There is a house I pass on the way to work that is covered in so many England flags that it has stopped being a house and become something quite else: polyester and paint, it glows slightly in the shade, a patriotism for living in. Sometimes people toot their car horns driving past. For every moment of togetherness and excitement, for every man loudly caressing his friend in a drunken expression of joy outside my local Wetherspoons when England wins, there is a counterpoint of trouble.

Last Sunday, I was walking slowly through the evening heat, while my daughter danced off ahead, and passed a man who was increasingly frustrated that his girlfriend, at whose flat he’d been watching the football, was not picking up the phone. “LUCY!” he bellowed up at her balcony, a polo-shirted Romeo. “LUCY! If you don’t open the car so I can get my toothbrush I’m going to smash it in with this rock.” She couldn’t hear him, the window was closed, but still he screamed, swearing a little more, kicking her car, weighing up suitable stones. The car alarm went off. She opened the window, and he swore up at her while she looked for her keys, finally bleeping it open from her balcony. So then he turned to me, all that anger with nowhere to go, not even a car window to break, and shouted words as I continued up the quiet road, the dust of insults in my wake as I smiled at my kid and pretended to her that nothing was happening.

There’s a kind of sanctioned madness around football, a change. A graphic went viral on social media ahead of England’s World Cup match against Tunisia, claiming: “No one wants England to win more than women.” Published by the domestic abuse charity Pathway Project, it explained that domestic abuse rates increase by 38% when England lose.

Nobody is really surprised that a combination of increased tension and increased drinking leads to increased violence

It has hit a nerve, it’s been promoted brilliantly. I’ve heard the figures being repeated at work, in pubs. My boyfriend mentioned it during the England game, my dad again when watching Iran v Spain. A 38% increase when they lose, and 26% when they win or draw. The stats came from a study by Lancaster University that looked at the number of domestic abuse cases reported to one English police force during the World Cups of 2002, 2006 and 2010. In 2014 the average reported occasions of violence had risen to 79.3 a day during England matches, compared with 58.2 when they weren’t playing. Incidents were 11% higher the day after England played, whatever the outcome, and were at their highest when the team exited the tournament.

One of the best things about these figures going viral, of course (two weeks ago it had reached more than 3 million people) is that it’s an opportunity to talk about domestic violence – something that feels so weighty and unsolvable yet so familiar and common that week after week, women’s wounds and deaths at the hands of their husbands and partners rarely make it to the top of the news.

It happens over there. In someone else’s kitchen, in front of someone else’s child. It hides itself – and this is how we allow ourselves to ignore it. When the figures appear on your Instagram, sandwiched between a photo of someone’s salad and an unfiltered sunset, less so.

And, reading the stats, after a second of shock, nobody is surprised. Nobody is really surprised that a combination of increased tension and increased drinking leads to increased violence, because we have all lived some years as humans and if we haven’t ourselves hit or been hit, we have certainly been violence-adjacent, walking down a quiet road while a red-faced man shouted abuse at us from the shade.

The aim of Pathway Project’s campaign is to enter our homes and catch us unexpected, to offer help to people who are suffering, but also to poke those that are able to sit in front of the telly and ignore these bleak truths.

But in its effectiveness, did it misdirect our attention? Football and alcohol do not cause domestic violence. Tension built by these things, this summer, will contribute to and trigger it, but the cause of domestic violence is abusive men that lash out at their partners in order to control them. Though there’s an argument that the sexist chants and macho culture around the game contribute to an environment where women are objectified and sidelined, there are many millions of football fans who choose not to abuse their girlfriends: blaming the game and the booze seems, slightly, to absolve those that do.

While anger is noisy and violence bruises, the more insidious evils, such as emotional abuse and financial control, remain largely unrecorded and unreported. These stats should give us pause to consider the abuse playing out in neighbours’ homes every night, whether or not their team is winning or losing, and regardless of what’s on TV.

One more thing…

Zsa Zsa the bulldog was named ‘World’s Ugliest Dog’ last week, not just for her wide gait and sparse hair, but for her very very long tongue, and ensuing ‘shower of slobber’. But let’s never forget three-time champion Sam, a blind pure-bred Chinese Crested hairless and toothless dog who looks like the most adorable nightmare.

There is extreme joy to be found in Paul McCartney’s Carpool Karaoke, where James Corden accompanies him on the most glorious journey around Liverpool, down Penny Lane, to his old house, his old pub, through fast-gathering crowds of fans shouting ‘I love you’.

I’m reading Crudo, the first novel by Olivia Laing whose genius book The Lonely City I think about daily. It’s about a writer, loosely based on the late Kathy Acker, finding love in 2017, that summer of ‘fire and fascism, she’d never forget it, the first season of marriage, awaking into her adult life so late, just as the world was shutting up shop’.



Eva Wiseman is a columnist for the Observer magazine. Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman