There She Goes
It was an absolutely excellent theory. I'd been mulling it over for months, always planning to write something about it for Mindre Panda. It was quite simple in concept; England participates in three major sports, football, rugby and cricket, and is incapable of being any good at any more than one of them at once.
Just looks at the past fifteen years or so. In the early-to-mid nineties England possibly were the strongest at football than they had been for years, including reaching World Cup and European Championship semi-finals and losing both of them to Germany. Both times on penalties. During that period England managed nothing of note in cricket and rugby.
As the new millennium began England's football was in decline and cricket was going from bad to worse (at one point they were considered the worst "test" nation), so it was the turn of rugby to take control. England started to wipe the floor with everyone. Finally we saw a northern hemisphere team that could defeat the "big three" from the southern hemisphere: South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. This culminated in England's 2003 Rugby World Cup victory over Australia.
And then it all started to go wrong. Again. A disastrous tour in 2004 made it all look like it had been a fluke, with England losing heavily to New Zealand and being humiliated 51-15 by Australia. This clearly meant it was time for cricket to have its time in the limelight. The summer of 2005 will be fondly remembered by England's fans for decades due to what is now being considered one of the best Ashes series against Australia, the world champions, ever. Indeed, there is a DVD box-set available of the series that is subtitled "The Greatest Series" and a DVD claiming the Edgbaston test to be "The Greatest Test".
Meanwhile, in the world of football, it was going all wrong for England. Sven-Göran Eriksson received his worst defeat as England manager, a 4-1 mauling by Denmark, and then what had been a World CUp qualification campaign that seemed like a foregone conclusion started to look very iffy indeed. Just managing to hold on 1-0 against Wales, losing 1-0 to Northern Ireland, whom they had beaten 4-0 in 2004, and again barely holding on to lesser opposition, this time Austria at home with one of the worst England performances of recent memory.
So the pattern seems to fit, so why the tone of the first paragraph? Saturday, November 12th 2005 is why. On the same day England managed to finally regain their rugby skills and beat Australia 26-16 (notably without Jonny Wilkinson, the fantastic fly-half that many non-England fans solely "blamed" England's World Cup victory on), beat Argentina 3-2 in a fine football match (notably coming back from 2-1 down with two very late goals when, in the past, England have been accused time and time again of lying down and allowing the opposition to walk all over them in the second half) and the cricketers continued their momentum by grasping the upper hand in the first test of their tour of Pakistan (their first test match since the Ashes victory).
And just for the hell of it Great Britain's Rugby League team gave New Zealand a 38-12 stuffing. Not quite just England, but a hell of a lot of England players were in that team.
All on the same day. That is why my theory is now in the dustbin.
M Panda
