The night game

Like many football fans I’ve measured my life in World Cups. Mexico 86, Italia 90, France 98, remembering chapters and times of tournaments like rings on a tree. I remember when Ray Wilkins was sent off in 1986, nine years old and thinking how unfair that our wonderful midfielder had to go, and I watched crying as my beloved Bryan Robson’s shoulder came out of its socket in the heat, this supremely combative athlete walking off so gingerly, clutching it with his head down. Four years later it was Gazza’s face in Turin, and then the penalties, my first penalties, then the next morning after a solemn breakfast with mum and dad into school where my teachers were as hollowed out as I was. Literally everyone was affected.

So I should have been ready for this World Cup but I wasn’t. I’d been struggling to connect with it, and if I’m honest, struggling to connect with England.

Some of that is the flag. Watch the footage of Italia 90 and its Union Jacks everywhere, draped over barriers, painted on faces, the whole glorious vibrant red white and blue of it all. The St George’s Cross came later, before it got taken over. Since then it’s been painted on roundabouts, planted outside newbuilds, and waved at marches by men who have decided that loving England means hating most of the people in it. I don’t want this to be a piece about flags but when the thing that’s meant to gather you in has been claimed by people who’d rather you weren’t there, supporting the team that carries it becomes complicated in a way it never was when I was nine.

Some of it is the fandom itself, or the version of it we’re shown. The last few tournaments have been buried under performative rubbish, beer hurled into the air at a first goal in a group game that meant nothing, all of it filmed before it was felt. For those of us who go to as many away days as we can each season, who love this game with our kids, who understand that a tournament is a narrative arc, it’s been hard to locate anything real in those moments. Millions of views and nothing left behind.

Then we got back the night.

Because of the kick-off times, England’s games at this tournament had all been civilised early evening affairs here, watched with the curtains open. And also there it has been daytime and the difference felt disproportionally important on the emotion we all took out of it. This Mexico game, at the Azteca kicked off at 1am UK time. Then a storm rolled over Mexico City and pushed it back another hour. Either way, everyone had to decide how they were going to do it, their own version of the night.

Tens of millions of individual stories and decisions on how to go about watching this epic night game suddenly became countless tales ready to set our memories for decades. Setting the alarm for the small hours or gutsing out the stay-up, the pub with a late licence versus the sofa and snacks, or the phone glowing in a dark bedroom, volume down, trying not to wake someone asleep in the other room. Adults across the country were reduced to being kids again, stripped back down to the essence. it used to be the transistor radio under the covers for me it was my tape player with TDK cassette at 9 years old, recording the commentary of Lineker’s 1986 hat-trick against Poland off the radio and replaying it for years after. Watching this match until four in the morning had exactly that quality, slightly illicit but entirely ours.

Precisely because it was abnormal, everyone came out of it with their story, and that’s what the night does. Nobody has a story about watching a 5pm kick-off really, but a 2am kick-off in that cracking atmospheric night, delayed by lightning, at altitude, in the most hostile stadium in world football, generates stories everywhere instantly.

And we’ve all been living out these stories in the aftermath. We saw the long walks home at five in the morning with the sun coming up over northern towns to country village pubs, fans nodding, singing, cheering with strangers who’d clearly been through the same thing. The taxi videos rolling through Shoreditch and east London, people spilling into streets and beeping and singing into the dawn, which feels closer to South American outpourings than anything British. My feed the next day wasn’t performative whatsoever, for once. It was real people telling each other how they’d watched, where they’d watched, and how they felt when they watched it.

Others write the tactical autopsy far better than me, but those 11 minutes of stoppage time with 10 men felt geological as underneath all of it, the ghost from when I was nine years old, the last time England played in that stadium was 1986 and being up late watching Maradona, that wound I grew up inside while falling in love with World Cups all at the same time. Forty years later, in the same building.

(Jordan Henderson hurt his wrist falling over an advertising hoarding during the celebrations trying to sing Wonderwall, might be the most English detail in the whole story)

Years ago I suggested a strapline for friends at MUNDIAL magazine and it was simply “reminded you why you love football”. That magazine was never really about the matches, it was all this; the shirts and smells and the feelings and the stuff around the stuff. And that’s what this night was. Before it, I was following this World Cup more analytically, forensically, interested but not emotionally invested. The squad-selection rows, the intrigue around our coach’s choices, best players left at home, all interesting but none of it really felt. The match replaced every bit of that with goosebumps. The analysis is all gone, I’m fully sucked in.

The nostalgia arrived instantly.

Not in twenty years on a retrospective documentary with talking heads and grainy grading, but the following morning, on an hour’s sleep, on the school runs and the empty commutes, the whole country already telling the story of the night before as though it were the distant past. Near-history nostalgia. We absorbed it all before we’d even slept it off. A tournament that opened with pasty clichés and social media froth somehow ended up handing a nation back the exact feeling of being nine years old with a radio and a blank tape.

Norway on Saturday, in Miami, and at a kinder hour for kick off. Part of me is glad but most of me hopes a storm delays it deep into the night, flashbulbs crackling like Italia 90 felt, because it turns out that’s where the love was hiding all along, in the dark, waiting for us to stay up for it.