How Les Bleus turned round public opinion and almost walked off with the main prize…
It’s one of those stock images you see at the conclusion of every major international soccer tournament. You know the one; cut to the victors’ capital city and the predictable mayhem of a wildly moving throng under a blur of smoke, flags and red light. This was Rome 2006.
And if you caught the news earlier in the week in the aftermath of France’s semi-final beating of Portugal, you’ll have seen a similar celebration in Paris. You’d be forgiven for believing that the French are as football-crazy as their Italian neighbours. Flares were lit, sheep were burnt, housing estates were set on fire. (Whether the French are happy or sad, they just love to express how they feel through the medium of pyromania).
That this outpouring of emotion – or shameful drunken revelry if you will – was able to take place at all, represents a considerable turnaround for a team that transformed itself from shambling cloggers with one foot on the plane home to finalists in less than three weeks.
Underwhelemed
En route, they efficiently dispatched Spain, who can now officially embroider ‘perennial underachievers’ onto their next strip, the supposedly peerless Brazilians and the limited Portuguese.
I holidayed this year in France for the first two weeks of the tournament and the general reaction to Le Mondial, even before a ball had been kicked, was, well, at most, underwhelming.
In that fortnight, I saw neither car stickers nor flags. Incredibly, not one Frenchman had seized the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of parading around in a plastic World War II-style Jerry helmet emblazoned with “Allez Les Bleus”. There was no World Cup fever. In fact, France hadn’t even caught a World Cup cold. I did see one small boy in a replica top, but he elicited the sort of sympathetic, patronising looks generally reserved for Les Dennis or Pete from Big Brother 7.
Contrast this to the mood back in Blighty. Feverish, unrealistic expectation seemed to haunt every fan. Unimpressive bunting hung from every lamp-post. And according to the EEC Waste Management Directorate, the volume of discarded England World Cup paraphernalia will produce enough landfill to bury the town of Colchester. Actually, I made that last bit up, but it sounds both plausible and attractive.
Shoulder shrugging
Now, one of the real pluses of being abroad at a major tournament is the chance to mingle with the locals, talk in a universal language (football or eight pints depending on the time of the evening) and to grasp the fact that blind allegiance to your national team is a universally shared agony.
I have to say that at the outset, the French just didn’t get it. They believed that they had a crap side that couldn’t possibly progress. And two games in, they were right. Antipathy had turned to hostility. I watched the first two France games in bars. The spectator count was 7 and 23 people respectively, a number comfortably eclipsed by numbers watching the England matches.
Apart from some impressive brow-furrowing and other expressions of disappointment (if they decided to abolish penalties in favour of shoulder shrugging, the French would have comfortably defeated Italy and so ended 8 years of hurt), the supporters didn’t even get angry about their team’s underperformance – it was all so expected: an aging team, led by a donkey, performing to the level everyone expected.
Now this disparity in attitudes between England and France is interesting and leads to just one conclusion – that as a nation, we are far more gullible and prone to hype than our French counterparts. Because going into the tournament, there were a great many similarities in the virtues of the two teams:
• Floundering, dim-looking and under-fire manager: check
• Blind faith in aging talisman: check
• Team selected on reputation rather than form or ability to play together: check
• Unconvincing and unbalanced look to the XI: check
• Gratuitous inclusion of really ugly player: check (Ribery/Crouch)
Televisual efficiency
Another plus of being abroad at a major tournament is the sheer joy of watching football on foreign TV. And the French coverage trumps ours. No wonder Monsieur Cantona has gone into acting. There are virtually no openings for pundits. I saw three; Wenger, Houllier and LeBeouf. And no luxury studio for these guys. Every expense has been spared as they sit thousands of feet up on a gantry being interviewed by a bloke who looks like Paul McGann.
As a general rule, my wife doesn’t share my enthusiasm for football. But she will pay some attention to the TV coverage and in this tournament, she did put in some telling contributions: ‘Nice top’ (Croatia). ‘Is he gay?’ (French TV pundit Frank LeBeouf) and ‘Who’s that wanker with the ridiculous Craig David chinstrap beard’ (Adriano) were worthy of mention.
Typical French football coverage runs thus: Opening titles (1 minute), commercials mainly consisting of cosmetics for men (10 minutes), Paul McGann and Gerard Houllier (2 minutes), First half (45 + 2 minutes), more cosmetics commercials (15 minutes), McGann and Houllier (1 minute), Second half (45 + 2 minutes). End.
You have to agree that this is wonderful efficiency. Contrast the BBC. Lineker. Shearer. Hansen. Wright. Stubbs. Lawrenson, O’Neill, Leonardo, Desailly, Bright, Crooks. (Note: I’m worried about Garth. He’s putting on a lot of weight and his eyes are beginning to bulge. He’s starting to look like a sub-Saharan despot: Amusing now, but this could cause a major incident when he’s turned back at Cape Town Airport in four years time). Then there’s Chiles, Peacock and Dixon (the latter so ugly and bland that he’s already been consigned to the twilight world that is ’press your red button now’).
On the subject of pundits, I’m being haunted by a recurring dream since my return from holiday. It is of ’66 hero Alan Ball running down an infinite Baden-Baden hotel corridor, screaming and being pursued by Ray Stubbs, carrying a microphone and wearing little more than a smile, a pink shirt and an erection
On balance, I have to say that in terms of supporter attitude the French have got it right. I was delighted for them that miserable acceptance turned so quickly to hope, elation and possible ecstasy. It would have been agony to fall at the final hurdle, but the French get over these things remarkably quickly and I’m sure that they’ve already reverted to the ‘I told you so’ mindset. And I’m planning to adopt exactly the same attitude when we next reach a major finals. Allez Les Blancs.
