Summer 2014, Brazil. The Fifa World Cup tournament. With their long-ball playing, the England men’s team had proved that football was most definitely not coming home. Again. But that wasn’t the only thing to dampen spirits. It was about this time that the word Brexit, coined two years earlier, seemed to take hold.
It was also around then I was approached to write a short film, commissioned by the Royal Court in collaboration with the Guardian, as one of six writers invited to create “microplays” to be filmed, each inspired by a section of the paper’s coverage. Sport was an obvious choice for me and my assigned director, my friend and fellow football fan Clint Dyer (an actor, writer and director but not by then risen to his current rank as deputy artistic director of the National Theatre). When we first talked, he suggested a funeral setting would capture the mood of the time. The way England played that summer, it certainly felt like a funeral.
