My Problem With England
During England’s second match, it started to creep in. First in brief flashes of unknowable discomfort — why did I just do a full-body shudder, as if trying to vibrate the devil out of my face holes? Why did it momentarily feel like someone just kicked me in the guts with trainers made of boiling worms? Why did someone just scrape a safety pin swiftly once round the inside of my skull?
Something bad from some other time was breaking through. The long, hot summer, the swelling vibes of positivity, the sudden blossoming optimism of a national team somehow not shitting the Stanky Faeces Of Hubris into the Bed Of Xenophobic Arrogance. This is all too familiar. This has all happened before. So say we all, there must be some kinda way out of here, the past is just the echo of a future whose warnings we shall not heed, it’s coming home, it came home, Neil Morrissey, time is a flat circle. Wait, say that last-but-one one again.
Nope. Nothing there. Just a distant mist shimmering with shame, like waking from a dream where Michael Gove had buried himself in some personal fleshy crevice of yours but you’d observed proceedings and just kind of nodded along with vague disinterest.
During England’s round of 16, the feelings grew stronger. The stink of Fosters evaporating off replica kits baking in the heat of an overcrowded big screen, the incomprehensible hum of a thousand sweaty white boys’ violent prayers while a trumpet does a random three-tone fart, everything is fucking red and fucking white; it was the vibe of a mid-decade long past, further from now than Ziggy Stardust was from then, a happy time with a hot sour pulse of misery inside it. Rachel Weisz. Creamy nostalgia around a razor blade. Hang on. HANG ON.
Gone again. Like waking from a dream where Michael Gove had buried himself in some personal fleshy crevice of yours and you’d been so extremely into it that your body had shaken you awake at t-minus vinegars to prevent any long-term psychological damage, but you still had the phrase “Gove’s supple, wet lips” haunting your thoughts for a good few days.
It took the climactic moment of Colombian capitulation for the deep unease to crystallise into an image, ripped from the ‘90s, in head-spinning 4k VR, all encompassing and semi-permanent. Was it a missed penalty, enough to drive a dude from spade-face boy to nation’s normcore bangdaddy? Hell fuckin no. The simultaneous death of 30 million dreams is small fry compared to this, suddenly there, HD clear — the jackhammer pendulum of a pale lil’ lad butt, ploughing and ploughing and ploughing without mercy, as Neil Morrissey banged Rachel Weisz from behind, simultaneously orgasming while they both watched England win against Bulgaria on a small CRT television.
Listen, my friends, and heed my warning. I think we’re heading for another My Summer With Des situation.
My Summer With Des was an act of psychic war that happened during the fevered nightmare of the France 1998 World Cup. My Summer With Des was a feature-length football-themed TV romcom, starring Rachel Weisz as a beautiful cypher, a mysterious nymph, a collection of irritating pixie-girl non-sequiturs propped upon a willing vagina, and Neil Morrissey as some fucking 90s Nick Hornby twat. My Summer With Des had a plot, ostensibly, mostly based around our collective fetishation of the warm, comforting hug of Des Lynam’s presence during our Euro 96 failure, but the details of the plot are unimportant. Because My Summer With Des, most of all, had a scene where Neil Morrissey banged Rachel Weisz from behind, simultaneously orgasming while they both watched England win against Bulgaria on a small CRT television.
This scene — this stomach-turning, revolting scene, based upon the premise that someone as ethereally stunning as Rachel Weisz, literally cast in this goddamn film as an angel in human form, would allow this fag-end of lad culture to ramraid her into oblivion and be grateful for it — is not something the hippocampus stores away in its happy pile for regular review if it wants to keep the oxygen flowing, so has remained buried for 20 years. Until this summer, where the combination of the heat, the hope, the song, oh, god, the bloody SONG, smashed through my mental patio and it all got a bit Trevor Jordache. I didn’t watch England vs Sweden: I watched a 90 minute loop of Men Behaving Badly’s triumphant cumface, over and over again.
We can’t allow this to happen again. My Summer With Des was only possible because of the football fervour of the decade — coming (ugh) so close in Euro ’96, a home tournament no less, leading into the hype spectacular of France ’98, where everything, everything that summer was flavoured with the insipid gravy gruel of En-ger-lund. And we’re already at the semis. God forbid we win the fucking thing, this country will be insufferable. And here comes 2020 and a 13-part Netflix binge, My Summer With VAR; a new generation of teenagers are scarred for life watching Josh Widdicombe hump Caroline Flack in an alleyway off Red Square, while Gary Lineker smiles beatifically from the sun like the kid in Teletubbies.
Don’t let this come to pass. Let our hopes die in peace and our enthusiasm for any sport wither on the vine like Boris’s post-leadership challenge nuts. Don’t let it come home. Change the locks, let it scream all night that you’re a fucking bitch, fall asleep in the gutter, slink off in the morning and move to Malaga with Candice from HR to start a sign-writing business. I commend this statement to the House.
