And Did Those Feet...?
Dear England (Woking and national tour) - Guest Review by Dr Terror
As I sat having lunch in the Woking Pizza Express (yes, I did ask: the waiter had only worked there since 2003, so was not there in 2001 when the building was offered as Mountbatten-Windsor's alibi), I was getting ready to eviscerate this play in print.
You see, it's about how Gareth Southgate and psychologist Pippa Grange changed the England football team forever and made the players believe in themselves. Frankly, I can't abide the conceited, whinging Southgate - the real one, not the likable, good humoured one portrayed in this play. For, as it turns out, this play is truly wonderful: clever, inspiring and very, very funny. Whether it's Jordan Pickford facing penalties in the full throes of ADHD or the players bigging up lovable but barely articulate Harry Kane by telling him 'you're a wizard, Harry', James Graham's script is nothing short of brilliant.
I really, really loved this...and I support Scotland (I wore my Scotland top). Maybe it's because it was Valentine's Day when I saw it? I did feel odd, though...like Harry Creel in Stranger Things. A peculiar energy was coming out of me. Within five minutes, the stage manager came on and told us that something was wrong and we'd need to evacuate the theatre. All this is true and a somewhat immersive play became somehow more immersive.
So I can't lie: I loved this. It's hilarious throughout. Ian Kirkby's Gary Lineker is pitch perfect and Courtney George's Theresa May suitably ghastly, her Liz Truss worse still. It is also affecting, joyful (I really didn't expect to be up on my feet dancing to Sweet Caroline with the players at the end) and wise. But how different David Sturzaker's Southgate is from the real thing.
In the play, when he engages Samantha Womack's Dr Pippa Grange, he apologizes that football, as a sport, has been slow to welcome the advice of psychologists. In real life, when a psychologist used psychometric personality profiling to reveal that Southgate was really not cut out for penalty taking, he immediately threatened him with litigation.The play also misses out his greed in advertising Pizza Hut (not Pizza Express), apparently making light of his miss.'
The play begins and ends in failure (his first, England's later) and dwells on the subject of penalty taking. While it offers up a fantasy sequence in the second half where England win the Euros in Germany in 2024, we know perfectly well that this didn't happen.
Shortly after Southgate's miss in 1996, I found myself drinking with the then England manager Terry Venables with whom I then shared a literary agent and who had become a good friend. I asked him about the circumstances of England's exit from that tournament.
'I had my five penalty takers worked out but it was still all even after ten penalties,' he said. 'I asked for volunteers and Gareth spoke up while other, more experienced, players stayed silent. He volunteered. Of course, if I'd realized he'd never scored from the penalty spot in his life [and never would, as it turned out], I wouldn't have picked the twat.'
Wise words, Terry. Wise words.