This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
How does a fractured nation define itself? If we do not share a common culture, how may we come together? Can sport play a part, with “heroes” in search of glory, like knights of old?
Every four years, when the football World Cup comes round — and assuming that England have qualified — there is a debate about national identity. Now England and Scotland are two of the 48 teams at the bloated World Cup in America that stretches to seven weeks.
In 1970, when Brazil won the World Cup with the finest team that ever took a field, the whole thing was done and dusted in three weeks. There were only 16 countries taking part, and the competition was better for it.
England also had a strong team in 1970, maybe even a better group of players than 1966. They had a Top Ten hit, too, with “Back Home”, a rousing song the players belted out on Top of the Pops. “Back ho-ome, they’ll be thinking about us when we are far away … ”.
Englishness and football is the sort of thing Radio 4 likes to explore, so it was no surprise to see Sixty Years of Hurt in the schedules, nor much of a surprise that David Baddiel, the comedian, was invited to present the shows. Plural, note. There were six half-hour programmes. Six!
It was a confrontational approach. The first five shows had England “versus” the world, mavericks, hooligans, “the culture” (whatever that means) and penalties, before Baddiel tied a few bows in the final slot. What did we learn? That Baddiel holds the views of a liberal North Londoner.
Billed as a “social and cultural history”, Sixty Years failed to satisfy on both counts, though it did give its presenter (and co-producer) a chance to reheat the hit song he co-wrote 30 years ago, the one about “thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming”. The poor chap is going to do a lot of counting before he lowers his lamp.
Baddiel is not, to put it politely, a sympathetic character. He is the sort of person who cannot refer to “a green and pleasant land” without trying to be ironic, and brings up “Burnley” with a barely-suppressed sneer. Actually, that grand club in east Lancashire has a marvellous history. “The Clarets’, founder members of the Football League, have won all four divisions in the professional hierarchy, and the FA Cup.
If you wanted to know something about English football, and what it means to those who watch it, you would get better answers knocking on doors in Burnley than Hampstead.
The programmes began with a premise, essentially that supporting the England football team was the only proper form of patriotism, and worked backwards to confirm it. Baddiel assembled a bunch of tame witnesses to nod along and commend their own good taste.
There were comedians, one of whom referred to the World Cup of 1990 as a turning-point in public perceptions of football. It was now possible to think of the game in terms of art, he stated, rather than brutish endeavour.
Clearly he had never heard of football as “working man’s ballet”, a phrase usually attributed to Tony Waddington, the manager of Stoke City. The Potteries, that’s right, where Sir Stanley Matthews, “the wizard of the dribble”, first laced his boots. Where do they get these folk?
The same place, one imagines, as they found the journalists and “historians” who rallied round to support Baddiel’s argument. He could have sought the views of Jeff Powell, the Daily Mail veteran, who got as close to the great Moore as a journalist ever got to any player. But no, they wheeled out a chump from the Guardian.
Pride of place, however, went to one of those historians who banged on about race and class. You can have those discussions, sure, but there was something repellent about this navel-gazing.
People who don’t much care for England are unlikely to understand English football. Baddiel referred to the “rules” of the game instead of the “laws”, the sort of error that distinguishes those who know from those who merely talk. As for “emotionality”, one of those words designed to sound grand, answers on a postcard.
We make too much of football, and footballers. The game holds up a mirror to each country that plays it, but so do other sports. And one must admit, the people who follow England around the globe have not made helpful ambassadors. The world can tell its own tale about 60 years of hurt, at the fists and boots of our hooligans.
But we live in hope. One fine day we may see Baddiel, meat pie in one hand, rattle in the other, standing on a terrace in Stoke. A sight to delight the eye of all true patriots.
