The other game

My ears were ringing after leaving the Sports Cafe Saturday arvo. If nothing else the Brits are passionate about their team, but I’m not sure if they put a lot of faith in their boys.

On opening they drunkenly sang “God save the Queen” in unison with the telly. The swell of voices rose in the air until you were swimming in baritone. I never really understood the passion about a song requesting divine intervention for an already spoilt granny. I have my own Gran to look after who needs a little more help than Elizabeth R.

Still it was rousing to hear. This was monarchic hegemony at work but no-one seemed to care; it’s the way these things slip through unnoticed unless you’re looking in from the outside. Dan and I however were standing in the middle of the throng of white and red and couldn’t have had a louder spot in the bar. We stood our ground.

These English wore their hearts on their sleeves. Each time an English boot sent the ball into the Australian twenty-two the Brits would go wild, as though their boys had hit a milestone. Then would come the choruses of ‘Swing Low’ which drowned out the Australian heckling.

Of course in eighty minutes they didn’t make it across the line once, and unsurprisingly they played the Northern hemisphere game making their boot do the talking. Toward the end the heckling from the aussies became fevered. The whistle blew for full time and a bomb went off in the bar. The crowd erupted, and I mean that literally, in joy. Screams of ecstasy and jubilation filled the four walls. Arms were raised in victory, and groups of hardy men were crying and hugging and then crying some more. It was gaudy and superficial and joyous to watch.

And like turning off a switch we walked out the Sports Cafe and into Piccadilly to see the England of busses and commuters rushing from one deadline to the next. It was a London that went along with its humdrum, oblivious to the microcosm of happiness just meters inside.