England vs Germany

I am very ill at the moment - I have a terrible sort of flu.

No appetite. I ache all over and have a headache if I move. All I can do is sleep.

Earlier today, after lunch (which I left most of), I went back to bed for two solid hours.

But I got up at 3pm to watch England vs Germany.

I don't care about the result. I will not read the Sports section tomorrow. In my view every one of the team played well, and I enjoyed seeing them performing at the highest level of international football.

And there is the compensating thought that however well Germany play and however well they perform they can never become the England football team (by this I mean they will always be the bad guys, the title of good guys is permanently reserved for England).

Towards the end of the match one of the commentators said "There will have to be an enquiry into this".

The commentators speculated how the England team members, individually so expert, could collectively fail.

Leaving aside physiological issues such as the effect of the climate and the altitude, the most obvious reason must be a failure of morale.

And a contributing factor in poor morale must be the behaviour of sports journalists. If you constantly tell a group of people they are rubbish and sustain this message over a period of decades, then the objects of this abuse will inevitably experience a loss of morale. In any other area of life the perpetrators would be guilty of psychological cruelty (and in certain workplace situations they would end up having to explain their behaviour in court).

It would be interesting to chart the performance of national teams in the World Cup together with the support they get from their respective media. Is there, I wonder, some Brazilian equivalent of Marina Hyde, constantly snarking about every single aspect of the national team's performance? Is there in Germany a coterie of journalists who, instead of finding new and interesting things to say, lazily recycle the old narrative of failure, knowing that by doing so they will bring about the very failure they predict?