Earlier this year I wrote about singleplayer sports games, and how they're more than just isolated matches and campaigns. They are, for long-suffering fans especially, a kind of Dream Factory. Video game as therapy.
In May I was writing that while celebrating my beloved Aston Villa returning to the Champions League for the first time since 1983. This week, I am writing under sadder, more pressing circumstances.
You probably know by now that I'm Australian, but what most people don't know about me and my sporting interests is that, when it comes to football, my heart belongs to England. Between my own English family (who have played for Villa!) and my wife's English family, I've spent more nights watching--and screaming at--England than I probably have my own Socceroos.
Australians of roughly my age (I was born in 1980) grew up in a world where the Socceroos just weren't players on the world stage. Australia went 32 years without appearing at the World Cup, and as part of the terrible Oceania Football Confederation didn't have a decent local tournament to take part in either. So every two years, every time the Euros and World Cup rolled around and Australian football fans were stuck on the sidelines (to be fair we will always be on the sidelines for the Euros, unless there's a Eurovision-style intervention), we needed some kind of investment. Being an immigrant nation, the solution here for me, my friends and just about everyone I know from football was simple: just start supporting the place your family originally came from.
Got Italian grandparents? You'd support Italy. Dad's Greek? You're Greek. And so it went, for Croatians and Spaniards and Scots, Dutch, Germans and Portuguese. In daily life everyone was Australian, most of us born here or at least calling here home, but every two years our hearts would belong to a nation and a team half a world away.
For most of those guys, the last few decades have been pretty good! Italy, Germany, France and Spain have all won the World Cup and the Euros, while even the Greeks and Portuguese have won the latter. And in all that time, England have won...nothing.
The nation that invented the sport and gave it to the world, that is home to the Premier League, that has repeatedly fielded star-studded lineups featuring some of the world's best players, has won nothing. Not a fuckin thing. England hasn't won a major international trophy since 1966. Indeed things have been so grim for most of my life--my earliest memories of supporting the team are at Italia 90--that it took until 2021 for them to even reach another final.
Which they lost. Then they made another one this week! And lost it too. The wait goes on. Thirty Years Of Hurt is itself about to turn 30. I get that for the rest of the world this is something of a punchline, or at the very least a source of amusement, and I completely understand why that is, but I'm not the rest of the world. I'm just sitting here wondering, as the years and decades roll on, and heartbreak piles atop disappointment atop heartbreak, when does Gil get a lick?
Maybe never! Maybe this is England's destiny. To wander the wilderness forever cursed, always thirsty and never able to drink, reaching semis and finals only to come up short every single time. If so, then so be it. I've had 44 years of practice, I am hardened to it now, if England go the rest of my life without winning something that will simply be how the biscuit has crumbled.
Being a fan of a team like this is frustrating because you feel so helpless. Trapped in a room you can't get out of, bound to a set of events that continually upset you but which you can't escape. To support England is to know that every two years, as the World Cup and Euros rotate, you are going to get your heart broken.
Just because I'm helpless watching the actual team stumble, though, doesn't mean I can't do anything about it. There's always the Dream Factory. So this week I've been playing the shit out of the Euro 2024 expansion for EA Sports FC 24, giving me a window into an alternate timeline where instead of lumbering around for seven games and winning the most embarrassing Golden Boot of all time, Harry Kane looked sharp as a thistle and scored seven goals leading England through the tournament, culminating in a crushing 3-0 win over Germany in the final in which he scored a brace. The real Harry Kane may have drudged off the field on Sunday night still somehow without a major trophy to his name, but my Harry Kane, the one inside my Dream Factory, lifted the Henri Delaunay Trophy without breaking a sweat.
Did this make me feel better? No. Only the slow passage of time--and maybe some day an actual victory in a major tournament--will achieve that. But for a few moments this week it has made me feel slightly better, in the way that the Dream Factory has always (and hopefully will always) be able to. I know that the victorious Harry Kane, the jubilant captain breaking a 58-year trophy drought, is not real. The fact EA's player models haven't been significantly updated in over a decade sees to that.
But it's something. A temporary indulgence, a flight of fancy that's fun in the same way any other kind of daydream can be. It's not real, it will never be real, but for the moment I allow myself to pretend it is and could be, it's close. Closer than England have got over the last 58 years, anyway.
