Writer, actor and activist explains how he fell in love with this England football team and his respect for players making a stand
“I went to an England game at the start of the Euros,” Benjamin Zephaniah says while explaining how he has come to love the national team for the first time in his 63 years. Zephaniah is a warm and amusing man who refers to himself, wryly, as “a dub revolutionary poet”. He is also a writer, an actor (most recently when playing the role of a preacher in Peaky Blinders) and an activist who has fought against racism most of his life.
Zephaniah has loved football since he was a boy supporting Aston Villa in the late 1960s. But his relationship with England has always been a tangled affair – at least until Gareth Southgate built a team full of players Zephaniah identified with, admired and even loved. He reels off some of the names in the squad that prepared for England’s first game of the European Championship – Raheem Sterling, Marcus Rashford, Harry Kane, Jack Grealish, Tyrone Mings, Bukaya Saka and the others who have so impressed him on and off the field.