So, let’s go over to the judges and see what they thought. Alan Shearer? “Hopeless.” Thanks, Alan. Lee Dixon? “Frankly, I don’t know where to start.” OK, Lee — thank you. And Alan Hansen? “That was four levels below abysmal.” Woo. It’s a “no” from you, then, we’re assuming.
Let’s not forget Frank Lampard’s “goal that never was”. Shearer said: “The debate will rage on.” Will it, though? Clearly, had England gone out on penalties, we were, each and every one of us, in for the full, Geoff Hurst-style 44 years of tiresomeness (albeit in reverse this time) and Lampard would have found it impossible to have a public conversation about anything else for, potentially, the rest of his life. (The midfield player may eventually reflect that the second-half caning that Germany handed England was not necessarily an unmixed evil, in this regard.) However, if we’re being honest, the debate was already struggling for oxygen by half-time. “There’s a chance that England could get knocked out of a World Cup as a result of that decision,” an aggrieved Shearer said, before playing his part in a lively and extended studio discussion about lack of width (“time and time again”), inability to keep the ball, failure of players to “show”, defensive inadequacies and a number of other things that can get you knocked out of a World Cup.
“Little things decide football matches,” a rather touchingly incoherent Fabio Capello said in the tunnel. And this is clearly true, although so do big things.
The wonder, really, is that anyone expected much else. Was that the deliriously persuasive effect of a scruffy 1-0 win over Slovenia? Or was it yesterday’s BBC-funded pre-match blessing from, of all people, Ozzy Osbourne (a man who frequently gives the impression that he would struggle to find his front door from a starting point in his kitchen), plus 14 pounds of theatrical ham from Brian Blessed? (There’s a tape one won’t be sorry to see go away for four years.) Asked, before the match, to consult his gut, Harry Redknapp went “2-1 England”. What can he have been eating this past fortnight? (’Arry, incidentally, calls Mezut Özil “Oozl”, giving it the full cockney “oo” and making him sound like a brand of bathroom cleaner. One to listen for in the later rounds.) A sobering corrective in so many directions, yesterday afternoon’s experience even seemed to expose Guy Mowbray’s fitness at this level. Mowbray has come into this tournament on a wave of optimism as the man who can finally bring to an end 40 years of Motty (or thereabouts), but yesterday he only really offered sighing and complaining, plus one low-grade joke about Mark Lawrenson and a toilet roll.
Add this to an equally ill-advised number about constipation during the Slovenia game. Do we detect the emergence of a signature theme in the Mowbray/Lawrenson partnership? Someone should have a word.
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But then, for me, the BBC team have lacked balance since Emmanuel Adebayor left. His partner has given birth and, recognising the relative insignificance of punditry at such a time (even international punditry, at a World Cup, and everything), the incomprehensible Manchester City striker has gone cot-side.
To say we missed his reliably cheering input yesterday is to be guilty of what Adebayor would doubtless describe as a “wigwam doughnut squander”. Here was an occasion where we had most need of someone who could say, “rumble strip octopus handle” — someone who could call a spade a “creosote turnip paragon”.
“Ah, well,” Lawro sighed. “There’s always Wimbledon.” Are you kidding? Next up, there was Argentina v Mexico, and with plenty more where that came from. It’s a World Cup, for heaven’s sake, Lawro. They don’t end just because David James goes home.
History is very clear on this. In fact, that’s normally the point at which they start to get good.