Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 5 July 2010 issue)

Germany 4, England 1

On June 27th 2010 England played Germany at the World Cup. Before the match the omens were good for England — they were playing in red and Emile Heskey was on the bench. And then the match began. England were destroyed, Germany were superb. Emile Heskey was brought on near the end. Why, lord, why?! The end.

I am an England supporter and once again a World Cup/Euros has come to a tragic, dispiriting end. My England career has had some tantalising, encouraging highs that have always been snuff ed out by eventual defeat. The defeats have usually been fighting, sometimes glorious but this time it was total and abject. By the end of this match I am ashamed to say I found myself silently willing Germany on to destroy England yet more fully, to push their margin of victory into rugby-score territory, in order to teach the England team, to teach me and everyone who supports England the terrible truth — England are just not that good. Germany, please deliver us from that 1966 nostalgia, that “Maybe, just maybe” nonsense. Please, let us no longer live in denial, let us embrace defeat, let us put a sign over the Wembley turnstiles: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” After all, the Scottish have accepted their truth and they remain cheerful.

This deep concern for England might sound strange coming from a Malaysian but I grew up in England and my mother is Welsh (she would probably sooner support North Korea than England). I lived there for 20 years and I am no longer embarrassed to say it left a mark on me, for good or for ill.

My England football career began in 1982 when I was 15. I had just taken my O Levels and while we were waiting for the results my school wanted to send me far away to dig a hole in Devon, or was it to wipe an old person’s nose in Derbyshire? I can’t remember which because I never got there. I got as far as London but a railway workers’ strike stopped all further progress. I couldn’t go forward and I couldn’t go back. I realised later that I could have taken a bus but buses were, as far as I was concerned, a mode of transport that other people took. I was young and alone in London.

I was given a leaflet at Victoria Station for a cheap hostel and I went there for the night. That night I watched my first World Cup match. England was playing Spain and England needed to win to progress. If football meant anything to me then it meant hooliganism and violence. It was a working class thing, a thing for rough young men, a thing to be feared. I watched the people in the hostel watching the match. There were oohs and aahs and a palpable sense of hope when England made a double substitution of Kevin Keegan and Trevor Brooking. Years later I have on many occasions felt that same sense of hope, a sense that maybe, just maybe this person will turn things around. Back in 1982 I understood that it was moving but it did not move me. Football was a sport that other people watched.

England failed to score and I failed my O Levels. There followed nearly a decade of England failure, and my failure at A Levels. Well, England did make it to the quarter-final of the 1986 World Cup and I did get a D for English, which amounts to much the same thing. There was club success in the 1980s, but what did I care for Liverpool or Aston Villa? I was beginning to meet football fans and they seemed like normal people so I watched Coventry win the FA Cup in 1987, but otherwise I was busy with pimples and girls and trying to direct my first movie at an even younger age than Orson Welles was when he made Citizen Kane. And there was Heysel and Hillsborough and hooliganism and skinheads, and I was a nice middle-class boy.

And then came the Italia 1990 World Cup. It started quietly for me, I barely noticed it. I was living in London by then and, unlike now, I made plans without regard for the World Cup schedule. But I noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was this guy called Paul Gascoigne who played with mesmerising skill. And there was Gary Lineker, Chris Waddle, Peter Beardsley. Their exuberance and gradual success seemed terribly un-English but the English were steadily becoming interested. In the Group of 16 England was playing Belgium and I was kicking myself for agreeing to watch a friend sing at a club. A bunch of us snuck off in a desperate search for a TV and eventually we found ourselves in the kitchen of a Moroccan restaurant watching the end of the match on a tiny black and white screen. A free kick, David Platt turned and scored. There was a cheer around Islington.

Somehow England managed to beat Cameroon in the quarter-final and now it was West Germany in the semis and I had stupidly agreed to go with my then-girlfriend to watch ballet. For the first (and still very rare) occasion I stood up to a girl and told her I was going to watch the football instead. A fighting draw, extra-time, penalties, Gazza’s tears, and my tears also. I was now hooked. Football was now something that I watched and England was, and remains, my team.

A short time later I decided to move back to Malaysia. The night before I left England in 1991 I watched England play Malaysia with my English friends. It was an exciting match and I wasn’t sure who I should support. I was about to return to my country but I didn’t know it too well, was I doing the right thing? But I was only going for a year. In 2000 I was in Kota Baru watching England versus Romania after a night with my wonderful Malaysian friends watching wayang kulit in a kampung in the middle of nowhere. I was, and remain, content that I had done the right thing.

So I support England and despite this woeful defeat I will continue to support them. This is a mature decision based on an adolescent hope. Just as I will almost certainly never make a movie at a younger age than Orson Welles was when he made Citizen Kane (I’m 44, he was 24) England will probably never win the World Cup. But England will dust itself off, make incremental improvements with a new generation of players and will rise again before crashing to a glorious, fighting defeat against Lichtenstein. I have no choice, and I’m happy for it.

Reprinted with the kind permission of