For David Beckham, it’s personal. When was it ever any other way? ‘Nothing will defeat me,†he said before the Euro 2004 game against Switzerland, reflecting on the penalty kick saved by Fabien Barthez. England had been on the verge of winning the match with France that they eventually lost, but the captain is ready to try again from 12m if the occasion arises.
His habit of viewing his life as a corny adventure in which he is the intrepid hero can look ridiculous. That, however, is his way of dealing with the peculiar existence he has devised for himself, and sportsmen do tend to motivate themselves by imagining that they are serving a great cause. Should Beckham recover his best form, people will happily go along with the make-believe.
It is, in any case, true that he has had to endure far more fluctuations in fortune than an ordinary person. There is a tendency now to forget just how much rival fans relished the opportunity to harass him after his inane sending-off against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup. In the view of Michael Owen, such experiences equip the England captain to deal with the failure against France.
‘It’s been the same with me for the past 10 years or so,†Beckham agreed. ‘I’ve been right up there or really down. A penalty is a penalty. I held my hands up on the day. If I’d scored it things might have been different but we’re never going to know that now.
‘The most important thing is to move on. I’m not worrying about anything else. Everyone knows there are things that have gone on in my life and career that I have got over. I’ll go on doing that. Nothing will defeat me. That’s the way I look upon things. If I miss the next four or five penalties then I’ll still step up to take them, although I’m not sure people will want me to. My mentality is to carry on until I win.â€
Before that can happen, however, failures have to be absorbed, and Beckham was busy shunning regrets and recriminations. If it was galling to know that Barthez, his former Manchester United teammate, claims to have worked out where the penalty would go by watching videos, the midfielder will not accept that a battle of wits had really occurred.
‘I’d worked with Fabien for a number of years and we used to have a few competitions,†Beckham remembered. ‘I came off the better back then. This time, he guessed right.†It does not matter in the least whether this version of events is accurate. The explanations are just methods of scaling down a huge disappointment.
‘For 90 minutes we were winning the game,†he said, turning Zinedine Zidane’s two goals into a mere appendix to the story. ‘I still believe if we came up against the French again we would give them a damned good game again.â€
Like the rest of the squad he has to stop himself from constantly reliving the anguish. So it was that he denied that Ashley Cole should have been on the goal-line to prevent Zidane’s free-kick equaliser. The arrangements, he argues, were just the normal ones dictated by the goalkeeper David James.
He does not waste time on feuding with Patrick Vieira, the France midfielder who was purported to have claimed that England had cheated with dirty play. Beckham only professed surprise that an opponent admired for toughness would ever make such an allegation.
He swapped shirts with his Real Madrid colleague Zidane at the end and the France captain’s top is not bound for a plastic bag in a broom cupboard. ‘No,†Beckham said, explaining why it would be framed on the wall of his house. ‘You have great memories of a great player. And it’s good to have a few disappointing things to look back on so that you look forward to the better ones ahead.â€
Success starts in the imagination and Beckham visualises how the tale of Euro 2004 might entrench the team’s popularity in the end. ‘It’s one of the great things about being English,†he said. ‘People do get knocked down but if they respond in the right way the English like that and respect it. If this team can do that it will be loved even more than it is at the moment.
‘There’s a lot of frustration and hopefully that will be taken out [on the Swiss and the Croats]. As soon as that whistle goes, we’ll be at them. The anger is good, because it’s not about kicking players. It’s an anger about wanting to win games and make people believe in us.â€
The England captain wants to set an example and it is his incorrigible hopefulness that the others most need to copy. —