In Football
Since the early 1990s the song has been sung by English football fans at some matches against the Germany national football team. It is typically accompanied by horizontally outstretched arms and a gentle swaying motion, as if to mimic an aircraft in flight, and on some occasions the word 'air' is replaced with 'war'.
Such vocal behaviour was eventually deemed to be racially offensive by the Football Association, and the former English manager Sven-Göran Eriksson asked fans to refrain from it at the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, a plea echoed by Greater Manchester Police and other authorities. Television commercials starring David Beckham, Michael Owen, and Wayne Rooney requesting the same were also planned. Similar issues attended the football song Two World Wars and One World Cup.
These moves were criticized by some elements of the British press. Tony Parsons, writing in The Daily Mirror, stated in December 2005 that:
- "Less than a lifetime ago the Germans inflicted untold misery on the world. If English football fans choose to deal with that a mere 60 years later by holding their arms out and pretending to be Lancaster bombers, I would suggest that the Germans are getting off quite lightly."
German fans in 2006, exhilarated by their team's three previous victories in the World Cup, adopted rival songs such as We're Heading For Berlin Without England when supporters of both teams staged impromptu chanting competitions in the center of Cologne. Elsewhere the answer from German fans at football matches was often the Nazi song Bomben auf Engeland (“Bombs to England").
During the 2006 World Cup the anti-German German musician Torsun (half of the group Egotronic) recorded a techno cover of the song. The song and its accompanying YouTube video (featuring footage of German planes being shot down, the Wembley goal, a burning German flag, etc.) attracted media attention in Germany, as well as from the British tabloid News of the World. The song was eventually included in the World Cup themed compilation Weltmeister Hits 2006.
Read more about this topic: Ten German Bombers
Famous quotes containing the word football:
“You can’t be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1993)
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)