Watching the England team labour under what's his name, Toddle, in the World Cup, I have been moved to rejoice at our absence from the competition. All we could have managed in France would have been gritty mediocrity, witless pluck and worst of all, the ghastly and winsome tag which the Scots have claimed in our absence - of having the best-humoured, gayest, most fun-loving bunch of drunken supporters, all of them, God help us, characters.
Having the fans as the starturn is in itself a defeat for soccer. It defines the sport not within its own terms of being a contest between two groups of players, but in the debauched and degenerate terms of English soccer thuggery. Indeed, there is something slightly disconcerting about the piety-competition of Irish soccer fans, as if soccer were an opportunity for the supporters to show how much better behaved (but nonetheless fun-loving cuties) they are than the English (or Dutch or German or whatever).
Not about winning
When fans feel a self-conscious need to make the public statement about themselves rather than their football team and to act out some public role for the consumption of the media, you can be sure the team is doomed to relatively early dismissal. One can almost sense the cliches gathering amid the sanctimonious mucus of a sporting world in which the fans-are-stars: that it is not about victory, but participation, not about winning, but about nobility in defeat, not about triumph but an honest acceptance that we weren't good enough.
It is a detestable excuse for failure. You don't hear the Germans talking like that, because they don't accept that the purpose of soccer is for the fans to show what adorable folk they are, or that the game is largely a splendid opportunity for footballers to show how sportingly gentlemen take defeat. The Germans know exactly what soccer is about. It is about winning, and never admitting defeat, even though all might seem lost.
Soccer is an allegory for war, and countries do not embark on wars with a stalemate or an honourable defeat in mind - or if they do, they're mad. Soccer is like all sport: it is about victory. The culture of endlessly being gallant or unlucky losers is a sick and depraved perversion, the very denial of the reason for the game.
Viscerally, people know this, and know moreover that in the entire range of sports, soccer is the sternest and most searching examiner of leadership, of all-round physical skills, of teamwork, of morale and of intelligence of the lot. It is the ultimate test because it is closest to war, but with rules which raise it above the brute-stupidity of war. Only teams gifted with these national qualities will succeed, and no other sport so rigorously examines those qualities.
Seriously prepare
That is why England under Woddle deservedly went out of the World Cup the other night: management is generalship, and Glen Noddle is an abysmal general, very much in the British New Orleans-Ypres-DunkirkArnhem tradition, with the added we-wuz-robbed element of English soccer. If you don't seriously prepare for every eventuality in international soccer, barring a collision with the moon or an invasion of the body snatchers, if you don't choose the right players and play them in position, and if you don't command them properly, you'll end up watching the later rounds from your livingroom.
Although it has to be said that hardly any British general in history could have done what Coddle has done, which firstly was to ignore Michael Owen, possibly the finest player in the World Cup, for the opening two matches, secondly to have his team play for a penalty shootout even as he withdrew two of his nominated penalty strikers, thirdly not to have his team as well drilled in the art of penaltytaking as they are in tying their bootlaces, and fourthly to have the final, vital kick to be taken by a man who had never in three dozen matches managed to score for England.
Military terms
Loddle's was stupidity at its crassest and most otiose. In military terms, the nearest thing to him would have been our own General Edward Pakenham, who led the British uphill against the well fortified defences of the Americans at New Orleans two weeks after war had ended (he hadn't heard the news). The result, British casualties, 2,000, US casualties, 71. Doddle is in the same class as our Ed Pakenham.
But Shoddle's greatest error was at a deadlier level still. He was not feared by his players - which was why David Beckham was able to destroy England's pattern by retaliating and then being sent off. No German would ever behave like that, because the Germans are all too afraid of their manager; and nor would you ever see a German manager perpetrating egregious folly after egregious folly, as Foddle did.
The truth is that soccer at World cup level, provided refereeing is competent, is the greatest game in the world, because it is the great discoverer of quality. If you go out, you deserve to go out; and if you squeeze through by laboured, unlovely football, as we might just have done, and Norway and Scotland managed to, you'll depart unloved and unlamented, regardless of what singing, dancing, capering characters your fans are. The one great shame of the World Cup is that it is not every year. No matter. Over a week of heaven still to go.