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'We kept crossing into the box but there was no-one there': six reasons why it wasn't England's fault

ENGLAND managed not to win last night, but to compensate have provided a whole host of compelling excuses. These are they: 

‘Whenever we crossed into the box, there was nobody there’

England kept providing excellent crosses, corners, and free-kicks into the box only for the ball to land on the head of a Ghana defender who sent it back upfield. Time after time, first half and second half. You can hardly blame the team for not scoring when there’s nobody there to score!

‘We couldn’t get close enough to goal to feign being fouled’

And the other key supplier of England goals, going down in the penalty area after minimum contact, was impossible because they couldn’t get near enough. They tried everything: passing backwards, passing sideways, passing backwards then passing sideways, passing all the way back to Pickford to start again, but it just wouldn’t happen.

‘We didn’t want to overshadow Scotland-Brazil’

England-Ghana’s hardly box-office gold, is it? Not compared to the Scots who the whole US has fallen for facing off against the most celebrated national side of all time? If England had won six-nil, which they easily could have, it would have made a one-nil win by Scotland look pathetic in comparison. So they held off to be good neighbours.

‘We’re heartbroken about Starmer’

You might not think it, but the whole squad are committed centrists who saw Starmer’s diffident, nonplussed politics as the future of our country. They were only able to hammer Croatia by two clear goals by imagining his pink, trusting face beaming approval. For him to be shafted by Burnham when they weren’t there to defend him? The lads were gutted.

‘We were over-hydrated’ 

Hydration is a responsibility to take seriously. The England team are role models to young children, and if one of them died of thirst because he’d seen Declan Rice reject a swig he’d wouldn’t forgive himself. So they loaded up on liquid every hydration break even though it was raining heavily and ended up sloshing around like sacks of piss.

‘Trump’s awarding the trophy and that’s put us off’

FIFA announced yesterday that the Jules Rimet trophy will be awarded to the winning team by the president himself, and none of the squad are up for that. It’s not just that he’s almost as right-wing as John Terry, it’s that he’s got even less right to stand there with them in our moment of glory than John Terry but will anyway. Honestly they couldn’t face winning.

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How to explain the nightmarish world before Brexit to the young

TEN years since Britain voted for freedom, many of today’s young people do not remember and cannot imagine life under the EU jackboot. Tell them the facts: 

You owe your lives to Brexit

Anyone aged 18 and over would be dead if not for Brexit, conscripted by the EU Army and used as cannon fodder in one of its costly banana wars. Remoaners say there is no army and no war, but if you believed that no-one would ever have voted for Brexit.

Leavers were ruthlessly persecuted

‘Racist’, ‘Little Englander’ and ‘gammon’ were all slurs hurled at Brexiters in the worst persecution history has every known. But by far the most common insult was that they were ‘thick’, all because they challenged so-called facts like ‘Britain recouped its entirely legitimate EU membership fee at least four times over’.

Sending fish by post was incredibly difficult

Brexit hero Boris Johnson famously mocked the EU for requiring an ‘ice pillow’ when sending kippers by post. Apparently a British rule designed to prevent listeria, but that’s irrelevant. Nowadays interfering Eurocrats can’t touch you when you take a jiffy bag of smoked mackerel to the Post Office.

The Brexit Wars cost millions of lives

Literally millions of Brexiters sacrificed themselves in the Brexit Wars of 2016. They may have died from old age rather than in a burning Spitfire or on the beaches of Normandy, but these selfless patriots gave everything so future generations would be free not to use millilitres. Captain Tom was one of them, sort of.

If you became ill before Brexit you would die

Before Brexit, healthcare in Britain didn’t exist. But in 2017 Nigel Farage founded the NHS with the £350 million a week he got back from the EU, and now every Briton has access to modern medical treatment. There may be a 12-hour wait in A&E, but that’s basically an immersive theatre version of Holby City.

A British passport was a badge of shame

Our burgundy passports were a daily reminder that the British lion had been castrated and our people were slaves. Now when you produce a mighty dark blue British passport in an airport, other Europeans pretend not to notice. Why? Because they were too cowardly to join the resistance.

There was none of the technology Gen Z take for granted

Before Brexit there was no TikTok, earbuds had wires attached, and you couldn’t make AI porn of your biology teacher. Was Brexit responsible for these technological marvels? Let’s say ‘maybe’. It’s best not to get too specific about the ineffable miracle of Brexit.

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