He hasn’t finished yet, but as things stand, midfielder Cristiano Ronaldo has scored 26 goals in 28 League appearances. Add in his 3 FA Cup goals and 7 Champions League strikes, and we can see that in 40 appearances (38 starts) he has managed 36 goals.
It means that if he scores a goal a game from here until the end of the Premiership season, he’ll join Alan Shearer and Andrew Cole as joint Premiership goalscoring record holder. And that’s good. But what’s more interesting about Ronaldo is not how he compares as a remarkable goalscoring midfielder up against modern out-and-out strikers, but how he compares against William “Dixie” Dean.
Because this is where the jaw really begins to drop. Dean, of course, scored more goals in his career than any other top flight English player. Arthur Rowley scored more, but at a slower rate, and for much of the time in lower divisions. Dean played one full season outside Division One.
What’s more, and again of course, Dean scored 60 goals in one 42-game season, but I’d argue that, great as that achievement is, it has more than a little to do with the 1925 change in the offside rule which brought several season’s glorious goalscoring chaos to the Football League.
It’s comparing Ronaldo’s season with Dixie’s other seasons that’s interesting.
Remember that Ronaldo has scored 26 in 28, or, if you prefer, 36 from 40, from midfield. (Only 4 of them penalties). Here’s Dean:
1925-26: 32 goals from 38 games.
1926-27: 21 goals from 27 games.
1927-28: 60 goals from 39 games.
1928-29: 26 goals from 29 games.
1929-30: 23 goals from 25 games.
1931-32: 45 goals from 38 games.
1932-33: 24 goals from 39 games.
1934-35: 26 goals from 38 games.
Injuries aside, Dean kept it up for year upon year. And he started younger - Dean was born in 1907, and was Theo Walcott’s age in the first season that I’ve featured here. Ronaldo is 23, two years older than Dean when Dean met Babe Ruth.
But Dean wasn’t playing against five man defences every week, let alone five man defences with midfielders sitting deep to shield them.
I think Dean would have sympathised with Ronaldo. Dean was a target for rough play too, but at a time when this was seen as normal. (And there’s just a bit too much artificial disgust at Ronaldo’s diving: when Alan Shearer bent the rules or deceived refs, commentators used to say that he’d “used his experience.” Then there’s the young Stan Matthews’ shock on his debut at the stamping, kicking, surreptitious punching and gouging that went on in First Division games in the ’30s and no doubt still does..)
Ronaldo is not just scoring at George Best rates, in George Best’s best season. He’s not just scoring at Alan Shearer rates; he’s in Dixie Dean territory. Not quite Jimmy Greaves yet, but he’s quite clearly improving as a player and that can’t be ruled out. Because - this hasn’t been one of those “surprise” seasons, where a new player sweeps all before him Marcus Stewart style. And Stewart “only” managed 19 anyway. Ronaldo has been around for a few seasons now, and other teams know all about him.
It’s remarkable. We’re all here to see it at first hand, rather than having to rely upon the memories of old men and the exigencies of nitrate film. I expect the famous backheel of a week ago will be the moment that encapsulates it in years to come, but for me, that Dixie Dean-style header against Roma last night is the one that raises my echoes.
A large chunk, amounting to about one-tenth of the entire game, of Celtic’s ‘67 triumph, which took place in one of the most beautiful arenas then used for football.
The same game watched first in black and white, then in colour, is faster, more skilful and less muddy the second time around. The moral of this for managers and coaches is, encourage your teams to play in colour.
It’s being reported as a dire game. But for those of us who weren’t looking to it to “prove to Europe” something or other about the Premiership, it was both tense and compelling, spoiled only by ad breaks at insultingly-chosen moments. (We even went to ads between the end of extra time and the start of penalties, an ignorant and tasteless thing to do).
Liverpool now have far too much “history” with the European Cup for commentators to avoid making too much of it. My own thoughts aren’t “Rome, Istanbul, Athens”, but, well done and bully for you. The plain fact of the matter is that Liverpool have spent much of this season as spectators to other teams’ narratives, and their arrival in the Final this time is as much interruption as achievement.
Some of the greatest team seasons end without silverware. The ultimate example of this belongs of course to Leeds United in 1969-70 - runners-up in the League, FA Cup Finallists, semi-finalists in the European Cup. At one point that team played five games in eight days, at a time when Leeds played as a first team, not as a first team squad.
The League that year went west with a 3-1 defeat to Southampton, which Norman Hunter described as “embarrassing”. 1970 would be Everton and Alan Ball’s title. But there was nothing embarrassing about a narrow defeat to Jock Stein’s Celtic:
In 1970, FA Cup semi-finals didn’t go to penalties: drawn matches meant replays, until a winner emerged. Leeds needed three matches to get past Manchester United. And then, for the first time, the FA Cup Final went to a replay:
It was an infamously tough game:
And then came Chelsea’s equaliser, and, eventually, defeat:
That would be Leeds United who have just slipped into the equivalent of the old Third Division. Next season contains the sorry chance of two ghost-ridden Leeds v Forest matches, assuming that Forest don’t succeed in the play-offs. I don’t think I could bear to watch.
Liverpool came close to a treble - something that doesn’t seem to be mentioned often, for reasons I can’t fathom - in 1976-7. League and European Cup were obtained - and an FA Cup Final:
1969-70, 1976-7, and Manchester United’s successful tilt at the same targets in 1999, were all essentially one-team seasons. What has set this year apart is the way both Chelsea and the rejuvenated Manchester United have been doing a Leeds, something completely unprecedented. Treble attempts are rare enough even these days, with the top four clubs dominating trophies.
Until last weekend and Bolton’s farewell to Allardyce in a 2-2 draw against the Champions, not only were two teams going for the treble, but there was the prospect of the season ending in the armageddon atmosphere of three Chelsea-Manchester United matches that would decide the oldest football competition in the world, the wealthiest football competition in the world, and, not in any way incidentally, the Premiership title.
It would have felt like the culmination of more than just a football season. Victory would have given meaning and shape to Mourinho’s tenure at Chelsea or a climax to Ferguson’s at Manchester United. The contest would have been the greatest display of football management in such a short space of time imaginable: how do two evidently great managers carry their players through such fire as this?
We’ll never know. In the real world, football doesn’t often attend to that kind of history. That saddening mediocrity that waits just below football’s surface has surfaced again, and, piece by piece, the season’s great ending is being taken apart. The title race has fizzled: if Milan win tonight by only one goal, the Champions League will be 2005 again, and it will be interesting to see if either United or Chelsea care too much about the FA Cup after that.
The last four seasons all seem to be about incredible possibility, never fulfilled. I can’t help tracking all that back to 2004 and Rooney’s injury against Portugal. Perhaps appropriately, it’s very hard to find the moment on internet video. Something good stopped growing that night, and now there’s a sense of it having gone away altogether.
I’d like to promote two comments by Matthew Turner to this post:
In cricket, I was unaware of the type of bowler known as the ‘lob’ bowler. Wisden’s dictionary of cricket says that this was not a specialist skill until the mid-19th century, when other forms of underarm bowling were obscolete (and since 2000, against the rules unless agreed in advance). “The baffling flight of a well bowled lob could pose serious problems of timing for the batsmen, and even if he managed to make contact with the ball he was still not out of danger, for the lob-bowlers great aim was to bowl balls that were difficult to score off unless hit in the air”. “Lobsters” survived 50 years longer than other underarm bowlers, with George Simpsom-Heyward taking 23 wickets for the MCC (ie England) against South Africa in 1910-1911. However by the 1910s they were dying out as batsmen found the best way to cope with them was to smack it around, and they proved too expensive, with the last first-class lobster Trever Maloney in 1921.
Likewise roundarm bowling, which I referred to in the previous post.
Darts, you see, used to be “my” sport. It began in WHSmiths in Bedford at the turn of the 1980s, when I spent part of a book voucher on John Lowe’s autobiography-cum-coaching-manual. Lowe was the best darts player in the world at that time, ignoring the fact there that darts wasn’t and isn’t played in enough countries to fully justify that use of “world”. It was the immediately pre-Bristow period. Lowe - clever, polite, dedicated - was an easy man to admire, and his enthusiasm for darts rubbed off on me in a big way. I pestered my parents for a board, put it up in the garage at regulation height, and began to put Lowe’s advice into action. Lowe saw three demands in darts: correct posture (to provide a consistent launching pad for the dart); correct grip and release (you need a smooth action and follow-through) and concentration, especially when surrounded by the drunken, baying crowds usual at competitions. Lowe was sufficiently confident in his advice - or seemed to be, to a early teenaged boy - to list and describe his rivals on the basis that, now, “these are your rivals, too.”
For the next few years, I played darts almost all of the time. Luckily, one or two of my friends shared my interest, and the summer sunshine went around our empty lawns and playing fields whilst from our shadowed garages came the thump of dart into board, hour after hour. Endless games of 501 or 1001, “clock” games to improve our performances on the doubles, plus the occasional game of “killer”, where you stood at opposite ends of the garage and attempted to hit your opponent with any of your three darts.
Inevitably, we “got good”. How good didn’t really register with me. Then, one evening on holiday in Devon, when I was aged 15, my father took me down to a local pub. It was early evening, and the dartboard wasn’t in use, so we borrowed the arrows from behind the bar and began chucking. I wasn’t on home ground, and didn’t like competing with my old man, so wasn’t putting much into it. Some interested locals gathered round, and, after making encouraging comments to me, and sarcastic ones to my father, challenged us to a game. My father must have sensed something undesirable in the wind, and demurred, but being young and foolish, I said yes, I’ll play you. And I put my darts hat back on.
Suffice to say that they didn’t detain me long. I finished my first leg treble 18, bull, double-top, won the next leg, and then found my hand being shaken.
The funny thing was that the experience of easy victory over my cocky elders sated me. Now, I wonder what could have been had I persisted. I have a board now, but my eyesight has deteriorated and the old skill has gone. How would darts have coped with me? Would I have had to don a persona (it would have been Bertie Wooster, more than likely) or take to drink? What did I miss? Was it this?
Back to changing sport, however. One thing that strikes me about Matthew’s discussion of lob bowlers is this: just because a game is governed by rules does not mean that every means of playing within those rules has been investigated. There’s always the unexpected. One example of the unexpected, Shane Warne, has just retired from test cricket. Before Warne, the top rank bowlers were almost all quickies, and had been for years. When you consider that the inventor of the googly died in 1936, the sheer surprise that was Warne comes into context.
It’s more often that rule changes generate changes in play that the change in the rule itself did not anticipate. In 1925, the increasing domination of football by defenders led to an untightening of the offside law, which, as planned, led to a glut of goals. No coincidence that George Camsell’s 59 league goals in a season for Middlesbrough and Dixie Dean’s 60 the following year for Everton (100 in all competitions including internationals) came immediately subsequent to the law change. But what also came after the law change - the Buchan/Chapman “W-M” formation, with a “stopper” centre-half, and, according to witnesses, the swinging of the whole game in the favour of large, physically imposing players over clever, skilful ones - was not expected.
Or, changes in technology bring about change. Men’s tennis, I feel, went through an unwatchable period following the replacement of wooden racquets with aluminium and composite ones. Too much depended on serve, all of a sudden, and the long, rally-filled Wimbledon afternoons typical of the Borg-McEnroe rivalry went away.
But - as Matthew said in his comment about darts to the previous post - it’s also the case that an individual can pull a game up all on his own. This isn’t necessarily always to the British taste. The height of snooker’s popularity came just before Stephen Hendry’s long period of dominance, something I put down to 1970s/80s snooker being populated by a supremely various set of characters and its potential for upset at that time, allowing the British taste for soap to take hold of it. (When I say that the British want “soap” more than success, by the way, I’m NOT referrring to “celebrity culture.” It’s more the longing for what e.g. Coronation Street was before the BBC coarsened soap with the parodic “Eastenders”: entertaining interplay of characters you could identify with in some way. The kind of thing “Footballers’ Wives” is about is different altogether - all to do with nausea, disgust and contempt, and “cultured” middle-class attempts to buy into, and cash in on, something unshared and misunderstood.
One thing that change in sport does seem apt to remove is the chance of upset and surprise. Noone expects giant-killing in the County Championship, or in the Olympic 100 metres final. I don’t know if I count Argentina’s victory at Twickenham as such, either, given the rapid growth and development of the game in Italy and South America while we determinedly dustbin our own recent growth and improvement. Very occasionally, and not for some years now, an underdog British tennis player (NOT Henman/Rudeski/Murray, who are/were very good players on a world scale and able to compete) will pull off the unexpected in an early round of Wimbledon. But really, giant-killing is left to football, and there seems something unique and wonderful about the continuing unexpectedness of the game in that respect. The German phrase, “Der Ball Ist Rund” remains valid.
Also unique to football is changes within, and interest in changes within, the audience. Athletics crowds are there to clap a rhythm for jumpers and pole vaulters; rugby crowds drink from the open backs of their cars and know one song per country; ice hockey crowds keep as far back from the rink as they can, if they are wise, and as for basketball.. football is different. You’ll love this:
And this - although I don’t agree with the football stadium/place of worship comparison entirely. (Note that, with standing at Premiership grounds prohibited, that we now go to pubs to stand, watch football, shout and jump around. When England v Argentina in 1998 crashed to a finish, I found myself hiding under the table with my hands over my ears, and didn’t watch England “live” again for almost two years).
And of course, this:
All of this is staringly obvious, of course. But it’s Sunday, and I really just wanted to talk about darts. After suffering through both Match of the Day Live (Liverpool and Arsenal kicking each other up into the air) and Match of the Day Dead (I switched off after watching what happened to Macclesfield. What is it about FA Cup mismatches and sending off goalkeepers?) I wonder if there’s ever any point, either in interviewing players and managers (they always say the same thing, and you always know what they’re going to say) or in having studio guests, who - for all the criticism they come in for - have the impossible job of coming up with something that will be as or more interesting as just slinging the next match tape on. Football tells its own stories best, without the aid of half-time comments. A good COMMENTATOR, on the other hand, can make sense out of chaos and genuinely add to the atmosphere, which is why so many fans who are actually at matches have Radio 5 on via headphones to hear about what’s passing before their eyes.
But even here the British suffer. Contrast any British commentator you can name with these urbane, informed, intelligent and insightful European commentators witnessing the greatest Champions League Final goal ever. It’s Zidane’s: an artist’s goal, watched by men not ashamed of intelligence or of art. You would, ideally, have Spanish to follow the discussion. But if you’re British, you almost certainly don’t. Listen, though, and learn. It’s no wonder Michael Robinson never came home:
Watching these clips, it’s impossible not to be struck by the slowness of the game compared to today. It has to be remembered that they were playing as fast as contemporary fitness levels allowed - and that’s still true now: the chances are that we’re only seeing the beginning of the acceleration of play, and the Premiership will look drugged from the perspective of 2030.
Thanks are due to Jonathan Derbyshire (in comments) for corrections to this post.
Not forgotten by fans of the teams concerned! but it’s interesting, in the light of the English dominance of European club football between 1977 and 1985 to take a look at what happened immediately prior to that period. Throw in Celtic and Rangers, and you have what might have been twenty years, not eight, of predominance, and no European Cup trebles from Ajax and Bayern. Run your eye down this list - so many more victories than you might have recalled, and so very many semi-finals and finals and might-have-beens. Especially for Revie’s Leeds.
In 1969, Manchester United lost in the semi-final of the European Cup, Manchester City won the European Cup-Winner’s Cup and Newcastle United won the Fairs Cup.
In 1970, Celtic lost the European Cup Final to Feyenoord 2-1 after extra time, Manchester City won the European Cup Winner’s Cup and Arsenal won the Fairs Cup.
In 1971, Leeds United won the Fairs Cup and Chelsea won the European Cup Winners’ Cup.
In 1972, Celtic lost in the semi-final of the European Cup on penalties, Rangers won the European Cup Winner’s Cup, and Tottenham Hotspur won the UEFA Cup, beating Wolves in the final.
In 1973, Derby County were robbed, probably via bribes to a referee, in the semi-final of the European Cup against Juventus, Leeds lost in the semi-final of the European Cup Winner’s Cup, and Liverpool won the UEFA Cup.
In 1974, Celtic again lost in the semi-final of the European Cupand Tottenham Hotspur lost in the final of the UEFA Cup.
In 1975, this happened:
In 1976, West Ham lost in the final of the European Cup Winner’s Cup and Liverpool won the UEFA Cup.
Were it not for the well-publicised fact that the two clubs haven’t met competitively before, you’d imagine this as one of those floodlit glory nights from the 1960s. Celtic are a better side, now, than they give themselves credit for, and were simply unfortunate to run into Louis Saha in the mood.
Of course, the fantasy Manchester-Celtic game would have matched the ‘66 United that saw Law, Charlton, Best and Crerand at their peak, against the Lisbon Lions. It’s sometimes forgotten now how quickly Jock Stein brought success to Celtic, or how completely. It’s forgotten, especially south of the border, that there were TWO European Cup Finals for the hoops..
Stein came to Celtic from Dunfermline and Hearts, having played for them earlier in his career. At Dunfermline, Stein had taken over a side about to be relegated: within a year all that was forgotten and he’d won them the Scottish Cup. It took him slightly longer to win Celtic the European Cup - two whole years, in fact, slow by his standards. Great managers have their impact straight away: they don’t learn their way up from mediocrity.
Stein, like Clough, managed Leeds United for 44 days during the 1970s.
That fantasy 1960s match, by the way, was a high-scoring affair, or would have been had it happened, and had it happened, you might have thought that it all turned on one controversial decision before Best’s extraordinary cameo in the dying minutes put the game on its head and took United through. (To a match against the Wunderteam or something. I really don’t know how these non-existent tournaments work. Perhaps they are round-robin affairs, also involving the 1890s Aston Villa side, who unexpectedly sweep all before them. But as I say, I really don’t know).
