Will we ever get over our absurd obsession with England vs Germany?

England vs Germany has long occupied the minds of supporters in this country. William Cook wonders if this fixture will always cease to be just another football match, and instead become something ugly and angry

When the whistle blows and the game begins, you find out who you really want to win (Getty)

What are you doing on Tuesday evening? If you’re English or German, and you’re even remotely interested in football, I bet you’ll be glued to the nearest television, cheering on your national team. For most Germans, it’s just a bit of fun – an important game, for sure, but hardly a matter of life and death. For English fans, it’s an event of immense significance. Beating Germany is the best thing in the world. Losing to Germany is the worst thing in the world. For England fans, the result of this football match will colour the way they feel about all sorts of things – Covid, Brexit, everything – for weeks, even months, to come. How did we end up like this? How did a simple sporting contest acquire such monumental importance? And when are we going to wake up, realise how absurd it is, and get a life?

Don’t get me wrong. I know exactly how it feels to be obsessed with this football fixture. I’ve been obsessed with it for half a century, yet I dread it each time it comes around. The reason I dread it is simple: although I was born and raised in England, my father was born and raised in Germany – and ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted Germany to win.

I don’t blame my father for this betrayal. He gave me no encouragement. He always told me to keep my head down, like he kept his head down, as a tongue-tied Kraut in an English boarding school in the aftermath of World War Two. For him, being German was a guilty secret. He was born in Dresden during the war, he survived its destruction by the RAF, and was bundled onto a train to Hamburg by my German grandmother to escape the rapacious Red Army. In Hamburg, 1945, my grandmother met a British soldier called Gerry Cook, a Fleet Street journalist in Civvy Street, who asked her to come back to London and to bring my father with her, they would raise him as their own – my German grandfather was in a British POW camp at the time. No wonder my father was so keen to assimilate. No wonder he always cheered on the England team.