England’s World Cup exit is still raw, but on Saturday we saw a unique situation where Football League clubs played on the same day as a major England international. The winter tournament means this is the first time this has happened, as Championship fans welcomed their teams back in the midst of a World Cup.
As a result, the weekend also saw the same old ‘club or country’ debate rear its head. Fans of the Premier League clubs didn’t even have to pick, but that didn’t stop people giving their opinion. One thing that has become clear in Qatar though is that the England fans who follow their country all across the globe tend not to support one of the big boys.
Clive Tyldesley, who has commentated on several of England’s biggest moments, outlined this trend in a recent series with The Sportsman.
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“England are your Champions League team,” Tyldesley said of being an EFL club fan. “You see that from the St George's flags in the stadium, they do not have Liverpool, Manchester United or Chelsea on them. They have Tunbridge Wells, they have Smethwick, they have small towns dotted all over a map of England where people don't have a local team that is ever going to win the Premier League title. This is our Premier League team. This is our Champions League team and we come together to support them.
“It is if you like, little England, middle England. It is very much the same as Scotland by the way, Scotland's hardcore tartan army support tends to come from either the highlands or the lowlands, not so much in the Glasgow/Edinburgh belt.”
It also appears to be the fans of ‘big six’ clubs who are members of the ‘Southgate Out’ brigade. That sense of entitlement, just because he doesn’t pick their team’s players, is difficult to shift.
“You hear fans of major Premier League teams who hate international football,” Tyldesley went on to explain. “'You are taking our players away, getting them injured, getting them tired' - they want it all to go away. Viewing figures are not everything in television but they are a good opinion poll. It is like an election, you don't have to watch a game or anything if you don't want to. And the singular most popular football team in England is not Manchester United, it is not Liverpool, in terms of viewing figures, the number of people who will watch England play a major match - it is England by far.”
Over 23 million people tuned in for the quarter-final on ITV and there were some criticisms that the commentary from Sam Matterface, who replaced Tyldesley as the channel's main commentator in 2020, was too biased. However, Tyldesley himself explains how, for England, those on the mic have to reflect their audiences’ emotions.
“In England games, I have used what I call the W world - we. Us. Because even though editorially you are neutral and objective, and you have to call that England versus Iceland display a dreadful display. But it is still us. England, although we are a very cosmopolitan nation now and there are lots of people, particularly from Scotland and Wales, who don't have the affiliation for the England national team that most of us do, it is most of us.
“You are commentating to your majority,” he continues. “I think you can very occasionally do that in an England game. You can go with the populist tie, without being Last Night at the Proms about it, you can represent the nation with the way that you react to a goal. I think you can do it less so in a Champions League final because of the nature of club rivalries in English football. But I think, as I say, when a team wins as dramatically as Liverpool did in 2005, you are entitled to be almost that Liverpool fan in some of the things that you say in key moments.”
