I Never Knew the Village Green: A Brief Ramble

I’m not a patriot. England’s the back of some Constable forgery in the bottom right-hand corner as you look at it of a drawer of odds and ends as far as I’m concerned. Any connection I feel is to the land, that’s my land, Northumbria we’ll call it, moors and the sea, and to the better part of humanity, special emphasis on the people I know, short a’s by and large. English is a language, and a fine one at that. People are excellent when they’re excellent, and it’s a global thing, it’s a feel, and I’ve noticed plenty of it up here. Internationalism’s my bag, and I want to fill it with the soul that made Gazza cry and the righteous passion that drove Mosley and his fascists into the Tyne, pissing their bitter little selves. I digress. England’s not a concept (if it’s that) that I can really relate to, frankly. But cricket’s what I really want to talk about.

Why is it I want to see England and Wales’s cricket team perform well while I find a certain bent appeal in seeing England’s football team stutter their way through the upper echelons of mediocrity? It’s not like I take great exception to the personnel involved, with the possible exception of Frank Lampard, whose face I can’t abide. Again, it comes down to feel. It’s the ugliness. I felt very unpleasant scratchings at my synapses having to witness the opportunistic patriotic fervour following the 2005 Ashes win. But that isn’t par for the course, as it were, in the cricketing world. It felt to me like a spillage from the headless-hen bowel of the scattershot, desperate, misplaced and distasteful nationalism that so often accompanies football, into the bloodstream of what the collective consciousness could be if we could get over knee-jerk tribalism. It simply wasn’t cricket. Cricket for me is always about the game itself, and although allegiance is not such an unconscionable thing in itself, if it were blind I would never have seen the look on Kevin Pietersen’s face when England lost to Sri Lanka by two runs. That’s the thing. They’re all top blokes – Freddie, Monty, Paul Nixon, our very own Paul Collingwood – and ultimately, now and when I’m sober, it’s all about people and not three amorphous lions and a crown (don’t get me started on the crown). Lasith Malinga is king of my heart. But Iran's what I really meant to talk about.