As the government piggybacks on England’s success, remember how it took on footballers – and lost – in the pandemic
Did you see the prime minister in the fancy seats at Wembley on Wednesday? He seemed to have come dressed as a particularly brutal Matt Lucas impersonation of himself. As for the young lady standing to his left and smiling indulgently at him, it’s nice that his … carer, is it? … takes him out for the day and buys him a football top. But I do hope there weren’t tears in the car on the way home when Boris Johnson was told he wasn’t going to be allowed to run on to the pitch and do one of his special footer kicks on Sunday. (There certainly wasn’t a mask in the car on the way home, as photos of Johnson show , but I guess it’s only the help that catches it that way, so … basically victimless.)
Politicians and the football, then. A marriage made in the realms of guaranteed ridicule. Yet still they come. Or, in the case of Lee Anderson, still they stay away. Lee is one of the breakout plonkers of the tournament, being the Ashfield MP who early on announced that he’d be boycotting all England games because taking the knee was Marxist or something. One of the great achievements of Gareth Southgate has been bubbling his squad so fastidiously that no player has yet found out they are being boycotted by Lee. Should this hermetic seal hold up to and including Sunday’s final, analysts believe that ignorance will amount if not to bliss, then certainly to an extra yard of pace on every England forward.
