David Winner - Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football

Is this it? asks Sophie, staring at the geese, chickens, milkmaids and inflated polystyrene clouds being dragged on strings around and above the Olympic Stadium track. The faux-Arcadian tableau is part of the Opening Ceremony and its been going on for a couple of hours now. Were vaguely worried about what the rest of the world is going to think of us. In fact, like most Londoners, weve pretty sceptical about the whole humungous enterprise. For years now, the Olympic Park has been off-limits to the likes of us, a giant, alien intrusion hidden behind barbed wire, high blue fences and surveillance cameras. The Games formally kick off on Friday and tickets of any sort have been hard to come by. Rather amazingly, though, a couple of days ago Sophie was offered free tickets for tonights rehearsal. So here we are, puzzled and wary, squinting into the setting sun and wondering what this bucolic idyll might signify. Details about the ceremony have been kept extremely secret, though director Danny Boyle has said it would capture a picture of ourselves as a nation, where we come from and where we want to be. No one has any idea what this means. Sophie is thinking about the implications. You know, this just isnt the Britain I know and love. I suggest a graffiti-ravaged multi-storey car park as an alternative symbol. Why not? Or a local sink estate? At least that wouldnt be boring.

And then the rehearsal actually starts. Vast blue sheets lift over the heads of the crowd. Sophies kids, Hamish and Iona, like this. Perhaps its something to do with the sea. Then theres warm-up communal singing and the orchestra on the far side of the track plays Elgar. All of a sudden, the big screens are counting down to a proper beginning, accompanied by a version of Baba ORiley. Then theres a video sweeping down the Thames, and someone rings a big bell and an angel sings the first bit of Jerusalem: And did those feet in ancient time Im beginning to get goose bumps. We dimly discern actors striding about in frock coats and top hats, though we dont know why. Kenneth Branagh, as a Victorian gent, recites some Shakespeare, which triggers the arrival of thousands of drummers. They pour down the stairways all around us, beating something thunderous and uplifting. Hundreds upon hundreds of actors, dressed as working men and women of two centuries ago, are now streaming centre stage, trampling the rural idyll, literally tearing it up in front of our eyes. Giant chimneys rise up out of the ground belching acrid smoke

And the rest is history. Or, to be more precise, what unfolded before our astonished eyes was a joyful, surprisingly radical bottom-up version of the nations story, deliriously mixed and played out with wit and verve on a canvas that was bigger and bolder than anything we had dreamed of. Instead of martial pomp and imperial nostalgia (the usual staples of British national ceremonial) here was a dizzying evocation of individuality, creativity, comedy, openness, ethnic diversity, the English language, the NHS, Mary Poppins. The soundtrack throbbed with British pop and quotes from film gems like Kes and Gregorys Girl. In our little part of the crowd, people stood up and whooped when they spotted yellow submarines and a phalanx of Sgt. Peppers. Even more moving was what happened when a representation of the Windrush, the ship that brought the first West Indians to live in Britain in 1948 marched past. Sophie spotted a white Tory politician from Hackney on his feet, clapping, tears pouring down his face. The show was beginning to feel like a manifesto for a new kind of Britain. The visionary film-maker Michael Powell, referenced here with a clip from A Matter of Life And Death, once told me that all art is one. And here was a thrilling demonstration of the principle: music, theatre, film, dance, lighting, poetry, sculpture and more fused on a stupendous scale. It was thrilling art, a riposte to all other opening ceremonies. And what did we think the rest of the world might make of all these obscure British references and in-jokes? Frankly, my dears, we couldnt give a toss.

A few days after the rehearsal I watched the real thing on TV and cried tears of joy most of the way through. Some of the best bits, like the Queen pretending to parachute out of a helicopter with James Bond, were new to me, and very thrilling. Even the speeches and athletes parade contained hidden delights. Fiji entered the stadium to music by the Bee Gees. (Did anyone from the little Pacific nation get the joke?) And who could have guessed that Her Majesty would so comfortably share the bill both with the rock band Queen and with an old recording of Johnny Rotten singing God Save The Queen (from the Sex Pistols song Anarchy in the UK, in which queen is rhymed with fascist regime)? Im not sure Ive ever felt so proud to be a Brit.

Lots of people seemed to feel the same way. The ceremony inaugurated a euphoric games in which Britain won squillions of medals, many of them in sports we used to know almost nothing about, like cycling and rowing. But that seemed almost beside the point. In the teeth of a bitter economic recession, the country suddenly felt wonderful about itself. People even began talking about a Danny Boyle vision of Britain or simply an opening ceremony Britain. By the end of the year, Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian could write that Boyle had forged a new mythology for Britain, and was still marvelling at the tone of the thing: Simultaneously serious and silly, reverential and idiotic: a bonkers but brilliant melding of comedy and gravitas, cheek and anti-authoritarianism that no other nation could have pulled off.

And what does this have to do with soccer and this book? Well, nothing and everything. Football barely figured in the ceremony, or even impinged much on our experience of the Games, though lots of people noted that the modesty, decency and brilliance of the Olympians would make professional football look tawdry (it did, but the feeling soon disappeared).

Thematically, though, parallels were striking. In early 2005, at a British Embassy reception for this book in The Hague, we all wore buttons reading LONDON : OLYMPIC CANDIDATE CITY , 2012. Ive still got mine. The Games finally arrived in London almost a decade after I finished the original research and writing. Those Feet had been conceived as a sequel to Brilliant Orange, my take on Dutch soccer. In each case I took a relatively tiny cultural artefacta distinctive way of playing footballand tried to use that to reveal something about a nations culture and history. The soccer of the Netherlands led me to Dutch architecture, politics, hippies and sense of space. Turning my eyes to home, I noticed that almost everything to do with football seemed to hinge on the past. English soccer wasnt just born in the nineteenth century. It still serves as a projection of Victorian values. Yet the game is also perpetually in flux. The book is caught in this tension.