England Vs Germany: Much More Than A Game Of Football.
Nothing captures England’s history of imperial pomp, postcolonial melancholia and angst, better than this fixture.
Two days ago, two longstanding epic foes went to war. This time, it wasn’t waged in the trenches of Flanders and Somme, nor was it fought in the deserts of Torbruk and El Alamein or in the thick forests of Zamfara and Sambisa. On this occasion, it was in the gentrified, cosmopolitan surroundings of North-West London — Wembley, an erstwhile working class neighbourhood, which has had hundreds of millions of pounds pumped into it, thereby sanitizing it, of its demography, history and identity.
The enemies in question?
England and Germany.
A football match between these two countries has always meant more than 22 men running around the pitch, with one nation seeking to dominate the other over the course of ninety minutes or in the case of these two, in 1990 and 1996, one hundred and twenty minutes, at the end of which the Germans triumphed. It has always been about history, bloody history, which has helped shaped the course of the humankind, in the bloodiest period that humanity has ever known — the twentieth century.