Jeers for Maguire reopen old wounds in England’s soccer team

It looked like a perfectly innocent post-match tweet, the kind sent by soccer players virtually every week.

“Enjoyable week playing for my country,” Harry Maguire posted on Twitter early Wednesday, complete with emojis of a Union Flag and a heart and a picture of him kicking a ball.

Except this one was loaded.

The previous night, Maguire was the target of jeers and abuse from a section of England fans before and during the team’s 3-0 win over the Ivory Coast in a friendly at Wembley Stadium.

When his name was read out in the pre-match team lineup. When he touched the ball.

Why, though? After all, he has been a mostly reliable presence at the heart of England’s defense for a while now. He helped England to reach the European Championship final last year, at Wembley. He was even named in the team of the tournament, placing him alongside many of the best players on the continent.

Quite simply, it’s because of something entirely different — his performances for Manchester United.

“Ludicrous,” was the post-match reaction of England coach Gareth Southgate to the boos.

Then, one by one, Maguire’s England teammates rallied behind the center back in a series of tweets.

“Total embarrassment,” Declan Rice wrote, adding: “Absolute nonsense now it’s becoming. Back your own players. Especially with a major tournament coming up.”

Harry Kane, England’s captain, wrote: “We’ve worked hard to rebuild our connection with England fans in the last few years so to hear Harry Maguire booed at Wembley before kickoff was just not right.”

Perhaps the most significant backing of Maguire came from Jordan Henderson.

“I can’t get my head around what happened at Wembley tonight,” the midfielder wrote. “To be booed at his home stadium, for no reason. What have we become?”

Henderson’s intervention was telling because he is captain of Liverpool, the fierce and historic rival of Maguire’s Man United team.

It wasn’t so long ago — indeed, when Southgate used to play for England — that club rivalries such as that between United and Liverpool used to spill over into the national team. There are stories of players of the respective clubs not sitting with each other at England squad meet-ups.

“We had a generation that was nicknamed the ‘Golden Generation’ of players, where expectations were huge for us as a national team to go out there and win something,” Rio Ferdinand said in 2017. “That there is probably what held us back. Not being able to separate our club ties to international ties.”

That’s clearly not the case with Southgate’s England. The cliques are gone inside the squad.

They aren’t gone from the stands, though. And for Southgate, that’s a big concern heading to the World Cup in Qatar.