United Road Take Me Home

Barely 9 o’clock, I’ve not even reached my desk and it’s started: ‘Where you watching it?’ ‘Reckon they’ll do it?’ and, twice already, ‘Rooney, eh?’ Muttering something vague and non-committal in response, I plonk myself down at the desk, throw some headphones on and try to muffle the insanity, knowing that it’s only going to get worse as the days proceeds.

Taken in order, something more than grunts in response to those questions: pubs and company (or the kind of company that elects to watch England matches down the boozer) will be swerved, instead I’ll be on the sofa, one eye on the box, the other on twitter, that all too familiar way of watching anything these days. Can they do it? Probably. And, Rooney, eh? On the drive to work, Nicky Campbell – as inimitably smug as ever – was calling him ‘the messiah’. True, all too predictably (and smugly, like he was the first person who ever thought of this) he undercut our Wayne’s divine credentials with a swipe at his naughty-boy ones. But an all too familiar narrative was being set in motion: Act One: Overload a single-player with expectation. Act Two: Eviscerate him when he buckles under the strain.

And not for the first time, the starring role in this drama would go to a man who plies his regular trade in a Manchester United shirt, the club that England has its most ambivalent and problematic relationship with, a feeling that is more than reciprocated by those of us who place United well before England in our footballing priorities.

Unlike some reds – who’ve already spent the morning spewing anti-England bile into my twitter timeline – what I feel towards the national side could never be defined as anything like hatred, for one thing that would require the exertion of far too many emotional muscles. No, what I feel is an indifference that shuttles along the spectrum between benign and malign in response to a host of factors.

It wasn’t always this way. Flick through my vinyl collection and you’ll find a splendid picture disk of the 1982 squad’s ‘This Time…’, the year I remember sprinting home from school just in time to see Bryan Robson smash it home against France after 27 seconds. I was 10 and couldn’t have been any more thrilled if these heroics were being performed in the red of United. Nestling among the New Order vinyl you’ll find a well-worn 12’’ of ‘World in Motion’, and when Gazza’ cried, and Lineker signalled to the bench, there was something prickling in the corner of my eye for sure.

You won’t find a copy of Three Lions though, but I have vivid memories of a nightclub in Rhodes that summer, where the DJ had the bright idea of finishing the night by playing it, a decision he may have had cause to regret as the lights came up, and the sing-along to Baddiel and Skinner smoothly segued into half the dance floor bellowing ‘No Surrender’ as they smashed the gaffe up.

And it’s with memories like this that my feelings for England start to curdle. Then throw in the fact that no international tournament seems complete without the anointing of a new pantomime villain, seemingly always cast from the repertoire of reds on duty. That’s before we’ve got to the fact that this is a tournament played in the shadow of John Terry’s racism or that it fell to the England captain to reassure the world that he would lead his team from the pitch if there was any racist bile spilling from the terraces. Any relation to the same bloke who warmed-up earlier this season in one of those fetching, racism-condoning Suarez tee-shirts being entirely co-incidental.

So I’ll be watching tonight, but when England win – and the pattern of this season tells all United fans of a fatalistic mindset that they’ll be going all the way to the final – I won’t be leaping from the sofa and, as I make my way to my desk tomorrow, and hear, ‘Rooney, eh?’ and turn to meet a face expecting me to share their delight, I’ll mutter something, stick the earphones on, and muffle the insanity once again. But not by playing ‘This Time’.