England lost the World Cup at Agincourt

“Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit. To his full height. On, on, you noblest English. Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!”*

Agincourt is imprinted on the English psyche, whether you know it or not. The tale of how a few hundred archers took on a vastly superior force of French cavalry and defeated them has resounded down the centuries until it is inseparable from the idea of ‘Englishness’.

I think the folk memory of that battle is still hampering our ability to put together a winning football team at national level. Bear with me here.

All the way from high culture and the immortal words that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Henry V, to low culture and the folk-tale we have spun about the origin of the v-sign, Agincourt has been the defining myth of the country. Its echoes can be found in the rote of historical events that every Englishman recognises as his own – Waterloo, Dunkirk, The Battle of Britain, Rorke’s Drift.

In all these cases, we are assured that it was English ‘spirit’ that was critical to our victory against the odds (or more commonly British, but that’s splitting hairs). All battles are framed thus in the national mind: outnumbered and outgunned by foreign forces and perfidy, our innate spunk and refusal to concede defeat see us through.

We see this unspoken story in our sports. Recall us to Beckham’s game against Greece in 2002 or “Botham’s Ashes” in 1981. In the iconography of the game, Terry Butcher’s heroics against Sweden in 1989 gave us the defining image of English sport: a man covered in blood yet unyielding in his defiance, a performance which single handedly gave us the result we needed (i.e. a draw with the footballing giants of Sweden when viewed more prosaically).

Typically, we have learned entirely the wrong set of lessons from these games. These events were exceptions - not rules.  The Beckham who charged around the pitch, tackling anything that moved might have stirred the blood – but ultimately delivered nothing. It was Beckham the dead-ball specialist who ultimately won the game by doing something he’d practised until it was a personal art form. There is no greater lesson to be taken from Beckham’s game against Greece other than clichés about “heroism”.

A better lesson to have taken would have been that a ‘lowly’ team not blessed with superb individual players can take a so-called top team like England to the wire by diligent application of the correct game plan.

So we end up at Bloemfontaine, where Gerrard’s desire to win the game himself by himself through English virtues like willpower and passion and grit meant that he consistently drifted from his position on the left in the game plan that Capello had set for him. Terry likewise pushed ever higher up the pitch, trying to will the team to victory while Johnson uselessly attempted to conjure blood and thunder via clumsy challenges (no doubt “letting the Germans know he was there”).

Sadly, the Germans even knew that this would happen. Coach Joachim Löw:

“We knew that Gerrard and Lampard always support the forwards and that the midfield would be open, there would be spaces. Our objective was to use Miroslav Klose to draw out John Terry, to force him to come out of the defence. We knew that the fullbacks would be very much to the side and this would create the spaces between the English defenders that would help us penetrate their defence”

Far from being our killer app, those English virtues of ‘commitment’ and ‘desire’ are our achilles heel.

The real lesson of Agincourt was lost on us. That we were fighting a war we could never hope to win at the time – a war to conquer France from the sea. That we won this battle not because of spunk and a sense of derring-do, but because of superior equipment and a better executed strategy. That, in the end, we lost France anyway. In the same way The Battle of Britain was never just about ‘the few’. It was about superior aircraft and the deployment of a cutting-edge radar network across the south of England. Ditto for Rorke’s Drift – a ‘victory’ set against a backdrop of inevitable reverses in a foolish conflict and delivered by fortifications, organisation and superior weaponry.

The disdain for strategy and tactics and a wider view of the game is encapsulated most crisply in the aphorism “lions led by donkeys.” The ordinary soldier – the Butcher, Beckham or Rooney – is a lion, but he is led into defeat by the tinkerings of McLaren, Taylor, Erikkson or latterly Capello. The brave soldiery are let down by the generals time and again. The cry goes up once more after every defeat: our kingdom for a manager who “understands the English mentality” and who can thus unleash the Arthurian spirit that every England player has inside of him!

And so back to Bloemfontaine. England once again framing the match in terms of heroics and last-ditches and a hundred clichés – not just in the press, but among the team (see the press conferences of Terry in particular). Gerrard drifted in from the left. Terry pushed too high up the pitch.  Every man strove for a moment of genius that would unlock the magic. Every man played a thousand over-hit passes. Every man bullishly charged once more into the breach and time and again Özil popped the ball behind that breach to the ever-waiting Klose.

The lesson for England is one that is never learned,  even with Capello at the helm – a man who surely understands our shortcomings. There is an argument that says that England would be better served by fielding fewer ‘stars’ and more players who can just execute a game plan. Ironically, one of the foremost proponents of this was England’s Saviour-That-Never-Was: Brian Clough who had no time for egos and staffed his teams with unfashionable journeymen gilded by the occasional genius. Despite that they produced football of real beauty and, more importantly, victories that mattered.

In this regard, perhaps it’s time to admit the possibility that 11 Heskeys would be better than 11 Gerrards.

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*yes, I know. Since writing this I discovered the quote is from before the battle of Harfleurs. But pound to a penny says 90% of people associate it with Agincourt, which is testament to the presence of the battle in the English mind! Or something.