For a few years, the English flag was an ambivalent image—the flag of the Crusaders who raided medieval Jerusalem, the flag of imperial conquest, and a flag appropriated by the white nationalists of the English Defence League. The cross of Saint George, purple on a white background, was additionally the flag of a bunch of losers. The English males’s soccer staff hasn’t gained a serious title because the 1966 World Cup.
Right here in Europe, as in america, debates about flags are helpful proxies for different cultural anxieties. Flags power us right into a confrontation with our nation’s historical past as a supply of delight, or disgrace, or each. They create an us, whose composition will be inclusive or unique. And, fairly truthfully, they’ll cease the left from profitable elections. Being uncomfortable with a nationwide flag is usually interpreted (or misinterpreted) as an indication that you just don’t love the nation it represents. The Scottish saltire and the Welsh purple dragon have been completely reclaimed by the nationalist events of these nations, and even the Union Jack, which blends the flags of Britain’s constituent nations, was rehabilitated within the Nineteen Nineties by New Labour. However till not too long ago, the English flag languished behind them, unloved and unwaved.
The flag of Saint George is central to the plot of Pricey England, a brand new play that has simply opened at London’s Nationwide Theatre. The drama begins with a historic second of non-public and nationwide humiliation. It’s the semifinal of the 1996 European championships, England versus Germany, a match that resulted in a 1–1 draw and a penalty shoot-out. The primary 5 gamers from each groups have all scored, that means the principles change to “sudden demise.” If a participant misses his penalty, and his opposing quantity scores, the primary staff is out of the competitors.
On this cauldron of stress, a 25-year-old named Gareth Southgate steps as much as the penalty spot—and kicks a gradual ball straight on the goalkeeper, who blocks it.
For an viewers in London, Pricey England doesn’t want to indicate what got here subsequent. Virtually the entire nation is aware of, together with those that aren’t sports activities followers or hadn’t even been born on the time. England’s goalkeeper, David Seaman, carrying one of many worst shirts ever designed—he appears to be like like a kids’s-party entertainer—can’t get a glove to the German staff’s subsequent penalty kick. That makes it 6–5 Germany, which works on to the ultimate and in the end wins the trophy. Gareth Southgate, in the meantime, goes residence with the burden of a whole nation’s disappointment upon him. That winter, he makes a pizza advert the place the joke is that he has to put on a paper bag on his head in public.
For some time, failure gave the impression to be historical past’s verdict on Southgate. “Each single day now, after I stroll down the road, it’s all the time talked about to me,” he informed a podcast in 2012. “When you have got performed for 20 years and that’s the very first thing individuals take into consideration you, it’s a little bit of a downer.” However in 2016, he received the possibility to develop into the momentary supervisor of the English males’s soccer staff, after the incumbent was caught in a newspaper sting operation over his monetary dealings. Since then, Southgate has been an sudden success within the “unimaginable job,” taking England to the brink of victory—whereas nurturing a era of gamers who’re unafraid to talk out on youngster poverty and followers’ racism.
Southgate has turned England’s soccer gamers from tabloid punch strains into function fashions, and insisted that no single man ought to ever bear a staff’s defeat alone, as he as soon as did. Throughout a interval when Britain has been bitterly divided by Brexit, he’s created a staff that belongs as a lot to a younger Black woman in Brixton, South London, because it does to an older white man in Boston, Lincolnshire. He has inspired a broadly secular, majority-white nation to cheer for a younger man of Nigerian heritage whose Instagram bio reads, “God’s youngster.” Southgate as soon as employed a psychologist to encourage his younger male gamers to speak about their fears and emotions, and has made them hyperlink arms throughout penalty shoot-outs. He has develop into so personally standard that England’s followers have awarded him a chant: “Southgate you’re the one / You continue to flip me on / Soccer’s coming residence once more.”
Okay, okay, after six years of Southgate’s administration, England nonetheless hasn’t gained something. However the staff has performed with grace and misplaced with honor. This has given the nation hope.
Southgate understands that the ability of sport is the ability of story—the redemption arc, the last-minute comeback, the underdog triumph, the grudge paid again. He understands that soccer provides individuals values round which everybody can coalesce, no matter their political views: exhausting work, sacrifice, humility, braveness. James Graham, the playwright behind Pricey England, understands that too. A lot of his work for the previous decade has been centered on the nation’s shifting identification, whether or not amongst former mining communities within the BBC drama Sherwood or inside the rising Thatcherite working class depicted within the hit play Ink. Graham is now the closest factor England has to a nationwide playwright. You’ll be able to in all probability think about the demographics of an viewers at a sponsored theater efficiency in London—whiter, richer, and extra liberal than the nation general. But by the tip of Pricey England, the gang was on its ft, shouting alongside to the unofficial anthem of the Southgate period, Neil Diamond’s “Candy Caroline.” (Properly, apart from the previous BBC journalist sitting subsequent to me, who fled after the primary half, maybe discovering all of it slightly too populist.)
Early on in Pricey England, a senior soccer official accuses the Southgate character (performed with eerie accuracy by Joseph Fiennes) of choosing a staff captain, Harry Kane, who is rather like him. Kane is an honest man—a father of three, with one other on the way in which, married to his childhood sweetheart—however he’s nobody’s concept of an orator. All of his charisma is situated in his ft. Graham’s script turns Kane, England’s most prolific aim scorer ever, into an avatar of stoic, unassuming English masculinity, a person for whom discovering the best phrases is much less vital than main by instance. (The distinction with the hyper-loquacious however unprincipled former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is briefly drawn.) In a single scene, Kane is proven carrying a rainbow captain’s armband on the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to assist LGBTQ rights, solely to be pressured to take away it by officers who don’t need to upset the extra conservative nations within the event. In one other, Kane leads the England staff in taking a knee to protest racism—a white man from North London genuflecting in solidarity along with his Black and mixed-race teammates.
The actual-life Southgate has been supervisor via a interval when the nationwide staff has develop into a lot much less white, a development that prompts anxiousness amongst those that fear that immigration and multiculturalism are reworking England into a rustic they don’t acknowledge. (Within the 1991 census, 5 years earlier than Southgate missed his penalty, England and Wales have been 94.1 % white. That determine is now 81.7 %.) Pricey England’s soundtrack displays this, shifting from the white Brit-pop of the Nineteen Nineties to Stormzy’s 2019 hit “Crown.” That track is a doubly resonant alternative. The lyrics—“heavy is the pinnacle that wears the crown”—actually apply to managing the nationwide soccer staff. Stormzy, like Southgate, has additionally raised questions on what patriotism means in the present day. When the rapper turned the primary Black British solo artist to headline the Glastonbury music pageant, he wore a monochrome stab-proof vest adorned with the Union Jack. It was each a riff on the standard John Bull caricature of Englishness and a rejoinder to the Nationwide Entrance’s racist slogan “Ain’t no black within the Union Jack.”
Southgate’s nice achievement off the pitch has been to raise nationwide delight above racial divisions and to mix ideas pricey to the best and the left right into a new-model patriotism. His personal beliefs, like these of many profitable politicians, defy neat, stereotypical categorization. In June 2021, he wrote the open letter from which Graham’s play will get its title. “Pricey England,” it started. “It has been a particularly troublesome yr.” Southgate referenced his grandfather’s service within the Second World Conflict to clarify why enjoying for England had been such an honor: “The thought of representing ‘Queen and nation’ has all the time been vital to me.” (He’s a patron of Assist for Heroes, a charity for veterans.) Having made this attraction to the best, although, Southgate moved into the difficult terrain of race, historically related to the left: “Why would you select to insult someone for one thing as ridiculous as the color of their pores and skin? Why? Sadly for these folks that have interaction in that type of behaviour, I’ve some unhealthy information. You’re on the shedding facet.” The letter’s closing picture was of a younger England fan watching the staff, filling out a wall chart, trying as much as the gamers, and feeling pleased with the nation they characterize. The letter was, by fairly a ways, extra highly effective and deeply felt than any speech I heard a politician give throughout the identical turbulent interval.
Inevitably, although, some commentators suppose that Southgate’s model of patriotism—respecting custom with out being blind to the sins of the previous—is taking inclusion too far. Forward of the final World Cup, the previous footballer turned COVID contrarian Matt Le Tissier appeared on a chat present hosted by Nigel Farage, a number one Brexiteer, to complain that “woke Mr. Southgate” wanted to instill a extra “optimistic” angle within the staff. When the English ahead Marcus Rashford, who was raised by a single mom, used his life story to marketing campaign totally free college meals throughout holidays, he confronted related jibes about “sticking to soccer.” Raheem Sterling, the English participant whose criticisms of racism have been most uncompromising, has are available for explicit warmth. In 2018, his choice to get a tattoo of a rifle on his proper calf led to calls for, amplified in tabloids and social media, that he be dropped from the squad. The subsequent day, Sterling revealed that the tattoo commemorated his late father, shot lifeless in Jamaica when he was 2, and his personal promise by no means to choose up a gun. “I shoot with my proper foot so it has a deeper that means,” he added.
Southgate has all the time supported Sterling in his choice to talk out quite than endure in silence. In December 2021, they gave a joint interview through which Southgate described criticizing one other Black participant for getting a yellow card for unhealthy conduct, earlier than realizing that he had confronted racist chants all through the sport. Southgate additionally revealed his concern that reporting the chants in opposition to Black gamers was pointless as a result of the soccer authorities would do nothing. “On the very least, this needed to be a staff the place we have been united on how we noticed it,” he added.
Just like the incident with the rainbow armband, this cautious reply reveals the troublesome terrain Southgate should navigate. He faces backlash from unreconstructed racists, who take loud and ostentatious offense at wealthy younger Black males criticizing their nation, even when these criticisms are couched in a want for England to be higher. However he should additionally steer his lads via the world of the image-conscious, money-obsessed, and generally brazenly corrupt soccer authorities, which—very like American sports activities leagues—have a tendency to treat racism and different bigotries as PR issues quite than social-justice points. (Maybe if homophobic abuse had prompted a wave of standard outrage equal in scale to the George Floyd protests, the soccer authorities would rethink their stance on rainbow armbands. However with nearly no brazenly homosexual footballers, that appears a distant prospect.)
The scene that everybody will discuss in Pricey England—after heat opinions, I anticipate it to switch to a industrial theater, and possibly develop into a tv drama—reveals Southgate in a gathering along with his staff, unfurling England’s flag and asking gamers to outline what it means. They specific unease with its legacy from the Crusades, and its associations with racism, earlier than he clarifies his request. The staff must say what the flag means to them. He asks them to speak in regards to the locations they grew up—Milton Keynes, a city finest generally known as a temple to the site visitors circle; Washington (the one in northeast England, not america); Walthamstow in North London; Wythenshawe close to Manchester. A few of these are “shit locations,” one participant observes. Sure, replies one other, “however they’re our shit locations.”
That is about as excellent a distillation of English patriotism as you may hope to come across. However the play’s actual coronary heart comes earlier, when Southgate first meets his teaching workers and gamers, and bluntly informs them that they’re unlikely to win their subsequent event. Why does England, a staff that final gained a World Cup greater than half a century in the past, nonetheless arrive at competitions anticipating to dominate them effortlessly? he wonders. And why does it harbor a way of wounded entitlement when it fails?
In a drama that might simply have fallen into overripe metaphors for the state of the nation, the actors don’t imbue these strains with pointless portentousness. However these questions do mirror the central problem of Englishness within the twenty first century. Is England all the time doomed to really feel diminished by the tip of its empire and by its relegation from the highest rank of world powers? Or can the nation rebuild itself, with exhausting work and humility, into one thing new? The query additionally applies to masculinity, the secondary theme of Pricey England. “At residence, I’m beneath the children and the canine within the pecking order however publicly I’m the England males’s soccer staff supervisor,” wrote Southgate in his well-known letter. Each there and within the play, he talks about being a father determine to the gamers, a few of whom have by no means recognized their very own fathers.
Does change all the time must really feel like loss? Not when you write a brand new story as a substitute of mourning the outdated one, argues Pricey England. It’s a message that might additionally apply to america: How a couple of story the place you’ll be able to take a knee and fly the flag, and do each with equal delight?
