Booing Harry Maguire for England is a ridiculous pantomime pile-on

Gareth Southgate called it “an absolute joke”. Declan Rice went with “total embarrassment”. For Jack Grealish it was “ridiculous”, which works on quite a few levels. Given time to reflect, Jordan Henderson was more profoundly existential. “What have we become?” he asked. And it is an excellent question, deserving of a serious answer.

By that stage Southgate, who is generally the most sensible person in the room, had also compared the jeers directed at Harry Maguire before kick-off on Tuesday night to the sustained racist abuse of John Barnes by card-carrying neo-Nazis in the 1980s. At which point it is hard not to wonder if this is all really about the thing it’s about. Or if England’s manager and his players are being caught in a sideswipe from somewhere else, a self-fuelling piece of theatre born out of TV noise, punditry blather and the idiot wind of social media. Harry Maguire: anatomy of a booing. This is how news works now. And none of us come out of it looking great.

Except the players, perhaps. On the most basic level it is good to see them sticking up for their mate. These are nice people. They do this for each other. And it’s good energy in other ways. Outside pressure can have an adhesive effect. Teams run on this kind of fuel. But it is hard to avoid the feeling of being dragged into some kind of cross-platform media event, a pantomime pile-on that might still do some genuine harm to the only relationship that really matters in all of this.

The jeers from the supporters came as Maguire’s name was read out. This is not something that happens. There was a sense of double-take around the press box. But it seemed like there were some more the first time Maguire got the ball, although it was hard to tell if these