Euro 2012: jingoistic fervour by 'patriotic' TV commentators does not become us I am enjoying this tournament and I may enjoy it even more now that England are not playing. That's not because I didn't want the team to do much better than they did but I do resist the kind of mad jingoistic fervour that springs up as an accompaniment to any international footballing competition. My unease springs from the over-extensive and undiscriminating use of the 'we' word. I first noticed this tendency when Ireland were making their own futile attempts to beat Italy. Now I have an Italian husband, and no Irish relatives whatsoever. Yet suddenly I found myself involuntarily enlisted in the Irish cause. 'We' were losing. Well, I wasn't. I hoped the best team would win, which it duly did. But there was little sense of that from Adrian Chiles and his mates back in the studio: 'we' had somehow been robbed. Once England were out on the pitch, the pronouns grew ever more slippery. It wasn't them, but us who were being shown up by the majestic Andrea Pirlo. "We" might be sitting on our sofas and unable to do anything more than shout impotently at the TV, but we were implicated in national failure. The peculiarity of this partisanship was underlined by the extremity of Mark Lawrenson's commentary. For this match, he had been banished from the studio to a role off camera, which someone presumably felt fitted his skills. Since Lawrenson is a man who makes Chiles, with his newly strange pudding of hair, look like a movie star, I have never quite understood how he has managed to make a career in television. But even if you can't see him, you still have to listen to him in his default mode of miserable old git. When he announced defiantly that he will never tweet, he sounded just as clogging and old-fashioned as England looked against the flexible, fluid Italians. This annoyed me, but what really worried me was when he started fulminating about England kicking the ball out of play when an Italian was on the ground; his implication was that the Italians were fakers and "we" - that word again - should take advantage of their infirmity and get on and score. As a parent, I spend a lot of time trying to persuade my children that it is better to be sporting and concern yourself with the welfare of others than trample over them in your bid to win. One of the qualities that Hodgson has brought to this English team is a becoming modesty and self-discipline. Checking that your opponent is OK, is part of that. Accusing him of putting it on - even if he is - is not the way commentators should encourage anyone to behave. They do so - and Lawrenson is not alone in this - out of a misplaced partisanship, as though being rude about the opposition could somehow make England play better. Those of us who love football - and love England - would like them to draw a different conclusion from this year's failure. They should look at Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal and ask what they can learn. And the TV commentators could help them do that by treating football as the great sport it is, not some kind of national combat. I once had to write an essay explaining the difference between jingoism and patriotism. Before the World Cup, perhaps every commentator should be made to do the same, and carefully consider the use of the "we" word.