‘IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT’
At the start of John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic science fiction novel the Day of the Triffids the narrator, Bill Masen, lies in a city-centre hospital, his eyes bandaged. A combination of circumstances too complicated to report here leads to him climbing from his bed, removing his bandages and – following an urge familiar to many Fiver readers – heading fairly directly to the nearest public house, where he meets a blind man who informs him that more or less everyone else is suddenly also blind.
Sterling, Delph and Henderson ruled out of England friendlies at Wembley
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“‘S that bloody comet, thash what done it,” the man slurs (he is a little the worse for wear). “Green shootin’ shtarsh – an’ ow everyone’s blind as a bat. D’ju shee green shootin’ shtarsh?” Masen had not seen green shooting stars, because of all the bandages and stuff. “There you are. Proves it. You didn’t see ‘em: you aren’t blind. Everyone else saw ‘em, all’s blind’s bats.”
But how, Masen wonders, does the drunkard know that absolutely everybody is blind? The man instructs him simply to listen. “We stood side by side leaning on the bar of the dingy pub, and I listened,” Masen continues. “There was nothing to be heard – nothing but the rustle of a dirty newspaper blown down an empty street. Such a quietness held everything as cannot have been known in those parts for a thousand years and more.”
Masen had actually noticed this eerie phenomenon earlier, lying in his hospital bed being ignored by the nurses who weren’t there. “No wheels rumbled, no buses roared, no sound of a car of any kind, in fact, was to be heard,” he narrated. “No brakes, no horns, not even the clopping of the few rare horses that still occasionally passed. Nor, as there should be at such an hour, the composite tramp of work-bound feet. The more I listened, the queerer it seemed. There was not the cooing of a pigeon, not the chirp of a sparrow. Nothing but the humming of wires in the wind.”
At top-flight football training grounds across the country this morning a handful of miraculously able-bodied footballers experienced their own Masen moments. Where normally there is action there was stillness, where there is noise there was only silence. Not a soul was to be seen, not a whisper to be heard, because everyone had been struck down by a bizarre Wyndhamesque overnight knack.
Over at the FA’s Wembley HQ, the telephone started to ring. First it was Harry Kane, whose knee had given way, and Harry Winks, whose ankle had failed, the severity of both injuries becoming clear just hours after Dele Alli had started to struggle with debilitating hamstring-twang. Gareth Southgate hurriedly called up Jake Livermore, but still the calls kept coming. Fabian Delph began clutching his calf, while Raheem Sterling and Jordan Henderson were both blighted with back-to-back back-bother. The FA, scrabbling desperately for fit footballers, announced that “a further squad update will be issued in due course”.
Perhaps the hour that Wyndham dreamed of has now arrived. The timing cannot be simple coincidence: just as in his novel bright, colourful lights were seen in the night sky across Britain over the weekend, reaching an explosive pinnacle on Sunday 5 November. Across the nation millions of people congregated together to ooh and aah at their spellbinding magnificence. “
Everybody’s out watching them,” Masen remembers a nurse telling him, “and sometimes it’s almost as light as day – only all the wrong colour. Every now and then there’s a big one so bright that it hurts to look at it. It’s a marvellous sight.” Ring a bell, firework fans? Then on 6 November Winks, Alli and Kane suddenly found they could scarcely walk, and footballers have been falling ever since. This may well be, The Fiver is sad to report, the end of the world.
Either that or England are playing some friendlies.
