Its NOT Coming Home

OK folks, let’s look on the bright side. At least they can’t disappoint us anymore, and let’s be honest, that’s been the overriding emotion for most of the past 3 World Cup weeks.

It’s been a time of nationwide hysteria…4/5 of the population apparently swept away by the possibility…by the dream…the delusion that England might just win the World Cup for the first time in 40 years. 50 Million people….100 million crosses of Saint George.

Sadly it was not to be. We had a team as lacklustre as ever and a manager with as much backbone as a wet lettuce. We had a lone striker with the temperament of a schizophrenic and a face like a slapped arse. Then we had the opposition who, let’s face it, had been paying just as poorly as wee had to that point.

Then suddenly, on Saturday afternoon, the curing antidote to our madness arrived. It was brutal and it was painful and it came in less than a second from the right foot of the sly, winking, cheating Cristiano Ronaldo.

Like everyone else in the country, I spent Saturday evening picking over the carcass of yet another England defeat with my husband and friends. Interestingly, at no point did any of us blame the players, although we did question the selection. Neither did we blame those who failed the penalty test. England always do badly at penalties. We didn't expect anything else.

The players are boys, young men at most. They're extraordinarily overpaid, certainly, but that isn't their fault. They did their best, in the face of hopeless misguidance, and when, at the end, they cried, their tears suggested that they were genuinely distraught. Like us, they wanted to believe that misplaced, exaggerated hope could take them to the heights of their profession.

So here we are, still basking in the summer heatwave, perhaps wondering if the heat got to our brains a little too much, and putting away our dreams of glory for another four years as we turn our attention to Andy Murray, Wimbledon and our summer holidays.

Truly, football is the world sport, and obviously in any tournament there can only be one winning team. But in a game which is governed so much by the lottery of refereeing decisions, the random nature of the penalty shoot-out, the misfortune of injuries to crucial players and the diving and cheating for which some nations are renowned, it occurs that we take it all a little too seriously.

I'm sorry we didn't go further in the World Cup. But I'm not heartbroken. At least our country has regained its sanity. We can now all get back to living our lives.