Team GB at the Olympics: the return of an improbable entity

First competitive appearance of British football team for 41 years sees English and Welsh players draw 1-1 with Senegal
Craig Bellamy
Craig Bellamy scores for Team GB. Photograph: Andrew Yates/AFP/Getty Images

If Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony really is to be the carnival of kitchen sink Britishness the whispers have suggested, London 2012 was fittingly represented the night before its inauguration by the first competitive appearance in 41 years of that improbable entity, the Great Britain football team.

At various times politics, power-brokering and ancient enmities had seemed to obscure the way for a footballing Team GB. But here they were on a mild Manchester evening, a Britannia-themed curiosity of seven Englishmen and four Welshmen singing God Save the Queen in spiffy Stella McCartney uniforms ahead of a breezy opening group match against Senegal in front of a politely enthused 72,000 crowd at Old Trafford. In the end they drew 1-1.

If the Olympics can still claim to be a force for cross-border unity here was evidence in the flesh that sport can still leap the occasional fence. Albeit right up to kick off there was still a lurking question as to what kind of response this un-fanfared conjoining of neighbours would meet. Even the "team" in Team GB has sounded a little forced and cajoling, like an overly nannying stage direction, and as the teams were announced there was the peculiar spectacle of the home players being cheered or jeered depending on their club profile: huge roar for local hero Ryan Giggs; scattered boos for the Manchester City-flavoured manager Stuart Pearce.

In Olympic fashion both anthems were warmly applauded, albeit with Team GB's Welsh contingent retaining the necessary mask of concrete-clad inscrutability during God Save The Queen. And in the early moments there was a sense of something warm, diffuse and quietly celebratory taking place.

It was above all a surprisingly unfraught occasion, less like a football match and more like a particularly impressive sixth form sports day. Before kickoff the pitch-side MC, no less than DJ Spoony, suggested "a nice warm round of applause for both teams" and throughout jarringly unfamiliar gales of family-friendly goodwill wafted around Old Trafford. In the stands nobody swore or howled with inconsolable fury. And as the players trotted about in their frankly terrible kit, looking from a distance like a peleton of dismounted cyclists, the thought occurred that here, finally, was a British football team entirely unbowed by any coddled history of expectation, thwarted hopes or indeed anything much at all.

British amateur teams competed regularly at the Olympics until the Munich Games, but these are the first real, actual professional players to appear under the union flag. They will also probably be the last, so great are the assorted tensions in the wings of Team GB, chiefly the fear of loss of influence within football's governing body Fifa. Which is a shame as in the hours before kick-off Manchester seemed surprisingly hospitable to this footballing flag of convenience, the streets of the Piccadilly area thronging with newbie fans and the procession towards Old Trafford producing an eclectic pageant of mingled union flag-ishness, reminiscent of a high-Britpop music video or an extended Benny Hill credits sequence.

A gaggle of men in kilts and ginger wigs loomed confusingly. A lone white-haired adventurer in a union flag waistcoat marched along like a music hall cockney, while others fearlessly paraded the paunch-hugging contours of the McCartney replica shirt.

Football has often been portrayed as an Olympic interloper, fuelled by the belief the Games should be the pinnacle of those sports involved, whereas Olympic football is a competition for the promising and the youthful. Disapproved of on all sides, Team GB has been duly reverential so far, the sporting gentry of the Premier League pointedly - if briefly - slumming it in the village and players talking with blushing, hopeful optimism about journeys and experiences and all the lads getting on really well.

In this spirit it seemed fitting that it should be Craig Bellamy, a player whose autobiography might at one stage have been entitled Bellamy: The History of a Scoundrel, but who has within Team GB taken on a zealously ambassadorial presence, that scored Team GB's first goal for 41 years. Like a sporting butterfly Team GB may be destined to flutter briefly before disappearing for ever.