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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25163 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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I am British living in England, and support England, so I feel the pain, although I can acknowledge that we deserved to lose this one. (So did Argentina in the first half).

But I can at least be aware that England were in a World Cup semi-final. For the second time in eight years. And that is a stunning achievement. In 1990 everyone knew this - even after going out on penalties to West Germany, the team that made the semi-final were hailed as heroes. But English fans are more susceptible to entitlement that any other country except Brazil, and now we have far too many people thinking we deserve to win the World Cup and anything less is a disappointment that the manager should be blamed for.

I'm still dreaming, but I think the 60 years of hurt are basically over now. If England had played their best and the opposition had not, we would have won the World Cup. But the opposite was what happened in the second half of yesterday's game.

We were lucky it wasn't 4-1, and we only have the courage and bravery of the goalposts to thank for that.

I don't think we deserved to win, getting to the quarterfinals is the standard benchmark for England and anything more is a bonus. The problem people have isn't with losing per se, it's the way that we lose. Even the way that we win. Let's say that somehow we'd held off Argentina for 40 minutes (!). Would you be proud of the result and confident going into the final, or feeling an unpleasant mixture of relief and trepidation? You can excuse keeping your back against the wall in a match where you're a man down, but in any other scenario it's an admission of a shameful lack of ambition. Too much of England's success has come from lucky breaks against weak opponents and a failure to capitalise on our advantages.

Relevant comedy sketch

Third place playoffs, eh?

OTOH in countries like Finland (where we have never participated in the World Cup and only once in the Euros) there's a long tradition of many people supporting England on the basis of old "honest lads who play hard, don't go for diving" narratives, and this World Cup, at least, has been a nail in the coffin of that myth.

Sadly that's the way the game has developed. I think the refereeing of this tournament has done a good job of limiting the worst of these tendencies and hopefully there's more that can be done. The new rules about time wasting have been a welcome change too.

To be fair, the ratio of fouls Argentina:England was literally 2:1. And the yellow cards were worse. England played a comparatively clean game.

England players don’t do the grandiose ‘let me hear your joy, pour champagne on me now’ routine when they score either.

Playing less dirty than argentina is nothing to brag about.

I'll be honest, I only tuned in for the semi-finals. I assumed that lots of fouling was just how the game was played these days, and that Argentina was overdoing it.

There have been a lot of fouls in this world cup but Argentina has had, just like previous world cups, a lot of them.

Was referring more to the Norway game here.

Ah, didn’t see it :)

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