Rule, Britannia!
Britannia rules the waves.
Britains never never never shall be slaves.
Ahh, for the life of an English football hooligan. Drink beer. Sing songs. Root, root, root for The Boys.
Give me St. George in my heart, keep me English.
Give me St. George in my heart, I say.
Give me St. George in my heart, keep me English.
Keep me English to my dying day.
No surrender!
No surrender!
No surrender to the IRA.
The English fans lifted their Boys in the English World Cup opener Sunday morning, filling Saitama Stadium in Japan with a sea of noise, their notes cascading down the seats and enveloping the action on the field.
Even through my tinny-sounding Sanyo television set, the sounds of the English transported me to another time, a time when I knew those chants by heart, a time when even this star-spangled boy bled for the St. George cross.
I lived in London for two formative years, and the sporting experience was as rich and diverse as the cultural experience. But not because the sporting scene was rich and diverse; in fact I found quite the opposite to be true.

In England there is football, and only football.
English boys and girls have two deep-seeded loyalties: their club team and their national squad. King and country. Left hand and right. The English football talent is culled on the country’s playgrounds, where Britain’s children play football for hours a day. As an American, I was soon “broken in” on the concrete fields of London, where I learned the subtleties of the game shooting at a brick wall behind my schoolgrounds.
We knew the players on the national squad well, rooted them on in Italy 1990 (in England there is no need for the moniker “World Cup,” the place and the year suffice). Gascoigne, Lineker and Platt were our gods.
Paul Gascoigne, the young, brash hero of that English squad, famously shed tears when he received a yellow card in the overtime of England’s semifinal contest with Germany. He cried because it was his second yellow of the tournament, which meant he would miss the final if England won.
Watching Gascoigne spill those tears had a soccer-goal-sized impact on my young sporting heart. The hero’s passion was unmatched by any of my American idols. His love for the game welled up in his heart and out of his eyes that day — and I was forever changed.
There is no way to describe how deeply football is embedded into countries all over the world. Americans and their capitalist sports market — a market that caters to many but as a whole satisfies only a few — can never know what it’s like to grow up with a sport built into the very fabric of a nation.
In England, football criss-crosses the country and the country’s demographics. The Queen herself gave condolences to England’s star of Korea 2002, David Beckham, in his quick recovery from a recent broken foot. The Queen herself was thinking the same thoughts as the coal-miner from Newcastle.
In Italy 1990, Gascoigne and the English went on to lose to the Germans on penalty-kicks. In Saitama, the English scored first but floundered in the second half, giving up a goal midway through and ending the game in a tie.
But the chants and songs of the English fans never died down for 90 minutes. Just like the rhythm of English football will never die down within me. Give me St. George in my heart, keep me English.
Da-da, da-da da. Da-da, da-da da. Da-da, da-da da-da da-darrr.
ENGLAND!