England: The long hangover

To support England’s football team is to be a connoisseur of disappointment. As long as I have been conscious, following their efforts has been like sipping the fine wine of tragic failure. In that respect, the 1990 World Cup in Italy was a vintage year. England’s penalty-shootout defeat to West Germany in the semi-final was as exquisitely painful a loss as the sporting gods could have devised. 

At that age, I didn’t know why England despised their European neighbors so much – it’s just something that I had absorbed from birth, a few years after my parents had fled Idi Amin’s Uganda. What I soon came to realize, was that my adopted country’s footballing fortunes were one long imperial hangover. The victory in the 1966 final had been a reminder that tiny, plucky England could still win things, even as the global balance of political power had shifted. But in 1990, when Chris Waddle sent his penalty sailing high into the Turin night, the days of Rule Britannia were clearly long gone.

Of course, I didn’t know this at the time. All I remember is leaving my grandparents’ house in a mournful silence, and not knowing quite why the tears came from so deep a place. Perhaps that’s because, when you’re born in England, you inherit the sense that the country should somehow be at the center of things all the time: that everything England does in the global gaze should be accompanied by pomp and fanfare. You could call it the entitlement of Empire: this sense that the nation belongs on the mountain top. Yet time and again, it is sent dashing back down the slopes. And to be dismissed from the World Cup in successive tournaments by two recent and particularly bitter military adversaries – the Argentines in 1986, and the Germans in 1990 – was as painful as could be. 

This is one reason why the tears fall from the eyes of England supporters as heavily as they do, and this is why, with each World Cup, there is the same uncomfortable swell of dread and hope in their guts. Each gifted new generation of English players carries the burden of a glorious past: and, just maybe, the bravery to provide us with new dreams.

As told to Africasacountry. Musa Okwonga (@Okwonga) is a poet, sportswriter and author, and is one half of The King's Will.