With the BBC announcing on their news programme (unless I was dreaming) that today, 24^th June is the 70^th anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein I was going to wax lyrical about the oddness of the coincidence between that event, which was a turning point in the course of World War II and England’s loss in Kiev against Italy on penalties.  Might that event too have been a turning point, I mused to myself.  It just shows how sensible it is to check one’s facts because it turns out that Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein didn’t take place until the beginning of November in 1942; so I guess the analogy falls flat on its face and we can draw no comfort from today’s loss whatsoever.

But wait a minute!  Didn’t Sir Alf Ramsey take over an England team that had flopped in the 1962 Chile World Cup tournament.  They had squeaked through their group in second place, finishing ahead of Argentina on goal average and then been well beaten by Brazil in the next round.  Walter Winterbottom, their manager, had resigned and Sir Alf was appointed and went on to win the World Cup in 1966.  Maybe there is a comparison to be drawn here; newly appointed Roy Hodgson, if we are lucky, and despite this loss in Kiev, might similarly be setting us on a course towards better things.

That we only lost on penalties is no consolation.  We didn’t deserve to win because the Italians were the better side and Andrea Pirlo, whose 33 year-old legs had no right to carry him through two hours of play, bossed the midfield as many pundits had predicted he would.  Perhaps what was needed was a good dose of man-to-man marking with a latter-day Nobby Stiles paying him close attention.

It doesn’t take much to send the expectations of an England football supporter rocketing into the stratosphere; but we must accept that, in order to play with the panache of the Spanish, who currently must be everyone’s paradigm, that we have to go right back to basics which have kids playing for fun, developing their skills unworried about the pressures of winning and free from the cynical meanness that creeps in where it does no good.  I was saddened when I listened to a friend of mine telling me how his talented sixteen year old son had picked up the knack of hurting his opponent in the tackle as if this was an inevitable and essential part of his armoury as a fully-formed player.

I visit Hong Kong regularly and am sometimes forced to watch youngsters play kick-about football on all-weather pitches.  Good-natured banter fills the air and hardly a foul is committed; indeed when the player on the ball goes down, for whatever reason, the ball gets passed back to his goalkeeper.  I don’t suggest that’s exactly how it should be but neither is the other extreme, where snarling pitch-side parents ruthlessly drive their children beyond the point of reason.  Watching the Glamour Garden Dragons go up against the Fanling Avengers is, for me, a refreshing breath of fresh air.

But all is not gloom and doom.  We are a long way, for example in terms of fair play from the 1962 Battle of Santiago between Chile and Italy and I, for one, love the way the Spaniards play the game.  That they are winning by playing the best-looking football, can only be to the benefit of the game.  Roll on the semis with, for my money, Germany beating Portugal, Spain overcoming Italy and then Iniesta, Xabi et al triumphing in the final.