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Another tournament, another agonising chapter in English football’s long catalogue of glorious disappointments.

England were dumped out of the World Cup by Argentina following a capitulation that will echo through the annals of English footballing folklore. Having taken the lead just shy of the hour mark, this one really stung.

But the irony is that this late collapse has stitched another thread of continuity into the long tapestry of England’s footballing heritage.

As a researcher of cultural heritage, I’ve always thought of football as so much more than the results on the pitch. Indeed, what makes the beautiful game such a powerful cultural phenomenon are the stories supporters inherit and pass on. The things that connect fans to team.

Long before most people fully understand the tactics or even the rules of the game, they begin learning its narratives. They hear about legendary players, miraculous victories, controversial refereeing decisions and – especially in the case of England – devastating defeats. Over time, these a form a shared cultural inheritance.

This is why football can be understood as a form of living heritage. Heritage is not confined to castles, monuments or museum collections. It also exists in intangible things too like traditions that communities continually recreate and transmit from one generation to the next.

Football support works in precisely this way. Every generation inherits a repertoire of stories before adding new chapters of its own and passing them on again. Football culture is thus sustained by an ongoing conversation between past, present and future.

These stories have a vital cultural function. They create identities by giving supporters – and players – a shared understanding of who they are. They bind strangers into communities through common memories and references. And they provide continuity, allowing football cultures to evolve without losing their sense of themselves.

Football matches come and go. The stories endure. It is those stories, continually retold and reinterpreted, that transform football from entertainment into one of Britain’s most powerful forms of living heritage.

Nowhere is this clearer than in England’s relationship with its men’s national team and in the never ending quest for football to finally “come home”. England’s defining story is not simply one of repeated failure, but of a peculiar cycle in which hope and disappointment continually reproduce one another.

Each generation inherits the emotional landmarks of previous tournaments. Of course there is the totemic memory of 1966 when England won the World Cup at Wembley Stadium. But the country’s subsequent experiences of heartbreak loom even larger in the collective imagination.

They are painfully memorable. Gazza’s tears in Turin in 1990 when a yellow card in a semi meant Paul Gascoigne wouldn’t be able to play in the final. The various penalty shoot-out defeats, and the unfulfilled promise of the “golden generation” of England’s 2006 World Cup team. And of course, the recent near misses under Gareth Southgate, as England have contrived to find ever more creative ways to miss out on a second major trophy.

Crucially, this tragic inheritance has not produced a culture of resignation or cynicism. Instead, every tournament begins with the same familiar ritual. Supporters convince themselves that the draw has opened up, that this squad is different, that this manager has found the answer. They do so partly in earnest and partly with a knowing smile, fully aware there is likely heartbreak to come.

For all the criticism it attracts – particularly abroad as an expression of arrogance in England’s self-perception as founder and home of modern football – the idea of football coming home is actually couched in a deep self-awareness. It is an expression of belief against the evidence, of an ability to hope despite knowing how the story will end.

In this way, England’s Sisyphean quest to finally bring football home is the narrative engine that animates the country’s footballing culture. England’s footballing living heritage is the repeated performance of hoping against hope – the willingness, however irrationally, to believe that this might finally be the year.

Each near miss, each cruel twist, becomes another story to be woven into a shared mythology that gives England fandom its remarkable continuity. The national footballing identity has never been forged by glory, but by a collective experience of its doomed pursuit of a second major trophy. The 60 years of hurt has become home.

So, as I try to emotionally recover from England’s latest heartbreak, I can take some comfort in the idea that this defeat has at least sustained a crucial continuity at the heart of this nation’s footballing heritage.

Perhaps football never will come home. But perhaps we don’t need it to. Because the quest has already given generations of England supporters something every bit as valuable: a shared story through which to understand who we are.

Christopher Nolan’s new film, The Odyssey, has been wowing critics, sparking renewed interest in the epic tale of sex, gods and sorcery. That it still resonates millennia after Homer invoked the Muse is a reminder that the characters may change, but human nature stays the same.

As proof, you need only look at the epic saga unfolding on our own political stage. As Britain’s self-appointed new saviour, Andy Burnham, prepares to take up residence in No 10, it seems to me that his predecessor Sir Keir Starmer’s place in history has finally been assured.

He will be remembered not for his oratory, his political acumen or his charisma, but for acting as a political Trojan horse for Burnham’s stealth army of Seventies socialists.

Just as Odysseus and his soldiers duped the men of Troy into allowing a seemingly innocuous gift to the goddess Athena to breach their defences, so the Labour Party duped voters into electing a similarly hollow vessel who appeared, on the outside, to be the answer to all our prayers – but has instead paved the way for a socialist coup.

With his lawyerly demeanour, Starmer succeeded in persuading even those who might not normally vote Labour that he’d be a safe pair of hands, a welcome relief from the so-called years of Tory chaos. He appealed to metropolitan Lefties and disillusioned Conservatives, and it won him a huge majority, albeit on an historically low turnout.

Key to his success was the notion that he had the hard Left of the party firmly under control. He suspended and barred Jeremy Corbyn following the 2020 Equality and Human Rights Commission report on anti-Semitism within the party. He also placed moderate candidates in safe seats, marginalising more Left-wing activists. In short, he gave the impression that, as one friend of mine who voted for him put it, he was a ‘decent guy’ who would get Britain back on course.

He may well be a ‘decent guy’ (all his allies tell me so), but he lacked the one attribute that every leader or prime minister needs in order to be able to do the job properly: the ability to control his parliamentary party, and in particular the equivalent of those Tory ‘swivel-eyed loons’ that David Cameron had to contend with.

It quickly became apparent that, far from him having locked the hard Left in a dark cupboard, they had him over a barrel. Attacks on pensioners, massive resistance to welfare reforms, huge tax rises, assaults on business, VAT on private schools – his much-vaunted commitment to growth was strangled at every turn and he had neither the authority nor the strength to resist.

He was elected on false pretences. And now he has been usurped by a man whose politics are completely out of kilter with what most of the British electorate wants – and who, had he been required to win an election himself, would have been rejected as Corbyn was in 2017 and 2019.

Because the truth is that Britain is not a hard-Left country – it is a land of political moderates, of small-business strivers, savers, home-owners and entrepreneurs who want to enjoy the fruits of their labours without being sucked dry or lectured on wokery and political dogma.

People are fed up with chancers being rewarded for nothing. They are tired of being told to go to the back of the queue for services they have paid for. And they are sick of being squeezed until the pips squeak.

They need Burnham’s socialist utopia like a hole in the head. They don’t want more welfare, more immigration, a bigger tax burden. That is why Reform has gained such popularity, and that is why, despite her party’s woes, Kemi Badenoch’s clear-sighted Conservatism has made her the only party leader with a positive poll rating.

Burnham has so far refused to account for himself either in Parliament or to the Press, save to declare himself the saviour of British politics and airily tell taxpayers that they are going to have to do ‘a little bit more’.

So the only way a man like him can get his hands on the levers of power is by stealth – and cunning. The coup that Burnham has pulled off does at least tell us one thing: he is a player. Where Starmer showed himself to be unsuited to the cloak-and-dagger style of parliamentary politics (one thing that stands in his favour) and always played a straight bat, Burnham clearly has a Machiavellian streak.

How else could he have plotted such a power grab? Even Starmer’s greatest detractors don’t quite know why he had to go. Despite a series of mistakes, including the Peter Mandelson affair, there is no massive scandal, no £5million of undeclared donations or evidence of misconduct in public office.

He has gone because he has finally served his purpose: to usher in the armies of hard-Left ideologues in Labour who have been hiding in the darkness and who are now preparing to unleash political hell on the unsuspecting – and trusting – voters of Britain.

Claudia’s so candid

Claudia Winkleman hosting an episode of The Claudia Winkleman Show

All credit to Claudia Winkleman for admitting that she wasn’t really enjoying hosting her own chat show, saying it made her ‘too nervous’. Most people would have made up some waffle about wanting to spend more time with their family, or similar. By being honest about her decision, she only reminds us why we love her.

They say Labour has a women problem, but surely releasing thousands of convicted rapists from prison early is taking it a bit far, even by their poor standards?

That’s no way to treat a widow

Readers may remember that my father died just over a month ago. As part of the inevitable ‘deathmin’, my mother needed to inform his various state pension providers. First, she rang the Italian pensions people. She explained the situation, and the lady was incredibly kind and helpful. She expressed her condolences, asked how my mother was coping, and detailed the process by which she could submit the information. Next, my mother rang the pensions people here. She explained that her husband had recently died, and she was in the process of sorting his things out. There was a long pause. Then, ‘Well, you’re not getting any money from us.’ Not, ‘I’m so sorry, here’s what you need to do,’ or even just, ‘Let me take his details.’ Just a nasty, unkind and frankly unnecessary dismissal of a grieving widow who has just lost her husband of 60 years. What the hell has become of us?

The easiest way to resolve the row over whether grooming gang ringleader Shabir Ahmed should be deported to his native Pakistan is to put him back in jail and make him serve his full sentence. This revolting excuse for a human being was released last month after serving just 14 years, having been jailed in 2012 for 22 years for 30 child rape offences and 19 years for child sex offences and trafficking. He’s 73: if he just serves out his term, with any luck what to do with him when he gets out will no longer be an issue.

The plight of Piddingtonians 

Of course, not all asylum seekers are dangerous – but with reports of cases such as this on the rise, can you really blame the Piddingtonians for taking matters into their own hands?

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The 350 residents of Piddington in Oxfordshire have reacted to Home Office plans to house 1,250 single male asylum seekers, a move that would overwhelm the village and totally change the nature of the area, by voting for independence.

No doubt they will be denounced as Nimbys but having lived in the same road as a hotel full of these young men and seen how their behaviour impacts their environment, I understand their concerns.

Truth is, many of them come from cultures that have very different attitudes, especially towards young girls and women – and sadly there are too many instances where those attitudes have led to violence.

A case in point is the three men – Iranian Abdulla Ahmadi and Egyptians Ibrahim Alshafe and Karin Al-Danasurt – sentenced last week for brutally raping a woman on Brighton beach.

Of course, not all asylum seekers are dangerous – but with reports of cases such as this on the rise, can you really blame the Piddingtonians for taking matters into their own hands?

Isn’t it interesting how the Duchess of Sussex and her two children managed to come to the UK without being spotted? Just goes to show that if someone truly wants privacy, it’s perfectly possible to have it.

The 25-year-old has not been seen for nearly two weeks

Police are “increasingly concerned” for a missing 25-year-old from Cambridgeshire. Lewis, from Eye in Peterborough, was last seen 13 days ago. However, he wasn’t reported missing until Thursday (July 16).

Police said the 25-year-old is “considered vulnerable” and Cambridgeshire Police are “becoming increasingly worried for his welfare”. Officers are appealing for help to find him.

A police spokesperson said: “He is keen on camping in woodland areas and officers would like to hear from anyone who believes they may have seen him. Lewis is described as 6ft 4 inches , with short dark hair and beard.”

Anyone who may have seen Lewis or has information concerning his whereabouts should call 101 and quote incident 254 of July 16.

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