Football

Before dashing out of the door and driving to Nice airport, I gave my eyebrows a quick trim with the electric grooming razor Father Christmas gave me. In my tearing haste, however, I forgot to clip on the length regulator and in two sweeps shaved them right off, leaving two bald white strips. I was last to board the plane. While everyone else queued in the stifling airbridge while the plane was prepared, I had remained in my comfortable seat in the sunny departure lounge reading Sir Michael Holroyd’s hilarious life of Augustus John. Seat 9F was the aisle seat of a row of three, and the pair of chaps already belted in to seats D and E looked utterly devastated by the last-minute occupation of their empty seat by a casually late arrival with no eyebrows.

[audioplayer src="http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/268140526-the-spectator-podcast-brexit-strategy-what-would-the.mp3" title="Toby Young explains his excitement at Euro 2016" startat=1096] Listen [/audioplayer] If you’re a proper football supporter, getting excited about England on the eve of a major tournament is considered uncool. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to engage people in conversation about England’s chances, only to be greeted with a look of bored condescension. ‘I’m not really interested in international football,’ is the inevitable reply. Well, sorry, but I’m pretty fired up about the Euros — although, to be fair, I do conform to the stereotype of the inauthentic, prawn-sandwich-eating fan.

Football, unlike cricket, has for the most part been ill served by its writers. For every Brian Glanville and Ian Hamilton (the latter having employed his critical authority to become a first-rate reader of the game), the purveyors of hackneyed analysis are legion. In recent years there has been a propensity to celebrate tactics and formation (i.e. pedantry) over poetry. Latin Americans, however, have always fared slightly better with their writers — as they do with their players — who tend not to make the distinction between literature and sports writing. Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, both Nobel laureates, took to writing about the game early on in their careers. Juan Villoro is one of Mexico’s foremost men of letters.

Apologies for the lack of blogs – I’ve been on jury duty for two weeks. Hang the bastard, regardless of the evidence, was my watchword as jury foreman. Anyway, normal service will soon be resumed. In the interim, let me give the few of you who care about football my take on the England team at present, and its chances in France next month. I was of course delighted we beat the hideous, cheating, Turks – and in the end with something to spare. But what we learned was this: Playing Jamie Vardy on the wing is stupid. Put him in the centre with Harry Kane. So that means some variation of 4-4-2. Yes, de trop. But it works for us.

A few years ago a motivational speaker brought out a smart little book called Legacy: What The All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life. Everyone wanted to know how a tiny country miles from anywhere could dominate the world’s hardest team sport for so long. A lot of it, the book said, boiled down to humility, believing in the collective, going the extra yard, and, crucially, ‘no dickheads’. Better people make better All Blacks, was the message. Now the world is trying to learn from the Leicester City playbook.

[audioplayer src="http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/262486539-the-spectator-podcast-erdogans-europe.mp3" title="Roger Alton and Nick Hilton discuss Leicester's title win" startat=1063] Listen [/audioplayer] Jean-Philippe Toussaint, in his recent book Football, observes that the sport is ‘measured and appreciated’ in the imagination. Toussaint, an intellectually fanatical supporter of the Belgian national team, is used to failure. Indeed, he is an acolyte of the view that football support is built on failure. After all, aren’t the grown men and women on the terraces of English stadia simply not good enough for a place on the pitch?

Yay – Izzy Christiansen! Yay – Beth Mead! I daresay you were as thrilled as I was to see that these two women had been named as, respectively, PFA Women’s Players' Player of the Year and PFA Women’s Young Player of the Year. Izzy plays for Manchester City, Beth for Sun’lan. You have never heard of either of them. You will never see them play ever. Both are worse at football than the worst player your club has ever employed. Yes, worse than Seth Johnson. Worse than Ade Akinbiyi. And yet they were given equal billing by the BBC at the Professional Footballers' Association awards with Riyad Mahrez and Dele Alli. I have nothing against Izzy and Beth. I wish them luck. But why the pretence that they are on a level with the male players?

What consolation in life can Arthur and I find after that defeat at the hands of Manchester United in the quarter-final replay of the FA Cup, and the manner of it? West Ham and their always hiding fortunes are, and always have been, real life for me; real life, only sport. My father first took me to Upton Park for the first game of the 1966–7 season against Chelsea. I was nine. Even then I had set my face against my father, but the subject of West Ham was a kind of no-man’s land between us, and until the day he died our relationship consisted entirely of conversation about a football team. (Even this was tinged with disdain after old Arsenal programmes discovered in the attic suggested an earlier allegiance.) My father came from solid West Ham-supporting stock.