England has made us all football consumers – so it's better to give in | Andy Bull | Soccer

T The woman who lives at No. 42 says that she knew, just knew, that Eric Dier was going to score his penalty as soon as he would come forward to take it. The two guys in the dry cleaners can not agree on whether Raheem Sterling should be in the team or not. The kid next door practices three Lions at the piano. The bus driver whistles him. A friend e-mailed a meme that he made the song playing on top of Big Lebowski's dance scenes. I Google "how to lose a worm of the ear". Dad, who has not watched a match since Trowbridge Town folded back in 1998, texts to say how much he appreciates all that. Madness becomes contagious.

All the best summer stories are on the air. It was 30 ° C in London last Saturday, but it was warmer, as "the sun was a huge fifty-cent coin on which someone poured kerosene and lit a match," wrote Richard Brautigan, "and says : "Hang on while I'm going to get a diary, and put the coin in my hand but never come back." Everything is a little woozy and delirious and feverish and a bunch of hazelnuts have invaded IKEA and the band Coldstream Guards are playing this song at Buckingham Palace and no one is really sure it's a dream.It could be it.It has all the logic of one.Anybody checked to see if spinning top stopped?

They say 24m watched England v Colombia, 19.6m England v Sweden. These are the days when all the world is a football fan, when, um, reporters who have not written a word about the game in the last Decade shamelessly decide that it's suddenly time to start. It's a strange affair, right now, to write about any other sport, like working in a bookstore that refuses to stock the bestseller that everyone reads, a butcher's shop that serves than artificial meat. juice that does it. "The World Cup is an unmistakable reminder, if anyone needed it, that England is a football country that plays other games.

Do you still like this? Back to the Guardian's Monday edition on July 30, 1966. Mary Peters broke the national record for the women's shot put this weekend, at a little meeting in Kingston before The Commonwealth Games The England Lawn Tennis Team beat Ireland 8-3 in Scarborough, Derbyshire were screened for 157 in Southampton.The British and Irish Lions beat Auckland 12-6 in New Zealand: Britain and Ireland have won the St Andrew's Trophy in Bilbao and lost the Curtis Cup in Hot Springs, Va. The Guardian has published lengthy reports on all that, and they ran a half-page football, too.Well, England won the World Cup on Saturday.

The match just made the front page, in a single column on the left side, all about how the players would share a £ 22,000 bonus despite the Wilson Freezing Government's salary. The main story was the latest development in Nigeria's coup d'etat. Pbading from generation to generation on July 5, 1990, and England's defeat by Germany in the semi-finals shared the top of the standings with a history on the electoral tax. Inside, the coverage of the match filled just one page, the same as Goran Ivanisevic's run to the semifinals of Wimbledon and only a little more than the news that Phil DeFreitas would not play the Third Test against New Zealand. until The Recap, our weekly email of editors' choices.

A new generation and race at the World Cup in England has become so irresistible that other sports distort their schedules so that everyone can do everything in time for the time being. ; sending. There were emergency meetings in the cricket leagues last week to accelerate early departure agreements and extended breaks for Saturday's games.

Gloucestershire and Kent brought their match of Wednesday T20 at 15h. Yorkshire – intractable, stubborn, former Yorkshire Cricket Club – kicked against Derbyshire in another week

They also played football on the big screens of Silverstone. Wimbledon, so sure of his status, is the one who holds up. They refuse to show anything other than tennis. Whisper It, but when it was said that the men's final was likely to come up against the World Cup this Sunday, one of the All England Club officials is supposed to have said, "Well, why can not they not move theirs? The club has the gift of a conservative minister for having read the public mood. It does not matter that the players themselves can not stop talking about it, Kyle Edmund said how happy he was to have finished his match on Tuesday because everyone could go watch. football.

The seats at the Center Court on Saturday, which, the club insisted, were "a consequence of the natural interruption of matches between matches", natural jumps that coincided with the time it took to England to go 2-0. Apparently it scared the club by making a concession.

They will now allow fans to watch the game on their cell phone. There is no competition with football, after all, no resistance to its spread through the culture of admiration. We are all football consumers now, so it's better to just give in and continue. This country needs something cheerful to shout about now, after all.