Why Aren’t English Managers More Intelligent? Part Two
I’d gone to Blackwells - the old Broad Street one, using the original narrow entrance in preference to the wider swing doors - to get something second-hand from their top-floor department. It was mildly annoying to have to shoulder my way in - blast these tourists, coming in to gawp - and slightly more annoying to find nothing worth the money after the long trek upstairs. I fretted my way back down. The ground floor was even thicker with people by this stage, as if coaches were offloading directly into the new fiction section. I pushed my way through, trying to stay this side of politeness, but my temper frayed altogether when I found the entrance blocked by a wall of suits. I pulled them aside, got through to the door, which opened in front of me: Muhammed Ali stepped through it, and shook my hand. The room erupted into applause.
The next day I caddied in a competition featuring Henry Cooper.
I’ve never really wanted to meet sportsmen. Those competition prizes - a day at Highbury, a coaching session at your school with Phil Neal or whatever - left me cold as a boy. Sam Tyler meets Bobby Charlton in a nightclub in “Life On Mars” (surely a continuity error) and fawns. I couldn’t do that.
There is always an exception to the rule, and my exception is Sir Tom Finney. Finney - brilliantly talented, intelligent, interested in his sport’s development, but trapped by maximum wage, retain-and-transfer, the decrepit state of significant sections of English football in the 1950s - exemplifies both what is fantastic about our national game and what is frustrating and self-defeating about it.
And there are other men who I would have liked to have interviewed. But they are all dead. Fred Pentland, English coach of the first foreign side to beat England. Jimmy Hogan, Hugo Meisl. Jack Reynolds, the father of Ajax, who was interned with P.G. Wodehouse during World War II. Herbert Chapman, of course. Sepp Herberger. Clough was famously uninterviewable, but left one of the great autobiographies behind him.
It’s a list that speaks for itself of our next reason why English managers don’t come across as well as their foreign counterparts.
The most intelligent English managers work abroad
Today, Stuart Baxter at Helsingborgs; yesterday, El Tel, Roy Hodgson, and the others in the long ago. In the period 1905-1939, it is as if only Herbert Chapman stayed, and his project, the creation of a great metropolitan London side, was something no one had seriously attempted before. There was good reason why this was so. Norman Fox writes of Jimmy Hogan:
He soon realised that the continental players had a different attitude from those in England. They said it was up to them to get themselves fit, what they expected of the coach was not the typical British notion that stamina would win in the end and that being deprived of the ball all week would make them all the more hungry for it on Saturday. They demanded to know how to improve their ball skills and how to use them to produce effective teamwork.
He took over at Fulham in August 1934, but the players disliked his ‘unconventional’ training methods (he actually used a ball) and tactics, and there were many complaints about his style from the more established players. After 31 games, Hogan was sacked whilst recovering from an operation in hospital - the board stating that “seasoned professionals did not need coaching.”
Time and time again in the biographies of these pioneers you find the phrase “Scottish passing game” and “English long ball game.” It’s repetitive and deeply depressing.
The Tradition of the English Professional
We saw in Part One of this post that Edwardian football did not have the large pool of ex-players to draw upon for management - the game simply hadn’t been around long enough to generate it. In any case, it was felt - and not unreasonably - that the players themselves were the experts at playing. That Herbert Chapman thought different did not make him a pioneer in England - it made him that very English thing, a man admired and looked up to, but not emulated.
The professionals were experts enough to beat everything foreign that came their way for a very long time - England didn’t lose to continental opposition until as late as 1929. In such circumstances, isn’t it forgiveable to suppose that the English way continued to be the best? Where was the evidence to the contrary? When a casually-thrown-together England team appointed by amateur non-players could see off hyper-motivated “World Champions” Italy, or defeat the Master Race in its rats nest in Berlin?
Where no demand is felt, none exists. The tradition - that the players, the professionals are the experts at playing, had fifty years free to set in cement before 1953 and the defeat to Hungary first cast real doubt on it.
Even the pioneers working abroad took some of it in with their mother’s milk. Jimmy Hogan, late in life, said:
I am a British coach. I still maintain that we have the best players, but it is our style of playing the game that has gone wrong.
The Creation of a Coaching Tradition Abroad
Men like Hogan were in demand abroad because between 1890 and World War One the fabulous game of football went around the world faster than cigarettes. In Europe, and in South America, the great twentieth century kickabout was getting underway. The new clubs in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Brazil, Argentina, Spain and Italy wanted to build their own footballing rockets - and the British, especially the English, were the footballing rocket scientists. We were the incorruptible referees, too.
From the point of view of these new foreign clubs, football was something for them to learn. The great unspoken project, “catch up with the British” (there were Scottish coaches abroad too) took fifty years. In pure technical and tactical terms, it took thirty - but the formidable psychological lead of the English and Scots took longer to break down. It was 1931 before Scotland lost an international against foreign opposition. They did it in style, going down 5-0 to the Wunderteam of Meisl, Sindelar and a certain Jimmy Hogan.. and followed it up four days later with a 3-0 defeat to Italy. But for those men it must still have been a wonderful holiday, in a Europe not yet scarred by Nazism and renewed war. Were the defeated Scots the very best side available, and were they sober?
In some countries, football slotted into an existing club tradition. Many German sporting clubs, famous for football now, offered tuition and participation in a wide range of sports such as they were in the nineteenth century. The idea of teaching a game, of coaching, was transplanted into football in these clubs in a way that didn’t happen in Britain.
Catching up with Britain was a considerable task. There were just so many people playing football in Britain that, even without ideas of coaching or an emphasis on ball skills, we enjoyed a steady flow of truly wonderful players that countries with less of a grass-roots base simply didn’t enjoy. The strength and resilience of our club structure, built in a comparatively uncorrupt sporting and business culture, in a famously unviolent social milieu, was almost impossible to emulate, and this remains the case to this day.
The sheer size of the task gave it its drive. Even now, and deny it as some countries do, beating England is a relatively rare peak experience for our rivals.
In England, in Italy, in Germany, Brazil, Spain, and Portugal, the vast majority of coaches and managers today are, as you’d expect, former players. Our former players have come from a tradition in which the player is the expert at playing, a tradition long suspicious of coaching per se. Abroad, coaching was part of their game by necessity from the very beginning - it’s not an alien import or an insult. In Italy, there is a college devoted just to training potential coaches and managers. That there is a need for tactical knowledge, and physical training expertise, that these approaches can be improved upon and developed, are as much part of the tradition abroad as “passion and commitment” is to ours.
So when an “untested” top continental player becomes a manager or coach - like Beckenbauer, or Marco Van Basten, or Luca Vialli, or Ruud Gullit - that player is steeped in a coaching tradition and has thrived within it. Some players making the step up, like Jurgen Klinsmann, appear untested but, as in Klinsmann’s case, have been studying modern coaching on their own account for some time.
Something more than raw talent is required for success in a coaching football culture. Within a more cerebral culture, the more cerebral thrive. It’s why there’ve been so many great Scottish managers compared to English; it’s why the best English managers were considered nuisances as players.
The Problem of Translation
Some balance now. How many managers working in England now can you name? I can come up with 40-50 without the need for Google, and you can probably manage the same or more. But how many managers can you name who are working in the domestic Dutch game? Or the French? Or the German? Or the Italian? Or the Spanish? Let alone the Greek, or the Portuguese. Don’t even mention South America, where naming more than 10 clubs in the entire continent is a challenge.
Our impression that foreign managers are more intelligent than their English counterparts is probably based on a kind of fact, as I’ve been discussing here. But it’s important to realize that we’ve built up that initial impression, and taken that basic idea, from a tiny sample. A tiny sample that, by and large, has taken the time learn English, a considerable intellectual task.
My personal list of the greatest managers in the game’s history runs: Hogan, Chapman, Meisl, Pozzo, Busby, Stein, Clough, Revie, Paisley, Herberger, Schon, Michels, Beckenbauer, Ferguson, Mourinho. What a mixture of Wikipedia, archive footage, hindsight and conventional thinking it is too. I don’t claim any special insight for it. I’m not aware that Sepp Herberger spoke English, but all the others did, even the English ones.
The English-speaking foreign managers come across well to us, then - but what are the others like? I’ll have to learn languages to find out.
Is It All Changing?
There are strong rumours, some of them coming from the mouth of Arsene Wenger, that there is a new generation of young English footballers coming through the Academies whose training has been very different from that of their predecessors. (Set that against the more pessimistic views of Sir Trevor Brooking and myself).
There are new approaches being applied - and the new approaches are English. Step forward Simon Clifford.
Alex Ferguson’s “sons” are spreading out through the British management world, and are showing signs of turning the whole thing inside out. Mark Hughes, Paul Ince (now succeeding at his second club), Roy Keane (happily prepared to talk us through his learning curve stage by stage), Alex McLeish, Gordon Strachan (who’d probably deny the influence until he’s blue in face as well as in the veins). Steve Bruce. More are on their way.
There’s even the remnants of a Jimmy Hogan line of descent in the Premiership. Steve Coppell, at Reading, played under Ron Atkinson, who names Hogan as a major influence. I admit that’s a weak link, as I can’t honestly see a trace of Hogan in the Big Ron approach.
Robsons, Sounesses, Megsons and their ilk still rattle around the English management scene. But perhaps the future now lies, not with the ex-lads of old, but in the enthusiasts for learning and growth, the Boothroyds and the Allardyces and the Keanes, who have seen proper management and seen proper coaching and seek to learn how to do it themselves.
English players have undoubtedly raised their game in the face of foreign competition in the Premiership. It’s meant something of a cull - English players aren’t the majority in the Premiership now. But what survives is there on merit. Is the same now happening to management?
What do you think? These have been speculative posts - what’s your take? Let me know in the comments.
Football in 1944
Hope and damnation side by side in the People’s Game. The first film is of a Wartime International between England and Scotland, won handsomely by the team in white in front of the Royal Family at Wembley. Stanley Matthews and Matt Busby are just two players of the many ’40s talents on show here. Poor James Hagan scores for England, but this isn’t an official international, and his actual England record consists of one friendly against Denmark in 1948. He was thirty, and had lost the best years of his career to the War.
That’s all he lost. The second film (apparently) is taken by the Nazis. It shows a propaganda match played in an arena in the fortress town of Terezin in Czechoslovakia, which had been turned into a cross between a ghetto and a Jewish Potemkin Village. You might know the place better by its German name, Theresianstadt. Terezin also contained the largest Gestapo prison in the country. The match is likely to have been part of what was called the “Embellishment” of Theresianstadt by the Germans, which turned the camp into a grotesque happy theatre for the benefit of the visiting Danish and Swedish Red Cross. Accounts differ, but not as to what followed. Within 2-3 months of the game, all but about 400 of the town’s inmates were transported, mostly to Auschwitz. It’s reckoned that 33,000 people died in the town itself, with a further 88,000 taken to Auchwitz.
After the War, Terezin became an internment camp for Germans, and the dying continued for another year through a mixture of disease and revenge murder. The last German prisoners were not released until 1948.
England v Italy 1977
It was all about goals - about setting Italy an impossible target in their final World Cup Qualifier which would come against Luxembourg in Rome. Six goals for England was surely out of the question, but any number would help. If they got two, Italy would only need to win 1-0 in Rome; three would ask the Italians to get three for themselves in Rome.
It was one of Ron Greenwood’s first matches in charge, and England were cheered off at the end. Here’s why:
It’s interesting to be reminded just how bad 1970s professional fouling could be, and how much things have improved - yes, improved! since.
Why Aren’t English Football Managers More Intelligent?
There’s a definite urge - don’t you have it? to say that English football managers just aren’t as intelligent as their foreign counterparts. In a comment left on an earlier post, John Sinnott said “I’ve done lots of interviews with overseas players and managers and invariably they were always smarter and brighter and more analytical than their English peers.”
There’s a lot of truth in that. Here’s why.
English Education
Professional football emerged onto the scene at the same time as state education. Many Edwardian players were the first people in their family who were able to read. There are conditions specific to the Edwardian situation, but by the time Bobby Charlton was at grammar school in the late 1940s and early 1950s, intelligent, talented young sportsmen were being encouraged away from the playing field and towards white collar careers. Brian Clough’s long-time captain, John McGovern, was bound for university and a very different kind of life when Old Big ‘Ead intervened. Education creams off some of the brains that might otherwise have been inclined to football.
The Maximum Wage
The Maximum Wage for footballers was introduced in 1901 at a level of £4 per week. At the time, this was well in excess of what most players could hope to earn, so there was relatively little opposition to the move and much of that was weak. What’s more, £4 per week would remain a good wage in relation to what could be earned in mine, mill or factory. The maximum wage would remain good in such limited terms until after the Second World War. The effect on many contemporary players was small. But the long-term effect the Maximum Wage would have on the game was not. League football became permanently class-based. In 1901, it was far from unknown for an amateur player like Vivien Woodward to turn out for England. The Maximum Wage finally closed the door - which, it must be admitted, was already swinging to - on middle class players, or intelligent boys for whom there were other, more lucrative options by the time the 1950s consumer boom was underway.
That wouldn’t have mattered so much was it not for the unconscious creation of a management tradition in the ’10s and ’20s.
Only a Horse Can Become a Jockey
Edwardian Secretary-Managers weren’t always former players - there simply wasn’t the pool of ex-professionals in retirement that would exist a decade later. But by the 1950s, it was assumed almost without question that a manager would have played, preferably at the top level:
To be a good coach you must first have been a good player (Bill Shankly)
There are arguments for and against this position. A glance at the Premiership shows Arsene Wenger, Avram Grant, Sven Goran Eriksson, and Rafa Benitez amongst those who failed to reach the very top as players for one reason or another. Jose Mourinho, recently at Chelsea, was another.
Mourinho himself has argued that a good former player will have an instinctive feel for parts of the game that the intelligent non-playing observer will miss.
Whichever side of that argument you are on, one thing is clear. Management has not been a way back into football for Englishmen who missed out on playing. Becoming a player is the footballing equivalent of the 11+. Fail it, and you are gone for good.
Sir Clive Woodward was a brilliant young footballer, invited to trial by serious League clubs. His father disapproved, and packed him off to a rugby-playing navy boarding school. He’d eventually find himself in rugby, both as a player and a very successful coach, but when he sought to bring his expertise into his first sporting love, he was obstructed and rejected. Sir Clive Woodward is a case study in the self-imposed exile of English football from the possibility of bringing in intelligence and innovation, not from outside itelf, but merely from outside the ranks of former players.
Kinds of Intelligence
There is an urge - don’t you feel it? to assume that the kind of intelligence you possess is the kind those purblind other people need in order to progress. The same goes for your outlook: I’ve often pondered what a middle-class English football culture would look like. One where the kind of impulse that creates a Beagle 2, or a Concorde, held sway.
So when surviving England players from the ’50s and ’60s lay into “blackboard manager” Sir Walter Winterbottom for being too much the well-spoken scholar, it’s natural for me to want to leap to his defence, to say “you could all have done with a bit more of that.” Natural, too, to watch blurred 1970s interviews with Rinus Michels and to feel Holland-envy.
But football isn’t a Space Race or a work of art, for all that it can feel as exciting as the first and as beautiful as the second.
Footballers need to be barked at by sergeant-major types. (John Aston, ex-Manchester United)
He didn’t know how to handle players, how to talk to them. He spoke too well, too precisely, like a schoolmaster. Walter had this impeccable accent, whereas football’s a poor man’s game, players expect to be sworn at, a bit of industrial language. (Sir Bobby Charlton on Sir Walter Winterbottom)
Communication, in other words. You can have all the ideas in the world, but if you can’t take people with you, they are as good as none. It’s been part of Sam Allardyce’s success that he has brought in new ideas by the cartload, to Bolton and now to Newcastle, whilst making them sound like bootroom tradition. It’s not just intelligence, but intelligence properly applied, and less intelligence, well applied, will trump genius delivered by tactless, insensitive, arrogant means. The intelligence that writes a novel, or composes music, or builds a business, or creates technological innovation, is not the kind that holds a team together and makes the most of its combined, limited, strengths.
There are managers who can do both. Jose Mourinho would be considered an intellectual in many English circles if they knew more about him. But that doesn’t stop him playing a very effective leader of his band of brothers. The question is, do class vs intelligence issues keep the English Mourinhos out of the game? We can’t really know. I think so, probably. But it’s only my hunch.
English football is like the National Lottery
Steve McClaren is reported to be earning £2.5million per year as England coach. Premiership stadia are the newest and best in Europe, and so are many of the training facilities. Why isn’t football becoming attractive as a career choice to the middle classes?
Perhaps it is, but the trend is too new to show up. But I don’t think so.
Because, in a white-collar, middle-class world, football is a handle people can grasp when they want to make working-class claims. It’s the preservation railway of a long-finished class war. And middle class values of intelligence, change, creativity, aren’t welcome because, by and large, we don’t want them to be. Football’s always been an entertainment more than a sport for the English, and now it has that escapist quality; it’s a place where you can STOP being so middle class and can shout and swear and drink and just stop thinking for a little while.
And it’s fake money: there are only twenty Premiership coaches, and 81 English players, in the Premiership. Since 2004, the National Lottery has created nearly 500 millionaires in the South East alone. If we have such long odds on tapping into Lottery winnings, how much less chance do we have of cutting in on Premiership wealth in playing or coaching roles? Instead, the middle classes are in charge of the new football support industries - reporting, broadcasting, product placement, kit design, stadium development, market expansion. Sport medicine. Even catering. Everything except what is going on on the pitch itself.
So, why aren’t English managers more intelligent? Because there are too many ways in which you can not become a football person, and not enough ways in which you can change direction, and become a football man later on in your life. Because you have to have been a horse. And because, ultimately, we just don’t want this sort of change to happen. It would be like asking for a more intellectual version of “Play Your Cards Right.” Football’s a heritage industry, and it ain’t that kind of heritage. Be careful what you wish for. Here are two interviews with managers, one English, one from abroad. You’re an intelligent, cultured sort, so you won’t want subtitles. Which do you prefer?
To Prepare or Not to Prepare?
In 2003, Martin Johnson lifted the Rugby World Cup. His England were, without argument, the best prepared team in the tournament, a group who had spent 3-4 years working towards this ultimate goal. England lost their visionary coach and inspirational captain shortly after the World Cup, and have spent the subsequent years in the rugby wilderness. New Zealand arrived in France in 2007 carrying England’s old mantle of best team in the world, likeliest to succeed. Like Woodward’s England, the All Blacks did their homework over 2004-7, developing, thinking, growing. They, not England, were the ready men. Other teams feared them and wanted to avoid them. When England surprised themselves by beating Australia, the first thought of many over here was that it was all going to end in tears in the next round, where we’d meet New Zealand, who’d put in four good years creating the thrilling and unstoppable side… that lost to France in the Quarter Finals.
What a blow for the out and out sporting professionals. The ones who make their own luck. The attention to detail men. The thinkers and the planners. It’s England, capably patched together by Brian Ashton, who will be in tomorrow’s final. New Zealand, who did everything right except to win against France, have gone home, taking nothing but failed potential and the memories of dented airport cars with them.
It is both a frustration and a beauty of sport that you can spend years in getting yourself ready, either as a team or as an individual, only to lose on the day to someone who has neither your talent or tenacity or persistence.
Is it really worth putting all that work in? Does the All Blacks experience tell us that, after all, natural talent, passion and commitment win out over professionalism, hard work and development?
Sometimes, yes, sometimes no. Without that uncertainty, sport would hardly be worth watching.
Noel Cantwell joined Manchester United in 1960 from West Ham, where he’d been coached by Ron Greenwood. Many years later, he told Leo McKinstry how surprised he was at the state of Old Trafford at the time:
There was no proper coaching whatsoever. No one at Old Trafford knew anything about coaching. Training was so boring it would drive you mad. We would just have a few laps, a five-a-side, and sometimes a game at the back of the stands, where people kicked the fuck out of each other. . Out on the field, there did not seem to be any system or pattern. We were just a team of individuals and I wanted to see us playing for each other. People would not come and help, as they had done at West Ham… At West Ham we’d had modern training gear. But at Old Trafford, it was all great big old sweaters and socks full of holes.. It would remind you of being in prison.
Eamonn Dunphy, another 1960 arrival at Old Trafford, has described the Matt Busby of the time as still “a wreck” after Munich, and never to be again the man he had been before that. Jimmy Murphy, Busby’s number two and a huge influence on the Busby Babes, was also suffering after-effects, and had taken to drink.
But the situation persisted - when John Giles left in 1963 - taking with him his FA Cup Winner’s medal, which tells you something - he found a quite different set-up at Revie’s Leeds:
When I arrived at Leeds, it was totally different. There was great attention to detail. Don (Revie) would be out there on the training field, putting things right week by week. And the atmosphere at Elland Road was different from Old Trafford, where there were a lot of players who did not get on.
Between the arrival of Giles at Leeds and the retirement of Matt Busby, Leeds won one league title to Manchester United’s two, and the Inter-City Fairs Cup against Manchester’s European Cup. Leeds won the Fairs Cup one more time in the 1970s, but that would prove to be Leeds’ peak insofar as that level of competition was concerned.
Even Liverpool, emerging from a similar situation to that of Revie’s Leeds, won two 1960s titles and an FA Cup, without ever venturing into the kind of professionalism, thinking and effort that went on at Leeds.
And yet - Leeds were, after all, so close, constantly, to greater things. And wasn’t Revie guilty of being too professional with his lads? Weren’t they a transformed side in the early 1970s when he finally let them off the leash? Clough’s Derby players felt that Revie kept his team too tense to be entirely themselves when it came to the crucial ties.
It’s not that the All Blacks, or Leeds, prove that proper preparation is a waste of time. But they do prove, once and for all, that in sport - do what you will beforehand - you will need your luck on the day. And I think they show that a little laughter in the right place doesn’t go amiss.
One successful manager is rumoured to have brought booze onto the team bus. Before the games. Naming no names..
The End of Mourinho
Only in England can you be a prophet in your own country whilst still coming from abroad.
It’s been a bad eighteen months for the people I’d call prophets. Martin Amis is being dragged backwards from the broadsheet pickup truck because of one 2-year-old line which contradicts a dozen others of his before and since. Richard Dawkins is to be condemned for what Walt and Mearsheimer are not, nor countless other incompletely-politicized middle-class types. Ayan Hirsi Ali is disdained by sui-disant left-wing Brits who have had things considerably easier than she. I don’t agree with everything these people say - and I have no heroes as such. But the balance of talent is with the prophets and not with the critics. It always was, and that’s been the problem.
Then there’s Mourinho. “Moanrinho”, or whatever “funny” name you might repeat endlessly to your friends, laughing loudly each time. I find this following clip shatteringly sad. It’s all in the eyes:
Actually, it’s not all in the eyes - it’s in the shoulders as well, in the corners of the mouth, in the tone of voice and in his choice of outfit.
Arsene Wenger, Cristiano Ronaldo, Stephen Hunt, Andy Johnson and, most of all, the Berkshire Ambulance Service, deserved their apologies from him over the last three years.
But tell me you don’t appreciate a man who will allow himself to be smuggled into a changing room in a laundry basket under the noses of UEFA.
I think he’s better off out of England, and especially out of English football. From Portugal, it must look all Bobby Robson, all Paisley, Clough and Shanks. A place where large personalities who know the game get the time to build big sides from nothing. Where fans understand more than the fate of their own club and applaud opponents. That’s still part of it, as Wenger, Ferguson and perhaps Sam Allardyce can testify. But what an underbelly: passive aggressive, alcoholic, fickle, cowardly and stupid. There are still places in the world who think all Englishmen are David Niven, but we’re not. When Mourinho arrived in 2004, I truly believe he thought he’d arrived to do his career-defining work in the oldest, greatest league in the world. By the time he left, I wonder how his feelings towards us had changed.
Even England at its very best - and Cobham, where Chelsea trained, is England at its very best - is a long way from Portugal and Spain. Not a long way timewise, of course - you can be there in two hours nowadays. The gulf’s social, cultural; it’s hundreds of little assumptions and attitudes that you barely notice when they belong to you and you’re at home. Four years at Chelsea was Mourinho’s longest stay at a club. It’s also the longest by far that he’s been away from home. And away from the people amongst whom he built up that marvellous, witty confidence that we saw so much of in 2004-5 and have scarcely seen since.
That confidence was wittled away more at Stamford Bridge than anywhere else, of course. The last player Mourinho truly brought in to his side was Michael Essien in the summer of 2005. The tight group Mourinho gathered around him - not without difficulty, just without half the trouble that would follow - then had to cope with the addition of an unwanted outer lining. That lining was a mix of bargain basement stuff and Championship Manager picks like Ballack and Shevchenko. Then there was the slow and steady castration by degrees Mourinho was subjected to by his boss. Neither Frank Arnesen nor Avram Grant were brought in as support as such. Arnesen in particular is not the kind of man who thrives out of the sun or under the thumb. And there were others beside them. Latterly, both CEO Peter Kenyon and Frank Arnesen are reported jockeying for the credit for Chelsea’s recent run of success. If that’s true, it’s outrageous.
It’s a long time to stay within unhappy walls. I hope Mourinho finds the right place to do his real work. I don’t expect him to turn up at Sheffield Wednesday or Nottingham Forest, although I think he’d do superbly, history-changingly, at either. But now that the England job is back on the market, I say, run! and keep running!
“I went to Leicester for a very big fee”
As if to prove that absolutely everything is on the web these days, here are some extracts from a 1976 book of poems published by the current manager of Wales.
The title’s harsh - some of this is perfectly serviceable verse, not pretending to be any more than it is.
Return From Spain has a genuine feel to it:
We’re coming in to land at Speke,
My legs are feeling very weak,
We’ve just returned from Barcelona,
And now I’m going for a sauna.
But the pressmen’s questions are all the same,
‘Where’s your poem for the Derby game???’
I tell them, ‘Poems don’t grow on trees’,
And you ain’t forthcoming with any fees!!
You’ll have to give me one more day,
They laugh and talk, then walk away.
Russia 2 England 1
It’s like that first real drink of the evening, England going out of a tournament.
All of that tension falls off your shoulders and the world rights itself. We hardly knew how bad we’d been feeling until it was over.
And the football suddenly gets better. Remember Euro 2000? I caught this one in the Hand in Hand in Wimbledon, and fell in love with the game all over again. A real Golden Generation’s golden moment:
When no home nations make it, you can forget all the worry about winning and just enjoy the football. England missed Euro 1984 too. France didn’t:
There’s still time for many of these England players. Not for Lampard, who will be 33 come the next World Cup. But Rooney, Defoe, Crouch, Barry, Gerrard, the Cole brothers, Owen and co. will be around. England weren’t at the 1994 World Cup, but here is the ‘94 game in which Roger Milla, at 42, became the oldest player to appear and score in a Finals match:
After ten years in the South London/Surrey borders, I’ve overdosed on White Van Man and won’t miss what would have been the inevitable revival of the debate about the carrying of plastic St George flags. But I’m sorry for Steve McClaren. He’d just found his feet in that most difficult of jobs. But at least he’s spared the even more appalling spotlight that comes with tournament finals.
Another drink, anyone? And maybe a trip out of town..
Ramprakash and the Bad Old Days
Mark Ramprakash is my direct contemporary, born in the fabulous late-60s sunshine and condemned to make his entry onto the scene in the dog days of the early ’90s.
Now he has found second wind, and may be looking at a late-life call-up to the England Test team after many seasons of superb county form. He is Wisden Cricketer of the Year, and the pride of my nameless, featureless generation.
So what happened, Mark?
You have to remember just how grim the early ’90s were. For Mark, that grimness was compounded by his having come forward at a time when English cricket had far less idea than they have now of how to run an international team.
Ramprakash made his Test debut young, aged 21, famously in the same match as the Le Tissier of cricket, Graeme Hick. Both men made the same score in the first as in the second innings - Hick 6, twice, and Ramps 27, twice. Ideally, a player of that age who is clearly up to standard is given time to bed himself in, in the Australian fashion, form giving way to substance.
Not a bit of it. He was dropped after eight matches, 15 innings and 241 runs. It would take him another four years to double his appearances.
This is, of course, precisely the wrong way to introduce bright young talent to the top of the game. It is, however, a good way to kill confidence, sow doubt and extinguish potential. There would be good Test days ahead for Ramprakash, especially in two series against the Windies and Australia, but we’d have to wait until 1997-8 and 1998-9 for that.
Ramprakash paid for arriving at a time when things were bad in English cricket, but not bad enough. How he’d have loved to be 21 now and breaking into a proper England Test team with some experience and genuine cricketing success under its belt.
But 1991 England was a mixed bag - Gooch at his peak, a captain leading by constant example, making up for lost time; the young Michael Atherton, showing signs of the mental strength that he would need in spades later on; Robin Smith and, sometimes, Botham, left over from the 1985 Ashes team; Lewis, Defreitas and Lawrence bowling. It doesn’t look bad, looking back, but how often it wasn’t good enough.
Above all, it wasn’t a side that could do without developing Ramprakash. England had a deserved reputation at the time for cliquey, unfriendly dressing rooms and changing, inconsistent management. Whatever else has changed since 1991, that has.
English sportsmen still have to master the art of continuous top-level performance. Both the rugby and cricket teams went into steep decline after their respective triumphs, and the very recent return to grace of the rugby men is welcome but not before time. If Ramprakash is restored - and restoration should be the word here - let it be part of a return for our cricketers too.
The Actual Language of Debate
..the rhetoric, the actual language of debate, employs a vocabulary determined more by the left than the right. The right has no rhetorical lexicon of any general moral value. The moral lexicon belongs to the left: the right can only argue by resorting to it. One has only to think of terms of values such as ‘radicalism’ (meaning good), or ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’ and so on to see that they spring out of a socially reforming, egalitarian, pacifist bedrock. Only in sport do the figures of patriotism, self-reliance, martial spirit and competition play a positive part.
(Not to mention references to good old working-class values.)
