C'est si bon: England is out of the World Cup

The English football team (you Americans call it soccer) just played its last World Cup game for at least another four years. Like many inhabitants of England, I can remember exactly where I was each time the national football team was knocked out of the World Cup. But unlike those millions of people, I experience these as moments of unadulterated joy, times when I can revel in the repeated footballing failures of my adopted nation. I have spent most of my life in England, but I’ll support anyone — even Germany — against the Three Lions.

Let me explain. My parents, both French, moved our family from Paris, where I was born, to London in 1990; I was 5 years old. When I was sent to an English primary school, I didn’t speak a word of the language (we spoke French at home). Every morning for the first two months, after my mother dropped me off, I cried because I couldn’t understand anyone around me. Two years later, I played the lead, Daddy Warbucks, in a school production of the musical “Annie.” Thanks to a grainy home video, I know I had a thick French accent even then.

Meet me now, and you wouldn’t know I wasn’t English — apart from my name, Jacques, which I make a point of pronouncing the French way. (It’s the same as “Jack,” in case you’re wondering, but with a soft J.) I have a middle-class English accent (the reverse is true in French), and I was educated exclusively, bar one year in a Parisian collège, in English-speaking institutions. My life is in London, my girlfriend a Londoner and most of my friends, too.

And yet, when it comes to sporting matters, I revel in the despair that surrounds the English football team every four years. This is a character trait I share with the other natives of the British Isles — the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish — for whom an English victory is almost worse than their own nation’s defeat. Culturally, I am more English than any of them; in fact, I’m probably among the most culturally assimilated first-generation immigrants in the country. So where did this anti-English sentiment come from?

Partly, I think, it has to do with my father, a lifelong Gaullist with a built-in distrust for “les rosbifs” (“roast beef” in French), so called in France for their Sunday lunching tradition. (They call us “les frogs” for similar reasons, although frogs are rarely eaten outside of my mother’s native Bourgogne.) As far as I can remember, he told me stories about “ces salopards d’anglais” (“those bastard English”), Joan of Arc, Agincourt, Waterloo and all the rest of it. Admiral Nelson was a hated figure in my household (though Winston Churchill was revered, despite the sabotaging of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir).

By the time of the 1998 World Cup, I was 13. I watched England’s second-round defeat to Argentina in my parents’ bedroom in our rented semi-detached house in Brook Green. My 11-year-old brother Pierre and I — Pierre and Jacques, the Frenchest of brotherly pairings: how could we ever support England? — were so delighted when David Beckham got sent off for kicking Diego Simeone, and later when England lost on penalties, that we opened the windows and screamed with delight into the London night. (We saw the next day that all of our neighbors had oriented their English flags toward our house.)

Being steeped in expatriate French chauvinist culture from such a tender age stood me in good stead when I was sent to a boarding school (in central London, but a boarding school nonetheless). My parents had moved back home to Paris; I was the only one left in town, age 14. As I found myself alone for the first time among the rosbifs, it was natural for me to play up my Frenchness and cultural differences: One of the first things I did in my new room was to hang up a French flag. (My one and only roommate, who endured the flag, has been living in Paris for seven years; he remains a very good friend, perhaps because he has embraced my mother culture so wholeheartedly.) I once failed to turn up for a school football match that coincided with a Six Nations rugby decider between England and France. France won, and I was suspended. I was furious, needless to say, and firmly believed the school had suspended me only because France had won a Grand Slam by trouncing l’ennemi héréditaire.

Back then, I had an excuse: I was still clearly a French expat, a boy sent to school in England by his reluctantly Anglophile parents, who was trying to build an identity for himself. I don’t have that anymore: I’ve spent 19 of my 30 years in London, almost four times the requisite amount of time needed in the country to apply for British citizenship.

My girlfriend finds my sport-induced anti-English sentiment hard to swallow. “If you don’t support England, I think you should go back to your own country,” she says, not quite joking. But my attitude is now softening. Last week, when Luis Suarez scored two goals in England’s defeat to Uruguay, I remained fairly neutral, even going so far as to encourage some of the England players in their pursuit of an equalizer.

Perhaps it was because England has been so expectedly average this year that there was no pleasure in watching it fall apart; none of the friends I’ve enjoyed goading over the years had any illusions about its chances. Possibly also because England’s players, for once, are more likable than usual. John Terry, who was investigated by police for allegedly hurling racial slurs at footballer Anton Ferdinand, and Ashley Cole, famous for cheating on television personality Cheryl Cole and leaving his boyhood club, Arsenal, for its biggest rival, Chelsea, are both out of the team — that helps a lot. (The stories surrounding those two, and many other England players, are endless — just Google them.)

Every four years when the World Cup comes around I am forced to reconsider my identity. This year I’ve come to a pretty definitive conclusion. I am French, but it’s been a long time since anyone would consider me an expat. In fact, I hate French expats in London almost as much as I hate the England football team. I suppose that makes me a bicultural Londoner with an identity problem. I’m comfortable with that. But no, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to support England.