Yet again, with all looking rosy, England indulge in a grand act of self-sabotage, writes Oliver Holt
Gareth Southgate looked a little weary. He listened to the question about Nike’s utterly predictable and pathetically provocative attempt to garner cheap publicity by bastardising the St George’s Cross on the new England shirt and just about managed to stop himself from rolling his eyes.
‘I’ve been told there’s a lot of noise,’ the England manager said.
A lot of noise? By then, the FA had released a statement, the prime minister Rishi Sunak had told Nike not to ‘mess’ with the flag, the leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, had called for the shirt to be recalled, the Liberal Democrats had weighed in, too, and Peter Shilton, England’s record cap holder, had said the design was ‘wrong on every level’. It was not so much noise as a sonic boom.
The England manager tried to point out that he had the small matter of a game against Brazil at Wembley to prepare for against the backdrop of an unprecedented injury crisis and that it has kept him away from the flag furore.
‘I haven’t really followed it,’ he said. ‘I have got enough on my plate really, trying to piece a team together.’
There is something about England and the build-up to World Cups and European Championships that suggests — even for a team which has not won a major tournament since 1966 but which has been installed as favourites for this summer’s Euros in Germany — we have a self-sabotaging predilection for making things even harder for ourselves than they already are.
If it isn’t stolen bracelets in Bogota, high jinks in Sardinia, a dentist’s chair in Hong Kong, Gazza smashing up the manager’s hotel room at La Manga, platform shoes outside Ulrika’s bedroom door, David Beckham’s broken metatarsal or rainbow armbands in Doha, then it’s alienating part of the
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