Duncan Barkes

I told our boys, I said, did you ever see the film Zulu?

And some of them said, yeah, what?

And I said, okay, we are going to play, forget Catanaccio, forget three at the back.

We are going to play Rourke's Drift.

I want everybody on the edge of our penalty area for the whole of the rest of the match, unless the rest of our team turn up.

which they didn't until halftime.

The score at halftime, nil-nil.

Yeah, nil bloody nil.

The rest of our players arrived, you know, an hour late, changed, ran out for the second half.

Now we've got 11 against their 11.

We lost 4-0.

This is a completely true story that I carry around as a flag in my heart for what you can do when you just simply blooming well have to.

Britain in 1939, we had no right whatsoever to the country.

I'm not going to say we because I wasn't there.

Our country, the country we are now, then had no right to stand up to the might, the overwhelming might of Hitler and his cronies.

But they did.

And they won.

Now, I'm not saying that what we did at the Riverside on Saturday was in any way equivalent to that kind of an achievement in terms of the merit of it and the value and the importance of it.

Of course I'm not.

But what I'm saying is that sometimes people, and I don't know whether it's an English characteristic in particular, I suspect not.