Bukayo Saka stoops, carefully places the football on the hallowed penalty spot, looks up to the heavens, and adjusts the fifty-five-year-old England flag waving and banana flinging monkey on his back.
Saka pauses to exhale. He is anticipating the referees whistle, being steadily drowned out by the tense murmur and bated breath of the stadium crowd.
And – like the Greek god Atlas, carrying the weight of the heavens on his shoulders – he takes aim, his calculated strike carrying the hopes and dreams of a nation already in mourning. A nation divided by race and politics. Polarised. With ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed in inky black on the tightly clenched fingers of each opposing hand.
Lost in this fleeting moment of grave suspense, I experience a flashback to my own childhood, a generation away from the burdened 19-year-old penalty taker.
Seated on a giant adult chair, I am enthusiastically swinging my boys legs under a long black dining room table, staring into a tiny black & white television monitor.
The surfaced memory is from my grandma’s flat, from some juncture in the mid 1980’s, when she lived a street away from the urban forests of Caledonian Road in the Big Smoke borough of Islington.
There is a bitter argument blazing amongst the grown-up’s, dividing family members gathered in the cosy basement room along political lines. The heated debate is boiling over, over the combustion of the British Empire, the faded legacy of colonial power, and the ‘glory’ days of the Raj. To my young ears, the passion is real – the wafting blue, red and white of the Union flag – a drunken dream of Broken Britannia evaporated.
The football is on, the crackling sound of the crowds of supporters fizzing over the analogue airwaves. It could be an international, it could be a penalty shoot-out, but no-one is watching. It’s an unwelcome distraction from those present, swinging political punches, picking sectarian sides, banging the old-world order to rights. They have the Empirical data of fallen Empires, and the football is not coming home tonight.
Picking his spot, the Ealing-born youngster Bukayo Saka sends the ball right, as the nation takes a deep inhalation of breath. A loaded gun of hope and desire placed to his right temple. A country tanked up on cheap supermarket booze, tainted nationalist love and three roaring lions on its chest.
One penalty to end fifty-five years of hurt.
One penalty to rule them all.
And, as the ball is palmed away by the giant paddle-like palms of the Italian goalkeeper, the inevitable crush of defeat on home turf turns to boiling anger and pint pulled tears of grief.
In this final whistle of divided times, the young black hopes of the nation are cursed by the footballing gods – to shoulder the oppressive weight of a fallen colonial empire collapsed in a wretched, teary, crying heap on the pitch-side of Wembley Stadium.
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