That’s kind of the point. The national media takes no notice of the fact that Scotland, Wales and NI are different countries. If British media was concentrating largely on the sporting achievements of Albania, with a tiny little paragraph on page 8 mentioning that England also played a little game of something, somewhere else, after a couple of decades of hearing all about Albania you’d probably start thinking to yourself ‘why are we only hearing about Albania? We aren’t Albania, we don’t give a shit about Albania. We are our own separate country, we want to hear about England’. Well that’s how Wales, Scotland and NI feel. Everything is England centric.
Added to that is what appears like arrogance. We might think the lyrics of ‘it’s coming home’ point to a subtle self deprecation and acknowledgment that it’s not really coming home, but that’s not how it appears to the rest of Britain, who are also being forced to listen to the bloody thing for weeks on end. It looks like supreme arrogance. And when we do win something, we never stop talking about it.
It’s my experience that, as individuals, they do like us. But as a nation, we behave like they are our younger siblings, who don’t really know what’s best for them, so they just need to be quiet and let us take charge because we’re the boss. And, funnily enough, that attitude has rubbed them up the wrong way.