National myths and Fifa's folly

There is perhaps nothing more damaging in football than the persistence of a national myth. When England won in Mexico – at altitude, with 10 men – by bringing on Dan Burn, going to a back five, sitting deep and resisting, it fed a dangerous flame that led to muddled thinking and panic in the defeat to Argentina in the semi-final. But just as surely the way Argentina prevailed in that game set them off down a self-defeating route in the final.

England loves a siege, which may be a reaction to colonial wars. Read 19^th-century fiction, Boys Own comics and the like, and they’re full of plucky resistance. It’s hard, after all, to see much heroic in professional soldiers armed with guns mowing down hundreds of ill-equipped locals. But courage and glory can be found in an outnumbered force digging in and resisting. Khartoum and Mafeking became touchstones and they’ve influenced cultural works as varied as JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur and the film Zulu.

For football the foundational myth perhaps came in Stockholm in 1989 as a bloodied Terry Butcher inspired England to a backs-to-the-wall 0-0 draw against Sweden to qualify for Italia 90. For many years, the image of Butcher was the most famous in English football. This was heroism. This was the passion and spirit the national team, was supposed to emulate – as, indeed, Paul Ince did finishing a similar 0-0 draw away to Italy with his head bandaged, albeit with rather less blood, as England qualified for the 1998 World Cup.

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The Power and the Glory, my history of the World Cup, is now out in paperback. Buy it here or here.

Issue Sixty-One of The Blizzard is available here, featuring Brazil, Argentina, Belgium’s first international coach, a photo-essay from Uzbekistan, memories of Scotland in 1998, a look at Curaçao and Cape Verde and an investigation into what went wrong for Serbia-Montenegro in 2006.

On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we continue our series on England and the 1966 World Cup. Listen here.

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On Libero, we continue our coverage from the World Cup. Listen here.

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But what that means is that there is something hard-wired into the English football psyche that the way to win key games is to retreat and hold the line. England keep doing it. It’s been a feature of major games since the semi-final in Euro 96 that they take the lead and go backwards. And that was exactly what they did having gone ahead against Argentina in the semi-final. Thomas Tuchel, bafflingly, doubled down on the approach, presumably reasoning that the combination of instinct and the surge of panic that comes when a major goal is in sight made anything else impossible.