London, June 23 (IANS) They waited patiently before television screens for the moment. Just as Jermain Defoe had waited since 2006 for his. It came in the 22nd minute and England rose as one, cheering to have made the last 16 of the football World Cup Wednesday. Many didn’t believe what their eyes had just seen till replays showed Defoe had definitely defied damnation for England.
Perhaps never since victory day in 1945 did the English people celebrate a win so publicly. Never since the war did they possibly want a victory so much as against Slovenia on Wednesday.
‘We won!’, ‘God gave us Defoe!’, ‘We live for another match!’, ‘Now we can win the World Cup!’ were the general refrains. Very few thought of the goals the English team missed. ‘The result matters, nothing else,’ said Ollie Henry of Humberstone, Leicester.
They filled the streets, the pubs, in fact any place with a television set on, as they cried themselves hoarse. The Queen watched the match and was happy, royal sources said. The prime minister had indicated earlier in the day that he was going to watch the whole match. He did for a while, watching the second half with Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowan.
There was no one known or unknown who did not celebrate England’s passage into the pre-quarter finals of the World Cup. The revellers who had jammed pubs, clubs and restaurants, came out in droves, their vocal decibels trying to match their excitement.
In cities like Manchester and Leicester, hundreds of people watched the match on giant screens set up in the city centres. There was unprecedented police presence to prevent any disorder that was the order on the previous occasions when England drew against Algeria. On Wednesday, the police themselves were celebrating, even if on the sly.
Thousands of fans in West London missed most of the match as a power cut affected homes in the Twickenham area. Supplier EDF Energy engineers too missed the match, trying to repair the faults. ‘I can’t believe I have a HD wide-screen TV and we’re listening to the match on a wind-up radio, resident Chris Caufield told the BBC.
Production stalled during the match period in many industries while in government and private offices, people sat glued to their screens. The supermarkets and the high street wore deserted looks, with hardly any customers.
Tesco was the most organised, detailing around 1,900 staff earlier this month to come up with a staff rota that enabled people supporting different countries to watch the relevant matches. But most of the staff wanted to watch England, though it wasn’t possible. At others, like cereal manufacturer Kellogg’s, both management and staff watched the match on big screens erected for 600 staff in the central atrium of the company’s Manchester headquarters.
Peak traffic time Wednesday was actually past noon, as people began rushing home or to the pubs. They were joined by schoolchildren who were let off is most counties of England half hour before the match began.
In Leicester’s St John’s Church of England Primary School, the head teacher, Andrew Marshall, and other teachers joined nearly a 100 students in the assembly hall, watching the match on a big screen. The hall reverberated with cheers when Defoe scored the goal. ‘I’ve never seen the head teacher do a jig,’ gushed a student.
Military personnel serving in Afghanistan could not watch the match live, but a replay of the game would be shown on the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), the defence ministry said, adding that troops in more remote locations, without satellite TV, would be sent a DVD later.
(Venkata Vemuri can be contacted at venkata.v@ians.in)
