A useful guide to the significance of a sporting achievement can be gleaned from how desperate politicians are to be associated with it. And given that within minutes of England’s 3-1 World Cup semi-final win over Australia on Wednesday, Lib Dem leader Ed Davey had posted a staggeringly wooden shot of himself celebrating victory in a pub, it can safely be said that England reaching the Women’s World Cup final is a very big deal indeed.
At least Davey appeared to know what was going on. Barnaby Joyce, Australia’s former deputy prime minister, posted celebratory photos after inadvertently watching an old game rather than Australia’s quarter-final win over France. But the broader point is the same: politicians in both the UK and Australia have been desperate to leap aboard the bandwagon.
In the UK, the Lionesses’ successes have been splashed across front as well as back pages. Viewing figures have been extraordinary, particularly given games are being played in the mornings: 7.2 million people watched England’s quarter-final win over Colombia (only 300,000 fewer than watched the finale of Happy Valley) and, given the final of the Euros last year drew 11.2 million, it’s safe to assume Sunday’s final against Spain will attract well over 10 million. it may even challenge the Coronation, which drew 12.03 million, as the most-watched programme of the year. What that means is far harder to say.
It is common in the wake of sporting successes to make great claims about their wider significance. Yet history isn’t always a helpful guide. Despite South Africa’s rugby union World Cup win in 1995 and footballing success at the Africa Cup of Nations the following year, it is not a happy and harmonious rainbow nation. Nor did the victory of France’s “Black-Blanc-Beur” side at the 1998 football World Cup end prejudice and racial tension there. Which is not to say that those triumphs and the celebrations that followed were worthless: symbols can still have value even if the ideal they represent remains distant, perhaps unattainable.
Jules Rimet, the French Fifa president who oversaw the birth of the men’s tournament, believed the World Cup would be a force for good, fostering greater understanding and brotherhood among nations. Even at the first World Cup, in 1930, it must have been hard to maintain that idealism as the Argentina captain Luis Monti received death threats from Uruguayan fans before the final, after which Uruguayan property in Buenos Aires was stoned and torched. By 1934 in Italy, when Mussolini took charge and turned the tournament into a celebration of fascism, it became impossible.
But then what can be expected from sport? The Olympic Games was launched in 1896 with similarly high-minded ideals; its sixth edition, scheduled for Berlin in 1916, had to be abandoned because of the First World War. Nobody, though, could realistically say, as a result, that Baron De Courbertin had failed.
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