Dreary days postponed

That's the Two dreary days. The time after you get knocked out of the World Cup, when you have to face up to not being in the World Cup any more (this is on top of the 1425 dreary days when the World Cup isn't even on, a futile and empty time which is supposed to be beyond the scope of this post but keeps cropping up because I can't stop thinking about it).

It's a delicate business, keeping yourself ready for the dreary days. Hope is the enemy on account of its natural pairing with renewed despair, but there is no point trying to repress it or it will just burst out when you least expect it and cause you to say something optimistic about Jude Bellingham being a natural born winner when people might hear you.

Instead, a kind of Stoic detachment is necessary. The guiding principle of Stoicism is that negative emotion expended on events beyond our control is wasted energy, so we should focus instead on the things we can affect. England results fall within the category of events beyond our control, but our reactions to them do not. Hope and despair cannot be avoided, so they must be contemplated, experienced and transcended.

I am calling this The Extremely Manageable Problem, to inspire myself to manage it, and also so its acronym is TEMP, which will remind me that this too shall pass. We lost 2-1 to Uruguay in 2018, and I really think I'm over it now. It helped when Luis Suarez was thrown out of the tournament for biting an opponent, mind. I'm still laughing about that.

I've been keeping myself ready for TEMP, like I said I would, but so far England have been unexpectedly postponing the dreary moment by repeatedly winning. This is appalling. I've been very good and transcended all kinds of hope, but now it's creeping round the edges and scaring me.

Do you think it's odd that I should react to hope with fear? Then you clearly haven't been paying attention, because we've been here often enough before. In the last five tournaments (World Cups and Euros) we have reached a semi final, a final, a quarter final, another final and now a semi final again, without ever actually winning. The men's team, that is. The women won the Euros, then they got to the World Cup final, then they won the Euros again. The men need to catch up.

To be fair we've done really well so far. We won our group with two wins and a draw, then we beat Congo DR in the round of 32, Mexico in the round of 16 and last night Norway in the quarter finals. If we beat Argentina in the semi finals and France or Spain in the final we won't have to face any dreary days for years.

There I go again. You see the problem, of course. The most likely real world outcome of all this success is that we will face the dreary days having allowed ourselves to hope that we might not. And even if we did win our rejoicing would be tempered by the knowledge that the World Cup was over (The Too Big Problem).  There's county cricket, the Tour de France and Count Binface to bridge us across to August 14th when the Championship kicks off, but otherwise we'll be stuck with summer fun and talking to people. Oh look there's a tree, I could say. I bet its bark contains lichen. Do you want to talk about Jude Bellingham now? No, I didn't think so.

More dreary day news as soon after Wednesday as I can face. This probably means Friday.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Let's take a ride and see what's mine

I haven't done one of these for years, but apparently they're considered quite old-fashioned now so it feels like it's my time again. Here then is my fourth World Cup blog. I often used to take my blog titles from songs, and so it was for all the World Cup ones. In 2006 the World Cup was in Germany so I chose  First We Take Manhattan because the next line in the song is T hen we take Berlin . In the event England did not in fact take Berlin, which taught me a valuable lesson about hostages to fortune. In 2010 it was in South Africa so I went for Hope Joanna , the Joanna in the Eddie Grant song being Johannesburg. It was recorded when apartheid was still in place, and was about the hope that it could be defeated. Obviously by 2010 it had been, and the Iron Curtain was a thing of the past as well, but equally obviously a whole new crock of shit had sprung up to replace the old crock of shit that we'd grown up with and thought would last for ever. Looking back, I seem to r...
Read more

The continental imbalance

This World Cup will be the first with 48 countries. The number has slowly grown, from an inauspicious 13 in 1930 to 16, 24 then finally 32 in France in 1998. I say finally, and most of us probably thought 32 was peak bloat, but like Mister Creosote they've found room for another 16 wafer thin mints. Whether we can expect a similar outcome remains to be seen. The 48 will be made up of 16 countries from Europe, 10 from Africa, 6 from South America, 6 from the rest of America (that's North America, Central America and the Caribbean), 9 from Asia and 1 from Oceania. Oceania used to have a play off against a South American team, but FIFA have now given them an automatic place. This means in future New Zealand will always qualify, unless they manage to lose to Vanuatu or one of the other volcanoes. The continental balance might strike you as not in fact that well balanced. Europe may be the centre of our world, but the centre of the actual physical world is a superheated mass of iron...
Read more

Silly games

Have a look at the pool stage from the 2011 Rugby World Cup . In particular, have a look at Namibia in Pool D. Namibia had games against South Africa, Wales, Samoa and Fiji. They lost all four of them, scoring 44 points and conceding 266. They lost 87-0 to South Africa. I remember this game because I watched it. On telly, I didn't go to Auckland to watch Namibia play rugby. It was a silly game. A silly game is a game where one element is incongruous when juxtaposed with the others. In this case it was Namibia who were incongruously shit in comparison with South Africa. I've only ever been to one truly silly game. It was the 2004 League One playoff final. Bristol City played Brighton and Hove Albion, for the right to play the following season in the Championship. For those who aren't familiar with FA branding practices, neither League One nor the Championship are the highest division. If you get relegated from the Premiership, the division with the teams you've heard of ...
Read more