PU #250 - WATCHING ENGLAND - (And yes, I purposefully avoided writing something about America's Semiquincentennial despite the perfect timing of our own 250th post because it's too damn depressing.)
I’m writing this on Sunday morning. Currently, like many others across England, I am planning on watching the England vs Mexico knockout match in the World Cup tonight. The problem for us in England is that the difference in time-zones with Mexico, where the match is being played, means that kick-off isn’t until 1am. And that is if kick-off goes as planned, without any weather delays. Earlier in the week, FIFA were discussing changing the kick-off time to earlier in the day precisely because of anticipated storms which might cause problems for the England/Mexico match. Ultimately their decision to keep the kick-off at 1am UK time was commercial, not meteorological, as a later match would clash with the Brazil vs Norway, so it remains conceivable as I write this that the 1am kick-off could end up being a 2am kick-off. Or the match might begin at 1am but be delayed for several hours midway through.
If all goes as planned, the earliest the match could end is around 3am. If it goes to extra-time and penalties, then around 4am. A storm could push it to 5am, or even later. This has led to the obvious problem all around England: what do we do about work, or school, on Monday morning? For those of us working in schools we have the same problem twice.
As a lifelong fan of American professional wrestling, I grew up as a school-child familiar with solving the problem of how to watch a three hour sporting event that starts at 1am and navigate the following school day. The answer back in the 1990s was easy: you get a 3 or 4 hour VHS tape and either get a parent to press record at 1am or midnight (depending on tape length), or when the technology allowed, use the timer function on your tape recorder. Go to sleep early then wake up at 4:30am and watch the whole thing back before school.
Although the tech is better for timer-recording in 2026, and the BBC iPlayer app will allow you to catch up easily, this strategy doesn’t work with live football because of the issues around starting and finish time already mentioned. I have to leave for work at 7:20am. Professional wrestling, being pre-planned, is wonderfully predictable. A three hour event will be three hours, so you can set a clock around its timings. If the football goes as planned, even into extra time and penalties, the 4:30am wake up would mean, with a bit of tactical fast-forwarding over half-time and hydration breaks, being able to leave for work on time. But any weather delays, and the whole thing falls apart. To avoid spoilers, you won’t know at 4:30am when you wake up how long you will need to give yourself. Therefore watching live seems to be the only option. But even an early nap and a sleep after the final whistle means staying up most of the night will leave you tired for work or school the next day. And that’s if, unlike me, you are actually good at sleeping. Insomniacs like myself find it difficult to command our bodies to just go to sleep. Buzzing from and England victory or disappointed with an England loss, it will take a while to get my mind to switch off enough to sleep.
So the reality is that many of us will face Monday July 6th very tired.
As an adult, that’s not something unfamiliar to us. People still go into work after being up most of the night with a feeding baby or a sick child. I’ve gone into work before after live-broadcasting an anarchist commentary on the 2024 general election and many watch general elections live as the votes come in, getting by on very little sleep the following day. And as an insomniac, some nights I just don’t sleep very well. Importantly, I don’t drink alcohol. So staying up late and watching an England match doesn’t mean drinking all night and a hangover on top of tiredness. But for children, needing more sleep and more regulation of their bodies to feel ok about a busy day ahead, it is not so easy. And lots of children want to watch the big game.
Earlier in the week, England manager Thomas Tuchel provided clear guidance: “Write an excuse for school and let them watch. There’s so much school to go to but the World Cup is every four years. Let them watch.”
Tuchel’s advice seems compelling at first: this is a one-off historical moment and school is something you do every day. Sometimes historical moments take precedent. Don’t miss amazing moments in your life out of blind obedience to the routine. The problem with the logic of this is that we don’t actually know yet if this is a one-off historic occasion. If England lose to Mexico and crash out of the World Cup, it is business as usual. Nothing special. We’ve seen England do this before. England not winning the World Cup has been as predictable as any day in school since they last won it in 1966. And if England do win the match and go on to the Quarter Finals that means there is no real need to watch their match in the Last 16 at 1am on Sunday. The far more important Quarter Final will take place on the following Saturday night, at 10pm, and staying up to watch it will not impact on school.
So either you don’t need to watch the match because it is nothing special — England crash out as per every World Cup since 1966. Or you don’t need to watch the match because there is another, more important one, coming up after this one — England qualify for the Quarter Finals. Either way, there is no compelling reason to watch the match live at 1am on Monday morning.
Certainly Tuchel’s suggestion was not well received by Bridget Phillipson, the Secretary of State for Education. She stressed the importance of school attendance, and many schools echoed her thoughts as they resisted calls to open up later on Monday, even as the Prime Minister gave the order to allow pubs to stay open until 5am for the game.
I have to, however, note the issues with Phillipson’s argument too though, as it seems many schools have forgotten the underlying rationale for the claim that school attendance matters.
School attendance is important because of what goes on in the school. Data has suggested quite consistently that students who miss a lot of school lose a lot of learning and end up with worse educational outcomes (such as lower exam results). And this makes a lot of sense: if you miss two weeks of school you will be missing a lot of content. If you miss just one day, you will still be missing out on five or six lessons’ worth of learning. But all of this is predicated on the fact that learning is what is happening in the classroom while you are away. What Phillipson is intentionally ignoring is that this is for many schools the last or penultimate week of term. Very little meaningful learning is actually happening in schools, despite the schools’ best intentions. There are a lot of trips, drop-down days, and end of year festivities taking the place of normal lessons. Where normal lessons are occurring, it would be a very odd choice indeed for a teacher to choose this week or next to introduce important new stuff given the impending six weeks absence where any learning from the last few weeks of school is likely to be pushed out of minds no longer concerned with school.
I would wager that even under ideal circumstances, a student could miss school on Monday July 6th (and especially just miss the morning of school and come in at lunchtime) and it literally have no impact on their overall education. I very much doubt crucial and unmissable learning is taking place this close to the summer holidays and, as a teacher, know from my own approach to these weeks, that where it is taking place, it will be gone over again in September to mitigate against holiday forgetting.
But this won’t even be ideal circumstances, as many of the adult members of staff will, like me, probably be staying up or getting up early to watch the game ourselves. Tired already after a long academic year, aware of the forecast of another looming heatwave, and shattered from the football, teaching a dynamic and unmissable lesson will be far from our frazzled minds. We’ll do our best, as we always do, but no teacher can teach five star lessons every time and part of work/life balance is working out where and when to put in the effort for maximum impact. A week or two from the end of term, with an uncertain attendance likely because of the match, even if you don’t stay up to watch the football, this probably isn’t going to be the day to pull out the five star lesson.
Related to this is the recognition that in every school I have been in since I first started my journey as a teacher in 2010, getting pre-holidays work experience during the South Africa World Cup, often schools at this time of year suspend lessons when England are playing in either the World Cup or the Euros, and show the match in school anyway. I have watched matches that took place during the school day in 2010, in 2016, and in 2018 in school halls, sixth form centres, and classrooms, the whole school deciding that sometimes there are things more important than doggedly following the academic timetable. Schools regularly suspend normal lessons for special events — an open evening, sports day, a special visitor speaking to year groups, sports fixtures, trips, academic conferences, etc. In my time as a teacher I have been unable to teach important lessons to students because of royal weddings and state funerals and my colleagues and I have simply adapted. The idea that this Monday’s timetable is too important to miss is a nonsense.
Which is not to say that schools should be closed or not open at all on Monday morning. After all, schools serve a lot of social functions. Many children depend on them for things like free school meals and many parents depend on them for childcare during the working day. And not all people care about football. For many others across the country, Sunday night is a normal Sunday evening in July and they will go to bed at a normal time. This includes school staff. Schools could happily run on a skeleton crew of non-football-watching staff until lunchtime, as well as, as previously said, adults who feel up to it even if they did watch the football, coming in at normal time anyway. Schools can fulfil their regular social purpose outside of any educating duties even if we acknowledge that many students won’t be in at all that day, or will be coming in late. (Indeed, it is only our punitive approach to coming in late that forces those who want the additional sleep to take a whole day off instead of merely a half day). And with a well-considered system in place they may even be able to do the education bit too. (A school with an open approach to the 1am kick-off could, for example, ask staff planning on watching the match to set work on Teams or Google Classroom in advance for their students to complete by a certain deadline which can accommodate also the students who watch the match and will miss the timetabled lesson.)
Watching a football match might seem like a small and petty thing to write all this about, but to me it points to a general inflexibility in systems and structures, such as our education system, marked by plainly false arguments made on behalf of sustaining the status quo that do not survive even the briefest scrutiny. Thomas Tuchel’s argument for watching the match might also be flawed, but only if you analyse it as I did earlier, based on the match’s unique historical status. An alternative way of valuing the match survives my criticism completely: namely the idea that what makes the match important and historical is not the match’s specific function within this particular tournament for progression or failure, but as a memorable and formative aesthetic experience in a young person’s life. Every England fan watching World Cup football since 1966 has experienced the drama of near-victory and the devastation of knockout loss, and our earliest memories of this play an important role in building the overall narrative of England’s role in international football which gives these matches meaning. I myself barely cared about football until about four years ago, but still would watch World Cup matches with interest after the indelible impression left on me by England’s loss in the semi-finals of Italia ‘90, my first World Cup. Gazza’s tears when he received a booking which would have prevented him from playing in the Final had England won the match told me the story of the importance of getting to the Final for these players and made me shed tears of my own when they failed in their efforts. Six years later, watching England play Germany again in the semi finals of Euro ‘96, I wasn’t a football fan and had been dragged to Wembley by my father mainly so he could gain access to a ticket to the final under the UEFA pyramid scheme ticketing system, but I understood the weight of yet another high-stakes semi-final against Germany because of watching that Italia ‘90 match. When Southgate missed his penalty, even as a non-fan, I understood the weight of the moment.
When I look back at my own school days, I don’t remember a lot of the everyday lessons. But I remember the day my parents allowed me an afternoon off school so I could go down to London and watch Green Day play at the Astoria. And I remember the two weeks of Sixth Form I missed to go touring with my punk rock band around Italy. I remember the week we had off in November of 1996 to spend our first and only Thanksgiving with our American grandmother (and watch WWE Survivor Series at Madison Square Garden). These memories were special moments in my life. Family moments. Aesthetic moments. And they were all far more important than being in school that day. A first class degree, an MA and a PhD later, I don’t think missing all that school for that stuff made my education suffer.
A kid staying up late on Sunday to watch the England match, whatever happens, will remember the weirdness of staying up so late on a school night; of the excitement and anticipation of the match and the moment; of the family or friends around them who they are watching it with; of the history made in the match, good or bad, that they will carry with them into the next match, or the next tournament. And they will be educated too. Educated about the importance of putting some things in your personal life above the never-ending demands of work; about the value of taking time to enjoy the things you love. These are lessons and experiences just as important, if not more important, than anything I will be offering my students in the classroom on Monday morning.
Right - that’s it for this academic year. Summer starts next week and unless inspiration hits I won’t be posting a new PU until we’re back at school in September. In the meantime — enjoy the archives!
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