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England and Belgium prepare for the 'Brexit derby'
Boris Johnson tackling Germany’s Maurizio Gaudino during the Legends celebrity football match at the Madejski Stadium in Reading in 2006.Photograph: Rebecca Naden/PA
It’s not exactly Westminster v Brussels, but England and Belgium’s match on Thursday has become “the Brexit derby” that no World Cup has had before. Or possibly wanted.
On Thursday Theresa May attends a meeting of the European Council in Brussels, attending a dinner while England and Belgium’s footballers play their group G game 900 miles east in Kaliningrad.
It’s just possible the British prime minister may share a bit of football small talk with her Belgian counterpart Charles Michel. “If the Brexit negotiations were a World Cup match, we’d be on the plane home,” bemoaned the Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn this week.
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Other EU leaders will hold their own discussions on Brexit, without May, at a working breakfast on Friday. After Germany’s dramatic exit from the World Cup, the German chancellor Angela Merkel may well wish to avoid the subject of football entirely.
Much has been made in the British media of Fifa “warning” England fans that pro-Brexit chants at the match will mean financial sanctions against the FA. This doesn’t seem to have been anything more than the tournament’s organisers re-stating their long-standing rules against “displaying insulting or political slogans in any form” and “uttering insulting words or sounds”, which only happened when a Fifa spokesperson was pressed on the issue by British journalists.
Quite how a new anti-Brexit chant policy would square with Fifa having allowed England fans for years to sing about German and IRA bombers unimpeded is unclear – although at this tournament Mexico have already been fined for homophobic chanting, and the trio of Granit Xhaka, Xherdan Shaqiri and Stephan Lichtsteiner have been fined for making “Albanian” eagle gestures as part of their goal celebrations for Switzerland.
As a result of those fines, the Albanian prime minister Edi Rama has set up a bank account called “Don’t Be Afraid of the Eagle” to collect money to pay fines on their behalf. It’s almost inconceivable that were the FA to be fined over Brexit chanting there wouldn’t be similar crowd-sourcing efforts in England to pay Fifa off.
The match has taken on an even more patriotic dimension in England with demands for the flag of St George to be flown on government buildings on match days. 10 Downing Street has announced it will do so, and the consternation of some Scots, Scotland secretary David Mundell has said that his department will follow suit - joking that he expected everybody to be flying the Saltire in 2022 on the assumption that Scotland would qualify for that tournament.
Typically in World Cup encounters, Belgium and England have been hard to separate. Exactly, some might argue, as it is turning out to be quite difficult to separate the UK from the clutches of the EU.
In 1990 it took a 120th minute wonder volley from England’s David Platt to make a difference, and in 1954 the two sides played out an epic 4-4 draw. England will be hoping that today’s game takes more from the lessons of David Platt, than the pro-Brexit style of tackling a certain Boris Johnson has sometimes demonstrated on the football pitch.
