Alan Shearer celebrates his winner at Euro 2000, the only time England have beaten Germany in competition since 1966. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the GuardianOne of the many splendours of modern technology is that it is able to transmit round-robin witticisms to those who might otherwise find themselves short of an aperçu at the most opportune of moments. Consider the embarrassment averted this morning at Port Elizabeth airport, when the BlackBerry of an England supporter beeped obligingly into life. The screen was consulted.
"This is great," he bellowed to assembled travellers, sweetly extending the bounty to those who were not in his touring party – and indeed those not fortunate enough to have won first prize in the lottery of life and been born an Englishman. "This World Cup is exactly like the second world war," he guffawed. "The French surrender early, the US turn up late, and we're left to deal with the bloody Germans."
It brought the house down. Unfortunately, he wasn't buried in the rubble.
But by now, a welter of Don't Mention The Score headlines should have convinced you that you're in for a beguiling few days until England meet Germany in Bloemfontein on Sunday. With his last minute, group-winning goal against Algeria yesterday, the USA's Landon Donovan effectively assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and invaded Poland. England now face the old enemy – the old enemy being the one within, namely some people's pathological inability to view football games with Germany through any other prism than war. Yet if this enemy has an ally – an Axis buddy, if you will – it is the idea that our nation enjoys a serious football rivalry with Germany.
From the minute England's round of 16 destiny was clear, you will have heard much about this sainted antagonism with Germany. Yet the so-called rivalry is quite obviously an illusion, existing only in the minds of those wishful to the point of insanity – which is to say, the English. We are rivals with Germany in the same way Christine Bleakley is rivals with Oprah.
How to put it even more starkly? Since 1966, Germany have been in 11 major tournament finals, of which they have won five. We've been in two semi-finals, and it hardly needs pointing out how that ended. The only time we beat them in tournament football is when it didn't matter, during Euro 2000 when both England and Germany went out in the first round anyway.
As for that 5-1 victory in Munich, there may be some who think that venerating a qualifying game in this way makes them look a force to reckoned with. But on one of the news channels the other day, a German living in England was asked about that night in 2001. If the question was meant as the most hamfisted of provocations – and I think it was Sky News, so it would have been – the reply was a study in understated fly-squashing. "Yes," said the German, gently. "I see the DVD is still selling in shops."
Wise heads have long since outsourced the settling of this ancient and hilariously one-sided blood feud. A friend swears that for him the greatest moment in English football in the last couple of decades came in 1994, at the World Cup in the US, when the Bulgarian Yordan Letchkov scored a brilliant header in the 78th minute that put Germany out in the quarter-finals. Letchkov, he reasons, was English footballer of that year, and if he was only named so on the honours boards of ironist publicans, then that is to our self-deceiving nation's discredit.
Harold Wilson blaming his 1970 election defeat on England's exit at the hands of West Germany in the World Cup in Mexico, Kevin Keegan resigning in the Wembley bogs – these are the sorts of things that happen after inevitable German wins, and there is a reassuringly traditional quality to them. In a world that has changed bewilderingly in recent decades, England losing to Germany in major tournaments is one of the few certainties.
The consequences of an upset of this natural order can only be immense. Watching that relatively insignificant 5-1 victory in 2001, the father of the then German coach Rudi Völler suffered a heart attack inside the stadium – and it is difficult not to think that a comparatively enormous upset in Bloemfontein could unleash such a dangerous collective euphoria in England that it could tear the very fabric of space and time itself. It would be like blasting gigawatts of power into the nation's flux capacitor – indeed, it might quite literally blast us back to 1966. Do let's be careful what we wish for.
Marina Hyde @'The Guardian'
