

England has won the Football World Cup just once. Brazil has won it five times. That record suggests the Latin Americans have a different mindset from ours, one that corresponds rather more closely to Shankly’s. One can be forgiven for thinking they display a level of commitment usually reserved for world religions, major political movements or making large amounts of money (or are all those the same thing?)

Recent events shown the Brazilians are capable of all of that and then some.

I’ve heard of referees who take a dim view of the behaviour of certain players, and penalise them harshly in consequence. But stabbing them? Fatally, to boot? That’s really impressive.

Equally, I know that it’s easy for spectators to lose their rag with referees, demanding their expulsion (or at least that they visit the opticians). Another legendary manager, Alex Ferguson, who stood down at the end of last season from over a quarter of a century in charge at Manchester United, famously denounced refs in lurid terms on numerous occasions and was disciplined more than once in consequence.

Decapitating the ref, however, as happened to the unfortunate who stabbed the recalcitrant player? Generally, in England we like to reserve our mob decapitations for kings.

Brazil: serious enough about football even for Shankly

But, hey, the Brazilians have true commitment. The kind that makes you realise that Shankly was literally right and football is much more serious than mere life and death. Which, in this case at least, truly made it a matter of life and death. 

The results speak for themselves. Five world cups. To our one.

Slow learners in the art of losing

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same

… you’ll be a man, my son, according to Rudyard Kipling in his most famous poem, If. Perhaps it would be nice to add ‘you’ll be a woman, my daughter’ as well, but then Kipling wasn’t perhaps the most progressive of men. I had a lot of time for him until I discovered that he had contributed to the fund for that poor Brigadier Dyer, so cruelly driven out of the Army for carrying out a policing operation in Jallianwallah Bagh which unforgiving folk like me think of today as the Amritsar Massacre.


Spot of unpleasantness in Amritsar: a monument to Brigadier Dyer

Still, Kipling has a point in expressing the sentiment in these lines. You take part; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose; you should take either with equanimity and move on. That certainly is the ideal behaviour of the phlegmatic Englishman, imperturbable in all circumstances.

Which is why it’s a major concern when Sepp Blatter, president of the world football federation FIFA, absolutely rightly accuses England of being bad losers.

FIFA handed the 2018 World Cup to Russia. So what? In the first place, it’s time more places outside the traditional regions of Europe and South America got their chance. In the second place, this is a contest with only one winner and multiple losers and the latter need to take it with good grace. It’s increasingly embarrassing to see our papers bleating on about how badly we were treated.

One reason we lost the bid was because sections of our media have been campaigning against corruption among FIFA officials, and those same FIFA officials decided to punish us by not choosing England to host the Cup. That’s not a cause for regret. It’s a cause for pride. We wouldn’t shut up about how rotten the organisation is, and it cost us the World Cup. That’s called taking a stand on principle and accepting the consequences. The opposite, if we’d muzzled our press and TV on the subject in the hope of succeeding in our bid, would have been craven.



Blatter and Putin:made for each other?



And Wikileaks has confirmed what all of us have long suspected about the debased nature of the Russian Federation. If two thoroughly dishonourable federations join up, who’s to be surprised? Again, why sulk? That’s the natural order of things.

But what shocks me most about the fact that we’re losing so badly is that we’ve no excuse for it. Kipling’s advice is excellent. But in addition, they say that practice makes perfect, and England has an unparalleled track record for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, in sporting competition after competition.

So how come we’re still so bad at losing?

World Cup: the agony and the ecstasy

Now that the World Cup is over, it’s time to take stock of its contribution to our lives.

It’s well known that if the national team wins a major trophy for a significant sport, there’s a general improvement in morale of the nation as a whole. This has to be a good thing and should be encouraged, even though there is a downside to it: sadly, the government also generally benefits from the upsurge. Since governments tend to be more than sufficiently self-satisfied  anything that contributes to them feeling better about themselves is probably best avoided.

Still, whatever helps ordinary people is welcome. And obviously the people of Spain need a boost more than most, given their parlous financial state and the looming risk that it’s about to get an awful lot worse. So good luck to them.

On the other hand, wouldn’t it have been nice if the Portuguese, the Greeks and the Italians could have had a similar boost to their self-esteem? After all, they along with Spain and of course Ireland – which didn’t even qualify for the World Cup, denied by a scandalous and insufficiently punished handball by France – form the PIIGS group of Eurozone nations most badly affected by the financial crisis.

And that’s the problem with this kind of competition. One nation gets a boost, gets its spirits lifted – but there were 32 taking part in South Africa. The other 31 all came home more or less disappointed – including Ghana, denied a place in the semi-finals by a scandalous and insufficiently punished handball by Uruguay – leaving their compatriots un-lifted or even downright dejected. The latter was the case, in particular, in England, though I don’t share the general depression: I believe the England team to be outstanding only in its capacity to disappoint, so I didn’t feel let down at all.

The overall picture is of one country getting a fillip, while 31 came home disappointed, while others didn’t get to go at all.

Where’s the mileage in that? It’s hardly the greatest good for the greatest number. This really isn’t the most effective way of spreading the feel-good effect around the most possible people, is it?

Still, the upside I suppose is that 31 smug governments – not to mention Ireland’s – at least got their wings clipped a bit.