For Harry and for England

Warning: powers of discrimination will be used in this piece which could be interpreted wrongly as being discriminatory.

Last night a masterclass in penalty taking was given by two tall, not terribly sophisticated white boys called Harry. Faced with a yellow-clad giant in the form of Gianluigi Donnarumma, Harry Kane from Walthamstow knew that slamming the ball into the side-netting, far away from the keeper, in a no-nonsense manner was required and Harry Maguire from Sheffield knew that sheer power that nearly put the ball through the roof of the net might work. They didn’t mess around.

Then up stepped Marcus Rashford, who, because he’s from a poor black background, is the patronisingly crowned national treasure and pet of the metropolitan classes. Doing a ridiculous shuffle that took so long you thought look, just start again and do it properly he showboated the ball into the goalpost. Youthful Jadon Sancho with his silly goatee took a ludicrously naive soft shot which the yellow giant reached with ease and, then, poor 19 year old Bukayo Saka, with the weight of the world on his young shoulders did more or less the same. 

The problem was they shouldn’t have been taking penalties at all and they wouldn’t have been had Gareth Southgate, with his Man at C and A suit and ridiculous waist coat, finished the game with relative ease within the 90 minutes. Instead, after a stunning first half in which England showed themselves to be by far the superior team in terms of actual football, he pulled off the remarkable stunt of de-motivating his team at half time in a reverse anti-matter parody of what he is supposed to do. They returned to the pitch dim shadows of their first half selves and went on the back foot inviting the opposition to beat them in the time-honoured England way we thought we’d seen the back of. For half an hour Sterling and Kane vanished from the pitch. The somewhat defensive-minded Henderson came on then off and the enterprising Grealish appeared too late. It was a photographic negative of the game of football whose whole raison d’être is as a dynamic game you have to win joyfully, actively and positively.

Southgate pulled off the extraordinary feat of prolonging the years of hurt quite unnecessarily when he had a team to end them. He was, once again, the boy to Mancini’s man (and Chiellini’s and Bonucci’s) and, of course, the British newspapers are full of laughable headlines like ‘England can Rebound from Devastating Blow’ and ‘Gareth Southgate’s Values Must not be Under-Estimated - the FA cannot let him go.’