Gareth Southgate called it “an absolute joke”. Declan Rice went with “total embarrassment”. For Jack Grealish it was “ridiculous”, which works on quite a few levels. Given time to reflect, Jordan Henderson was more profoundly existential. “What have we become?” he asked. And it is an excellent question, deserving of a serious answer.
By that stage Southgate, who is generally the most sensible person in the room, had also compared the jeers directed at Harry Maguire before kick-off in the friendly international against Ivory Coast at Wembley on Tuesday night to the sustained racist abuse of John Barnes by card-carrying neo-Nazis in the 1980s.
At which point it is hard not to wonder if this is all really about the thing it’s about. Or if England’s manager and his players are being caught in a sideswipe from somewhere else, a self-fuelling piece of theatre born out of TV noise, punditry blather and the idiot wind of social media. Harry Maguire: anatomy of a booing. This is how news works now. And none of us come out of it looking great.
Except the players, perhaps. On the most basic …
- March 31, 2022
