England Vs. Sweden: What Kind of Future Will England Embrace?

Once more unto the beach, dear friends. It’s fitting that England’s World Cup campaign, which so far has contained all the euphoria-incited male bonding, haywire emotion and redemption sobs of some colossal, nation-gripping lads’ holiday, should wash up for its latest leg a short stroll from the sandy stretch of Russian leisure-water usually home at this time of year to promenading crews of £1-a-litre drinkers and nightclubbers with volleyball tans. This is the side of Russia that not so many had talked or thought about before the action began: sun-kissed, al fresco, strobe-lit, at ease with foreign hedonism. Even the capital is getting in on the act. There was a moment there late on Tuesday night, as the shoot-out victory was draining all the dread away, when Gareth Southgate was caught by the cameras in a tender embrace with his captain, noses nuzzing, eyes pissed on relief and joy, mouth caught shaping the adoring words: “You’re my H.” All those prophecies of roaming GoPro gangs banging Englishmen over the head with mallets could never have imagined a moment this ecstatically vulnerable in Moscow, a DMC in the DMZ that looks, watching it back, more like some post-Jägerbomb vignette from Ibiza Uncovered than a clip off Tinker, Tailor or a Danny Dyer yob-doc.

There is a coming-of-age kind of feel to this England tournament summer, one that suggests they’re on or at least furtively approaching some kind of golden cusp, a tipping point beyond which all of the Bad Things – the tabloid hit-pieces and Fake Sheikh stings, the scapegoats and paralysing stage fright, the colonial hubris, German bomber songs and gammon-baiting radio phone-ins – might just fade away easily on the breeze, replaced by a messiah in a steampunk waistcoat and England’s current sixth-form of loveable, Fortnite-obsessed fuccbois. This is unrealistic, of course – nothing good ever lasts very long in England – but it’s a nice thought, and for all that the greatest challenges lie ahead, there is the sense of something dormant being reactivated, the digits of some dusty and lost old jukebox love song being punched in to the machine half an hour before closing time.

The first time I saw Southgate and Harry Kane’s tete-a-tete, I flinched. Not because there was anything bad about it – it was just the shock of the new, or at least the newly rediscovered. Joy, tenderness, sensitivity: these aren’t emotions that have been allowed to exist in English football – in English public life – for so long. The ides are that a New England is coming; the glory-hungry academy sides from St George’s Park all seem to play with a selfless togetherness and frictionless ease that make them look more like some eerily dominant Olympic hockey side than a doom-goading Dream Team thrown together from discrete celebrity parts. And yet… the parping of the England band can still be detected, “Three Lions” is in the air everywhere, Liam Gallagher remains the nation’s biggest rock star. If England are heading for some new future, what, exactly are we leaving behind?

It’s this question, as much as anything else, that feels like it’s fuelling the build up to Saturday’s quarter-final against Sweden and whatever lies beyond, either in Russia or back on home soil. Blood and thunder. The grim memories. The mixer and the years of hurt. These will all have to disappear soon. In this way the tournament can be seen not just as a signpost of the new tide to come, but a prolonged farewell to the nation that produced the weird and bitter sporting freakshow that was England though autumn ’96 to spring ’18 – an on-pitch Punch and Judy show that Southgate’s side seem to be so enthusiastically exorcising. And for all that it’s being sung with celebratory gusto – something in short supply on this island of late – it’s definitely time for a change.

It’s been 22 years now since Baddiel, Skinner and the oft-forgotten Lightning Seeds first told us it was coming home. 22 years before that, it was 1974, the Sex Pistols were still two years from swearing on TV and the miners’ strike was just ending. 22 years from now, it is likely that Johnny Rotten will be dead, as will many others. For all that in the instantly nostalgic heat of these tournament moments we pretend and pray they’ll last forever, this might be Baddiel and Skinner’s final chance to feather the inheritance nest with what must be colossal PRS payments.

Not that this England side seems to care too much about death and history. Dele Alli doesn’t know what M*A*S*H is. Jordan Pickford is getting shout outs at happy hardcore raves. They and their teammates will no doubt be putting as much distance as possible between themselves and all this existential, historical hand-wringing as they look forward to dealing with a different kind of game to any they’ve faced so far at Russia 2018, not least because their Swedish opponents seem like a team with cold blood – strength without the shithousery. If this is an England squad raised in the constant red mist that is the Premier League, they will have to show off all their vaunted nu-continental nous and patience to overcome a team that are so well organised, compact and featureless that they seem at times more like a lunar rock formation than a football team.

One of the key mantras that Southgate has been pushing for the duration of his tenure is that these players are out there to “write their own history”. Saturday feels like the first chapter in that book, a game that might set the tone for the era to come. The year is 2040. An England led by Jordan Henderson are about to take on Sweden in the quarter finals of a European Championships hosted in late December by a clutch of offshore tax havens. And as you try to quell those familiar big match anxieties by drawing the rod back and casting it into the deep water of formative memory, it is this Saturday in Samara that you and your ageing friends are talking about, a game that ought to be played looking out over seas towards a blank and unknowable horizon rather than at the heavy land left behind.

@hydallcodeen