England’s rivalry with Spain is missing just one vital ingredient – sun loungers

England coach Sarina Wiegman was asked what made the Lionesses so hard to beat and she gave a clear answer: ‘We’re ruthless’. Never has that been more apparent than when English and Spanish holiday-makers go face-to-face by the pool, writes Tom Peck

Sarina Wiegman, centre, with her players after England’s semi-final win over Australia (The FA via Getty Images)

It is a disappointment that women’s football has come of age in very slightly more enlightened times.

For most people, what will happen on Sunday in Sydney is just a sporting contest, a shot at immortality. It’s noble enough. Admirable even. But it is nevertheless a statement of fact that had this been going on, say, 20 years ago, it would have been a fine opportunity to analyse the degree to which the proud nations of England and Spain absolutely hate one another.

It is only really the luck of the footballing draw that means your average Englishman has spent the last half-century or so getting angry about the Battle of Trafalgar, the Second World War and the Falklands, while scarcely troubling at all the rich seam of historical grievance with the Spanish. And it seems a shame that this is unlikely to change.

There has, in relatively modern times, only been one opportunity for the tabloid newspapers to evoke the Spanish Armada, and that was 27 years ago during Euro ’96. What a waste. But if you look closely enough, you’ll see that Anglo-Spanish resentment has been simmering nicely for quite some time.

In the moment of the Lionesses’ victory against Australia on Wednesday, coach Sarina Wiegman was asked what made her England team so hard to beat. She gave a clear answer: “We’re ruthless,” she said. “We really, really, really want to win.”

And that sort of attitude has been holding the English in good stead all over Spain this summer. Barely weeks ago, two brave English knights on holiday in the Canary Islands tipped a Spanish mother clear out of her sun lounger. She had, they said, “stolen their spot”. She’ll be brave to try that again.

There have been numerous reports of Spanish hotels employing security guards to control the dawn dash for sun loungers all over Spain. But we will simply not be defeated.

Take Wendy Brown, 44, from Colchester – not necessarily all that good at football, but a Lioness all the same. “You can’t hesitate,” she told The Sun. “You need to know exactly where you are going because that second of doubt could cost you your bed.”

Just last month, on the glorious twelfth, sunny Benidorm was lucky enough to bear witness to its own Orange march, in which brave Northern Irish men paraded past the hallowed spot where their fathers fought to keep Ireland English, which we must assume was somewhere around Scruffy Murphy’s Irish bar and grill.

This is most certainly the ruthlessness of which Wiegman speaks. But where we have ruthlessness, the Spanish, it seems, have cunning. Last week, near the famous caves at Manacor in Mallorca, some curious signs appeared, in English, warning of falling rocks and dangerous jellyfish. There are, it transpires, no falling rocks, and no jellyfish – but quite possibly now rather fewer English people.

And can it really be six years since former Conservative Party leader Michael Howard calmly declared war on Spain from the comfort of his own home one Sunday morning, telling one of the political programmes that Britain would be glad to go to war to “protect Gibraltar”? It was not clear at the time, nor has it been since, precisely what Gibraltar needed protecting from, but given that fully 96 per cent of its population voted to remain in the EU, it is a pity that Gibraltar was not able to protect the UK – from itself.

Ah, the war with Spain. It’s not clear who won, but what is a matter of historical fact is that I got a free half of a mini chorizo sausage out of it, from a street bocadillo seller on Strutton Ground in London. She was putting them in all that day’s sandwich, as, she said, “a gesture of peace between two warring nations”. I concluded the war to be over two weeks later, when I returned and the sandwiches had gone back to their customary two bits of sausage, not three.

Who knows? Maybe this kind of thing just makes no sense any more. England’s talismanic duo, Lucy Bronze and Keira Walsh, both play for Barcelona. In the men’s game, Pep Guardiola’s unquenchable thirst for footballing perfection probably won the World Cup for Spain in 2010, and for Germany in 2014; should England manage it any time soon, we’ll have him and his transformational impact on so many of our players to thank for it.

It seems possible – likely, even – that an English football team could proceed all the way to World Cup glory without so much as a single chair having been thrown. With no mad nationalistic rivalry dredged up from nowhere. And that’s just not right. Why should the Lionesses get to go straight to the good bit? This is England, after all. Can you really win anything if you don’t embarrass yourself just a little bit on the way?