‘Humble, proud and liberated.’ A new England kneels and rises to the Euro 2020 challenge

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/06/2021 (1935 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“The idea of representing ‘Queen and country’ has always been important to me. We do pageantry so well in Britain …”

Gareth Southgate’s penned address to his nation this past week was so eloquently incisive, so stirring of the soul, that it seems unfair to pluck the one and only line where the manager of the country’s soccer team sounded like the littlest of Little Englanders.

Queen and country. What a concept — even at the best of times. For both, these are nothing like the best of times.

In the parts of the world privileged enough to have a foothold in the fight to vaccinate our way out of the pandemic, doors that have been shut for 18 months creak open. It’s disorienting, unsettling. Places and processes have changed. People have changed. How could they not?

Turning to sports for stability doesn’t soothe the senses. An Olympic Games is just six weeks off, but doubts float daily as to whether they will even happen. The NBA playoffs, meantime, have a full eight teams remaining yet none contain LeBron James.

Enter England. Dear old England. The guardians of the beautiful game who, every two years when a major championship rolls around, are heartbroken to discover that the competition still plays their game better than them. Nothing more reliable than that.

On the surface, England the nation if not its soccer team would appear to be arriving at the delayed 2020 European Championship in absolutely peak form. Southgate’s brave Lions have found themselves wrestling for tabloid front page supremacy with a royal scandal. The country is also confronting other reckonings with its colonial past by largely looking the other way or intentionally obfuscating the issue such that they refuse to see it clearly. This is England.

Southgate’s 2021 squad represent the youngest, most diverse group assembled in the team’s major tournament history. The country is the de facto host with much of the latter stages of the pan-continental Euro 2020 taking place in London. The wealth of gifted attacking talent assembled is more than enough to see England installed as second favourite to win the whole thing. But before they even get their campaign underway against Croatia on Sunday, the players will face the wrath of their own fans. Why? For standing up, or more specifically kneeling, for racial justice at kickoff.

Welcoming fans back to the arenas that had been ghostly and hollow these past 18 months was supposed to be a moment for togetherness, shared passion converging just in time for that most treasured collective experience: a tournament summer of hope and glory. Instead the return of England’s fans only served to highlight a nation divided, a significant section of fans loudly booing players who took a knee in recent warm-up matches.

The likes of striker Marcus Rashford and defender Tyrone Mings have coolly, articulately explained that the gesture symbolizes anti-racism and nothing more. Yet in the toxic wastelands of political and social commentary in post-Brexit Britain, anything and everything can become a culture war. Nigel Farage, investment banker turned naked populist and one of the architects of Brexit, somehow still holds sway, in spite of having all the charm and warmth of a damp fart. To Farage, each knee an England player takes drags the country a step closer to communism. Black Lives Matter, he says, is “a Marxist mob” and the players are doing their bidding. Sadly, yet unsurprisingly, Farage found his audience. Hence the boos and jeers.

The players aren’t for moving. “(The booing) is something that we can’t control and for us we believe (kneeling) is the right thing to do, so we’re going to continue to do it,” said Rashford, the Manchester United forward who has won a world of admirers with his campaigning for meals for underprivileged schoolchildren across the U.K., forcing Prime Minister Boris Johnson into the kind of embarrassing climbdowns on funding cuts that have been a hallmark of his time in office.

To little surprise, Downing Street couldn’t muster the spine to condemn those booing, a mealy-mouthed statement this past week effectively both-sidesing the players’ call for equality.

In such a leaderless vacuum, Southgate continues to find his own voice.

An unheralded young coach before taking the most impossible job in sports, he banished some of England’s darkest demons when his team actually went and won a penalty shootout en route to the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The Everest, though, is matching the icons of 1966, who stand alone as the only England team to win a major tournament when the World Cup was claimed on home soil.

“This is a special group. Humble, proud and liberated in being their true selves,” Southgate wrote in the Players’ Tribune. “Our players are role models. And, beyond the confines of the pitch, we must recognise the impact they can have on society … I have never believed that we should just stick to football.”

A generation who came of age in an era of Tory austerity, Southgate’s squad represents modern England much more fittingly than those who bluster about Brexit and boo on the sidelines. They are so multicultural that fully 15 of the 26-man squad could have represented other countries such as Nigeria, Jamaica, New Zealand, Ghana or Ireland. They are confident, hopeful, unscarred like the generations who failed to live up to the hype. They’re brash, too.

The cruellest irony is that they may be too modern for their own good.

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Southgate’s squad is bursting with sharp attacking talent. Too many to fit in. But in defence, those most traditional of English qualities — dependability, solidity — look lacking. Selection dilemmas abound, but the fear could be that without a solid defence, the likes of Jadon Sancho, Phil Foden and Jack Grealish could in fact be too fast, too loose for the more pedestrian, pragmatic game that international soccer has become.

Time’s passing brings poignancy. Always has. Fully six of the golden Lions of ’66 have passed away since soccer’s last major tournament summer in 2018. There may soon come a time when there is no longer a living Englishman to recount what it feels like to taste glory at one of these things.

That’s the kind of weight that falls on Southgate’s young England squad as players drop to one knee Sunday before facing Croatia. They’ll rise with all that hope and history on their shoulders and that should be enough. But they’ll also carry opportunity: the chance to find unity amid division weaponized against them, to show England a better version of itself.

For Queen? Sure, fine, if that’s your thing. But for country? Most certainly. It’s never needed them more.

Joe Callaghan is a Toronto-based sports and feature writer based and a freelance contributor for the Star. Reach him via email: joecallaghan84@hotmail.com or follow him on Twitter: @JoeCallaghan84