It is the first international match for the England team since ejection from the World Cup.
You would think that after a less than successful performance in the World Cup everyone would have been keen to forget about the competition.
But World Cup 2010 lingers on in the national consciousness:
Above: in the weeks following the end of the World Cup you could still send off for this Limited Edition Official England Glass. Which I duly did. My brother drinks Stella from it.
Above: even a month after the Final you could buy these England USB drives. And strangely, I was motivated to make a purchase, even though I work in marketing and know that the link between these objects and the England football team is tenuous in the extreme. It was almost as if I had an out-of-body experience and could watch myself falling for the marketing hype.
Above: only two weeks ago I passed the Churchill pub still flying the England flag and with a big sign up saying it was the home of the World Cup.
Above: and on Monday of this week I noticed that White Van Man still had a big flag up on the side of his house.
What is going on here? Why this romantic nostalgia for an episode that was undeniably a failure (Marina Hyde describing it in such exaggerated gotterdammerung terms that you would think she was referring to the fall of Singapore in 1942)? Obviously England's World Cup 2010 campaign still sells over two months after England lost to Germany on 27th June.
Probably it represents the power of myth and fantasy over reality. Even in defeat the England team is a powerful cultural and psychological phenomenon (like artists in France, in England footballers are the "cherished children of the nation"). Few other psychological machines can harness the collective emotional energy of the masses in quite the same way.
As Zervos said: "It is impossible to deny that the collective is satisfied with opiate ideas".
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