AFTER England’s defeat to Italy, it sadly came as no surprise that a wave of online racist abuse was en route to England’s black players, exacerbated by Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka missing crucial penalties.

The moment the ball failed to hit the net, most knew what to expect from the bigoted underbelly that the sport has yet to eradicate.

However, just as predictable as the vulgar racism, were the cries from English leftists and liberals of: “This is why I don’t support England” and “This is why England deserved to lose.” By repeating these tropes they fell into the trenches of the culture war being staged between “normies” and politicos.

Why is it that so many see England, and more specifically English football, as exceptional in its racism, and what does wishing for England’s demise seek to accomplish?

There is an argument for a “special kind” of English racism derived from our country’s history of imperialism and colonialism, with the history and ideological implications of the British empire still hard to escape and disentangle from our national identity.

But this makes a distinction between England and, say, Poland; but it doesn’t differentiate us from Belgium, the Netherlands and France, to name but a few who also had colonial empires.