Leading article: A triumph, after all, for doggedness

Put away the flags, take the empties to the recycling skip, keep the replica shirts for next time. But don’t feel down or be too self-hating about our defeat. We have to accept the fact that much of the England team’s rugby had been more about avoiding defeat than achieving the certainty of victory. We decided not to out-run the Aussies or to outpass the French. We played our game and it nearly worked. And the nation was gripped for a month. But while we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about another glorious failure, there should be some reflection on the fact that sport is such a vibrant and important narrative in daily life. The streets of our towns and cities were empty last night between 8pm and 10pm – what else could achieve that?

England now needs to assess whether the rugby team succeeded, but then ultimately failed, by being too true to our nature. As a country, we don’t do flair; it’s too much like dads dancing at discos. And flamboyance is at odds with our temperament, which has been formed by, among other elements, fear of invasion, religious conditioning, the weather, waiting in queues – and which can best be expressed in a single word “doggedness”. It was doggedness that won us our only football World Cup back in 1966. The country may have been swinging and dedicated to following fashion, but the 11 players who did duty that July day included two balding brothers with comb-overs, the Charltons, a ginger-haired short-arse, Alan Ball, and a toothless but vicious terrier, Nobby Stiles. In subsequent decades, flair players in our three major sports have always had more to do to justify their places in our teams, or were simply kept in a box marked “?”, because the innate fear in our hearts has been that they will one day let us down. Correspondingly, in our public life we’ve tended to be suspicious of the flamboyant and demonstrative, thereby thwarting the political careers of such orators as Michael Heseltine and Neil Kinnock, while those who shouted for too much attention in other spheres, such as Jeffrey Archer and Robert Maxwell, were cut down by our gut disapproval. No wonder our sports should match this Protestant streak in our political and cultural life. Even Lewis Hamilton who now has one hand on the World Drivers’ Championship in the Brazilian Grand Prix at Sao Paulo today has, for all his youthful brilliance, deployed English pragmatism in earning more points by finishing in the places than he has in winning just four Grand Prix. The thinking is that if we want jazzy stuff we can buy in overseas players or import foreign coaches so we can borrow the effective parts of their philosophies. And yet in order to progress on and off the field, we shouldn’t forget that foreign influences have helped flavour and redefine all our sports as well as most aspects of business, culture and entertainment in our society.

So the magical journey of this gallant but patched-up team shouldn’t be used as an excuse to stay behind the barriers, clinging to bald nationalism and the notion that we can continue in isolation of modern influences.

Don’t turn the clocks back too far next week.