How to roar
The roar consumes every inch of the city.
It’s a surging ocean, flooding a landlocked, soot-filled metropolis. You can hear it from your window as you start unpacking into your new room in London Fields. It’s the afternoon England thrashes Panama within an inch of its life and the roar is so loud it propels you out of the house as if by some sort of cosmic force.
You’ve been in England three weeks and have already watched more football than you have in the past 30 years. The World Cup is well and truly on and the games are neatly scheduled at lunch, knock-off time and dinner. You don’t have a job, the galleries aren’t going anywhere and it hasn’t rained in a fortnight. This combined with a thumping first-round win for a country that hasn’t actually secured the trophy in half a century means that complete British delirium cannot be far off.
By the end of the weekend, it’s estimated England will have spent close to a billion pounds on beer. The madness sizzles from the pavement. Babies are sipping parents’ pints. For 90 minutes, this grey island is happier than Bhutan.
To attempt a full-bodied roar as someone with limited skin in the game is to hear your interior scream for real. It’s not natural. You grew up going to packed rock concerts, where the default mode of address was screaming, often followed by singing. That this is different from the football roar becomes immediately apparent the first time you try it out.
You feel like a fraud before it even leaves your chest, something deep and profound stops you, like pulling back off a wave you know is going to crash at the last minute. It is an irrevocable impotence that no number of drinks can fix. The roar surges ahead around you, without you.
The English roar sounds like the abridged version of every war they’ve ever been in. For every goal, a charging army that vanquishes an enemy in under twenty seconds. It is the bygone glories of the Empire, Commonwealth and Brit-Pop all baked into one. Louder than bombs, as Morrissey would say.
Elizabeth can hear them, surely. There are at least a dozen pubs within spitting distance of the palace. Her Royal Highness would surely be proud of the patriotism of her subjects, a muscle already exercised once this year during her grandson’s wedding. You wonder if she has her own private broadcast, in one of the palace’s many rooms, where she too joins the roar along with her excitable corgi constituents.
For the one thing the roar has in its favour is its universal impermeability. It is everywhere and nowhere. It has to be the warmest day of the year and there’s not a soul that isn’t ramming themselves inside, around or beyond the fence of their local, sneaking booze from the off-license. In fact, they’ll do this every day, the sort of thing that’s totally natural in a nation that’s always been mad for football, but is now actually winning it. They’ll cheer for Mexico, for Denmark, for whoever.
But the roar is saved only for England.
