When I went to bed on Sunday, football commentators were killing time waiting for the England match by talking about Donald Trump, Fifa president Gianni Infantino and Folarin Balogun’s red card, waived for the US because of reasons. None of the available words – “unacceptable”, “cheaty”, “absolutely stinks” – covered it. There’s no chance of Trump’s US playing nicely in an international tournament, especially when it’s hosting most of it. Does the US just get the trophy, whatever happens? Do they fashion two trophies, one for the winner and one for most winning host?
It was all a big deal for geopolitics, but for the more immediate matter of how to take seriously a competition in which there were no longer rules, it wasn’t the end of the world. Whatever happened, it definitely wouldn’t end in a showdown between the US and the UK, fixed in advance by a president determined to celebrate 250 years in style. Because, by tomorrow, I thought, England would be out. If we’ve learned anything from the past decade, it’s not to go to sleep waiting for news. Whatever the dawn breaks over will be bad.
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The Brexit result was the start of the horrible surprise awakening, and if you were still surprised by Trump’s first win in November of the same year, you hadn’t been paying attention. Decisions made by humans, singly or in aggregate by voting, were from now on going to be wrong. A great way to quash your spirit is to think back to what used to count as a disaster before June 2016. It was the absolute end of the world when a celebrity died, even if they’d been fighting a definitely losing battle with cancer for some time (David Bowie) or they were 90 (George Martin, the fifth Beatle).
In 2011, it was the worst year that had ever happened, because Osama bin Laden had been killed around the time the hacking scandal knocked the respectability out of Rupert Murdoch. It was, genuinely, a terrible year for natural disasters – earthquakes in New Zealand killed 185, more in Japan killed nearly 20,000. There was famine in Somalia and the awful Breivik massacre in Norway, an end-of-days feeling that events both manmade and not must be connected, because how else to make sense of them all arriving at once? But it seems extraordinary now that we even had time to debate whether the killing of Bin Laden was extralegal, whether the tabloid news was shady.
The same year, riots in the UK spurred months of questions about the irrevocable breakdown of society and the loss of a generation to delinquency, as magistrates courts sat overnight and gave people custodial sentences for stealing bottled water, and it all looked pretty bad. It’s hard now not to feel nostalgic for a time when social breakdown looked like ransacking JD Sports rather than setting fire to buildings because of the people who are in them.
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If you want to really kill your mood, I refer you back to the turn of the century, when the most mismanagement anyone could imagine from a government, the most reckless public spending, the most egregious sell-out of all possible, better futures, was the Millennium Dome. To be fair to the us of the past, I distinctly remember some confusion at the time about what the problem was. You have to mark a thousand years somehow; did anyone have a better idea than a dome? But sure, it was a graver matter than Tony Blair failing to react strongly or quickly enough to the false imprisonment of Deirdre Barlow, a fictional character on Coronation Street.
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That was the impossible-to-fathom outrage of 1998, to which the notion “more innocent times” will not stretch. It’s not like the decades before this one were devoid of injustice or hardship; a generalised air of unseriousness was definitely skating over some detail. But you’ve got to miss the years when it was possible to pretend.
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The pattern of the years since – unremitting disaster – has had the side-effect of elevating every kind of sport from a pleasant diversion to a keeper of the flame, a reminder that sometimes you can’t guess what’s going to happen in advance, using pessimism as your lodestar. Or at least, that’s how it works when nobody’s cheating.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
