The match kicked off at 10pm, Shabbat went out at 10:18pm. Eighteen minutes – chai, the auspicious number we give for luck – which I prophetically decided to read as a good omen.
Eighteen minutes was the gap between the moment Norway and England walked out in Miami and the moment we were allowed to switch the television on. No clever workaround, no recording, no delay – we simply didn’t turn it on until Shabbat was out, which meant 10:18pm, a quarter of an hour into a game already under way. We’d missed the opening, and missed nothing: a quiet, feeling-out first quarter, and we arrived just as it began to warm.
It warmed nicely at the hydration break. Shabbat had ended, but we hadn’t yet said Havdalah – the small ceremony that separates the holy from the regular, wine and spices and a plaited candle. So we said it there, in the drinks break, while twenty-two footballers took on water and the commentators filled the air. Two pauses, one gap in the play. The candle hissed out, the new week began, the football resumed, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt the holy and the everyday sit so easily in the same couple of minutes.
And then it came alive properly. Norway scored – Schjelderup, from an angle that had no business producing a goal, off the post and in, Pickford grasping at the Florida air. One-nil. The room made a noise I won’t transcribe.
But this England doesn’t fold the way the old ones did. Right on half-time, Gordon swung a cross in and Bellingham – who else, this tournament – took a touch, found space, and passed it low into the bottom corner. Level. We came off the sofa as one, and a pub came off its floor at the very same goal, at the very same second, because we were watching the very same live match. Just eighteen minutes later to the party.
One-all at the break. There’s a way of being a Jew in this country that watches the national game at an angle – as a guest, half-wondering if one is quite entitled to the roar. I’ve never recognised that man, and I decline to become him.
That morning, like every Shabbat morning, we’d stood in synagogue and said the prayer for the King and the Royal Family. We say it every week, and we mean it, and it asks for nothing back – not a receipt, not an insurance policy, just what loyalty sounds like when it’s real. Tonight we were yelling at his team through a television, and nobody in the room felt a seam between the morning and the evening, because there isn’t one. I wasn’t watching England. We were watching England. That "we" is not a courtesy anyone extended to me. It’s a plain fact, arrived at in a room full of blokes who happened to wait for three stars before switching the telly on, and who then screamed at Jordan Pickford in precisely the tone of every other front room in the country.
This was a comfortable living room, and I won’t claim it was the barricades. But a living room is where this country watches its football - where the whole nation was that night, in its millions – so we weren’t tucked away from anything, just doing the most ordinary national thing there is. The one thing that set us apart was the blessing over wine and the candle pinched out in it; the football and the shouting set us apart not at all. It was the same life – Havdalah at the hydration break and joy at the winner, one evening, no seam. We flourish here – not endure, flourish – and flourishing looks like this: unremarkable, shared, entirely at home. Not a lesser way of belonging. If anything, a fuller one.
And it wasn’t only in the room. Up on the screen the same country was doing the same thing at national scale: an England side drawn from half the world and welded into one team in one shirt – one of the things this country has done well, even handing the whole operation to a German manager and roaring him on. Our families are a thread of the same cloth. We took the deal Britain offered, and made ourselves as much a part of this place as the eleven on the pitch, even if we aren’t often picked for the national team. "It’s coming home" comes from a song written by a Jew, a Jew and a gentile – which is about as English as a song gets.
The second half was hard. Norway had a goal chalked off by VAR. England had a penalty given and taken away by the same. The crossbar shook. Seven minutes of stoppage settled nothing, and we went into extra time exactly level with the nation, holding exactly the nation’s breath.
And then, in the 95th minute, Rogers had a shot pushed out, and Bellingham was quickest to the loose ball – the way he’s been quickest to everything this summer – and tucked the rebound in.
That was the sound I’d been waiting for. Not the missed quarter-hour, not even the odd grace of a Havdalah said between the goalposts. The roar – the one that went up in living rooms and pubs and back gardens across the whole country in a single instant, ours among them, dead on time, because for all that we’d come to it late, we’d come to it live. Every inch of it mine.
On to Argentina.
Ashley Hirst lives in Hendon with his wife, four children, two cats and a dog. A former UJS Chair, he is the co-founder of the Alei Tzion community
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