Whingeing poms

Last night illustrated perfectly what I was arguing on 26th February in Infantilising Sport. By a last minute whisker England squeezed a final winning goal over Tunisia in the FIFA World Cup. Unfortunately I was watching the game with the BBC commentary. The commentators were full of indignation about the referee, who should, they reckoned, have awarded at least two penalties for clashes between the defence and English captain, Harry Kane.

"What," they said, "was the VAR referee thinking of? Why did he not tell the ref to look again? Isn't that's what VAR is for?" Oh, look at the Tunisians; they're getting in the way. Even after the end of match when we'd won, what were the pundits talking about? The missed penalties - surprise! To give him his credit, Harry Kane was quite philosophical about it.

I know it's the ancient English custom, as our Antipodean cousins termed it, "whingeing Poms". It's not fair. Maybe the Tunisian commentary team kept harping on about English diving or whatever they saw....

Perhaps the commentators, both BBC and ITV (who are equally prone to whingeing), should have a copy of the archetypically English poet, Kipling's poem If:

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;...

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!" At present, we are further from such equanimity than we have been for many a long year.

Nevertheless, lest those who know me well accuse me of insufficient national pride, congratulations to Gareth Southgate and his team - of course!