Is Thomas Tuchel a secret agent sent by Friedrich Merz’s government to ruin the UK economy and education system so as to make life easier for German exporters? I know the answer to that is probably no, but I ask only because of the England manager’s extraordinary call on parents to allow their children to play truant after staying up to watch his plodding footballers muff their chances against Mexico early on Monday morning. “Write an excuse and let them watch football,” he said. “There’s so much school to go to, but the World Cup is every four years.”
The last thing workshy Britain needs is an outsider egging us on to do less work
The last thing workshy Britain needs is an outsider egging us on to do even less work. Actually, there is not all that much school to go to, not when you extract the days kids had off last week because it was too hot, the days they have off every time a snowflake lands on their school, teachers’ strikes, days off for staff training and all the other ways that the school year has been steadily eroded. It is hardly as if the England team have reached the final; Monday is just a last 16 match. For the professional hires who make up the England team it will be just one more day at the office, and it should be for the rest of us, too.
Why does the world of football think it is so special? Somehow I don’t think that Tuchel would be too impressed if his players announced they were skipping training in order to watch the last Brit being knocked out of Wimbledon. He presumably demands total dedication of them, to judge by his manic shrieking on the touchline. So why does he think he has the right to tell schoolchildren they needn’t focus on their maths and English?
Credit, though, where it is due to our down-and-out Prime Minister: Keir Starmer has told schools and parents to ignore Tuchel’s demand, just as he refused loud calls for a bank holiday when the England women’s football team won the European championship last July.
It would have been utterly ridiculous for the country to take a day offer when only a quarter of the population had been sufficiently interested to watch the match. What would the rest of us have been supposed to be celebrating?
It is the mark of a banana republic where the national mood is channelled entirely through its sports teams, and where everything has to stop because of a big football match.
England, fortunately, is far from being that country, as I can attest from walking through Central London last Wednesday while the England football team was struggling against the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A few bars were showing the match, but life mostly went on as normal, just as it did the day England won the World Cup in 1966: Geoff Hurst (who for the benefit of non-football fans scored a hat-trick against West Germany in the final) revealed last year that he spent the next day mowing his lawn, not getting blotto with his team mates or being paraded through the streets.
That is the England that we should be proud of: the one which gets on with it. Don’t let’s ruin it by getting over-excited by a minor footballing fixture.
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