The silence of the vuvuzelas

I blame myself entirely. If only I’d known. It was nothing to do with the poorly motivated, underachieving, uninspiring, unprofessional bunch of international embarrassments who so comprehensively proved themselves unfit to bear the three lions on their chests. No, it was down to me and if I had any pride I would impale myself upon a vuvuzela. Though of course I don’t have any pride left, the pathetic display in South Africa saw to that. But I must at least confess my guilt to you gentle reader as I, entirely inadvertently, seem to have put the hex on the England football team.
It all began innocently enough; a holiday travelling through Europe planned months before a ball was even kicked and timed to make sure that I was back in time for the business end of the tournament. Back then I had what now seems like monstrously misplaced confidence that the English team would sail through the group stages before mounting a serious challenge for the trophy. What a joke. Anyway, the first stages of the holiday involved travelling down through France. Towards the end of that first week I became aware that all was not entirely well with ‘Les Bleus’ – poor results and some kind of furore that my GCSE French vocabulary wasn’t quite up to translating.
It was only much later that I discovered that their players had actually gone on strike! I mean if anyone had asked me to guess which of the national sides had taken such drastic steps then the French would have been near the top of list given that industrial action is practically a national pastime. The delicious Gallic drama reached such a crisis point that President Sarkozy got involved, though as history will testify it was clearly too little too late. The 1998 World Cup winners not only crashed out of the tournament but also suffered the ignominy of actually coming bottom of their group. I tried to feel a little bit sorry for them. For a bit.
After what seemed like an age travelling through Europe’s highest mountain, Jack and family emerged from the Mont Blanc tunnel into Italy. Having had a disappointingly cloudy drive up the French side to the tunnel entrance I had fully expected to emerge into beautiful sunshine and spectacular Italian countryside. Instead we seemed to have come out in drivers’ hell. Though scarcely past two o’clock in the afternoon it was dark – really dark. Even with the windscreen wipers on turbo the road was indistinct due to the torrential, near biblical rain that was thrashing down. This in combination with roads offering neither cats-eyes nor adequate drainage, roads that nevertheless had clearly been mistaken for a race-track by the local traffic, made for the sort of buttock-clenching white-knuckle ride guaranteed to enhance any family holiday.
Actually that was the low-point of the Italian section of the trip. The rest was beautiful, sunny and happy – with the exception of watching the England games of course. On leaving Italy we headed next to Switzerland and it was in the home of money, clocks, chocolate and cheese that I learned Italy too had been bundled out of the tournament. This was incredibly unexpected given their footballing pedigree, indeed it was the first time the World Cup holders had not progressed beyond the group stages in decades.
As a committed lover of all things Italian (with the possible exception of their compulsory swimming hats but including their football) I was truly disappointed but also just a touch curious. Here we were in Switzerland on the eve, it turned out, of a hugely important World Cup game in which the Swiss only had to do better against Honduras (not exactly a footballing power) than Spain did against the unbeaten Chileans. Given the relatively inconsistent Spanish performances until that point this seemed eminently achievable, but could our holiday jinx strike another country? By mid-evening the silence of Zurich’s vuvuzelas confirmed that it could. Switzerland out, Spain in. Number of countries visited: three. Number of countries visited still in the tournament: zero. I was now a believer in the curse.
So here was a dilemma. Our last stop on the continent was Brussels – no drama there as the Belgians hadn’t qualified for South Africa – but there were a number of potential routes to get there. One of these involved going through Germany…England’s next opponents. It was considerably longer than a route back through France and Luxembourg but it was do-able. However, a later start than planned, a stiflingly hot day and two children under five who had already travelled almost 2,000 miles by car in a fortnight were enough to sway us to take the shorter option. To my eternal shame.
After a very brief stay in Brussels it was finally time to return home: a couple of hours to the ferry, a quick hop across the Channel and then downhill all the way home. With any luck I thought the traffic should be a bit lighter given it was Sunday and so many people were likely to be staying in to watch the game. Yes friends, it was Sunday 27th June – the day England were due to face Germany. Surely, I told myself, as I actually live in England then the fact that I was travelling through it couldn’t count as part of my holiday? It wouldn’t be right if the curse were applied as I traversed my native soil. That would be grossly unfair and more than a little stupid – as unfair and stupid you might say as failing to provide basic goal-line technology that would prevent massive miscarriages of justice in the world’s biggest sporting event. Nevertheless, I was more than a little bit worried…as it turned out with some justification. What followed was a display of such breathtaking ineptitude that only a curse, only something supernatural, could properly explain it. Now I have to shoulder the burden of knowing I could have averted this national disaster...and the knowledge weighs heavy.

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