AT THIS stage of the tournament, in the nation’s living rooms, questions inevitably outnumber answers. To perm only three of the most pressing: Given the present political tensions, are the BBC’s opening graphics, which every evening re-enact the dropping of a smart bomb on a densely populated Portuguese city, in the best taste? Could the laminated passes issued by way of accreditation to the managers be any bigger? (The coaches are uneasily wearing around their necks a document roughly the size of the card carrying instructions for the brace position that you find in the seat-pocket on aeroplanes.) And has Sir Bobby Charlton ever actually tried to buy a cupcake with a credit card?
This last confusion arises from that commercial for MasterCard, one of a small blizzard of football-themed advertisements in heavy rotation on ITV now. Indeed, if you had a pound for every time you had heard Charlton wax lyrical on behalf of MasterCard in the past week or so, you would be along the way towards clearing your debts.
In the ad, Charlton, who has obligingly turned black and white for the occasion, stands on a bridge and movingly envisages a nation solidly united by football and monthly interest repayments. National unity is priceless, Charlton argues, but for everything else there is MasterCard — “everything else” apparently including, for this advert’s purposes, an individual cake iced with the flag of St George and priced at 80 pence.
Who would have thought the day would come when we would see the Greatest Living Englishman and fabled man of the people giving the old Marie Antoinette line a contemporary twist: let them charge cake! Anyway, you wouldn’t want to try that in my local bakery — not on purchases amounting to less than £5 and not unless you were ready to exit wearing both the cake and the MasterCard.
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More questions: what effect on play is the new ball having? Why, more importantly, does it appear to be held together with gaffer tape? And whither England? Above all “whither England?”, a question that, by careful concentration and a little spin, can even be made to dominate the coverage of, say, Holland v Germany. On Tuesday, with the ruffling of his Panini sticker book almost audible in the background, John Motson dutifully pointed out that Holland are the only team to have won a European Championship after losing their opening match in the group phase — something they did in 1988. “Might be a good omen for England, you never know,” Motty said.
In other words, by losing to France, England have set themselves firmly on course to achieve something that has only happened once in the history of the competition. Reassuring news for the fans at home, then. That said, I don’t know about you, but I tend to prefer my omens to be a bit more . . . well, ominous, I suppose. Also, Holland drew in the end, so whither England after that? In one of a series of feverish nightly link-ups with the England camp, Gary Lineker addressed Frank Lampard on BBC One as follows: “At least now you know that you are capable of beating the French.” Confusing, no? England did, after all, if memory serves, lose to the French and losing to a side is never going to be the most straightforward way of demonstrating that you are capable of beating them. But just as, on Sunday, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory, so, in the critical aftermath, victory appears to have been snatched from the jaws of defeat.
Everyone seems to be seeking the positive England angle. Or maybe they are just homesick. Late on against Germany, in an act close to despair, Holland threw on Pierre van Hooijdonk (“once of Nottingham Forest!” Motty reminded us), and finally, back in the studio, Gordon Strachan was dealing with something he recognised. “Straightforward balls into the box to big strong men!” Strachan cried out, his voice almost trembling with emotion. And depressingly, it seemed to work. “The proof of the pudding is on the scoresheet,” Alan Hansen said. Let’s hope it’s one of those plastic-coated, wipe-clean scoresheets.
In what one hopes will remain the lowest point for this rampant Anglophilia, Clive Tyldesley, the ITV commentator, referred to France last Sunday as Arsenal. He also, on Tuesday, during Latvia v the Czech Republic, managed to work Millwall into one of his analogies, which is surely an absolute no-no at this level. To go as far as Portugal to witness the greatest talents that European football can presently marshal and to end up reflecting, even tangentially, on Kevin Muscat . . . well, it’s the busman’s holiday to end all busmen’s holidays.
Incidentally, one doesn’t mean to be rude or anything, but would it hurt Tyldesley to shut up altogether every now and again? He talks as if he’s on the radio — which is to say he’s fluent, quick-witted and resourceful. But surely one of the great blessings of television is that it isn’t radio, which is, in the end, a far more limited medium for live sport, what with the lack of images. Having Tyldesley constantly harking back to the days pre-pictures is kind of spoiling it a bit.
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