“Ashes To Ashes” For Football?

“Life On Mars” was bungled at the end, and “Ashes to Ashes” has been bungled at the beginning, but whatever the quality of the thinking behind the screenplay it’s been the best fun to be had on television and the underlying idea is fascinating. I’ll keep the image of Sam Tyler sitting up into the world of my early childhood with me for the rest of my life.

Only the most humourless kind of Guardian hack could begrudge another eight episodes of Gene, Chris and Ray. But the eighties, and policing, press none of the questions that the first series could, and anyway, the eighties of “Ashes to Ashes” thus far is that of a very young version of said hack who doesn’t remember the reality. What a jukebox it is, too: the product of minds who sincerely believe that pop music changes the world. Never mind. We’ll all have a good time watching it. But I can’t help thinking that they’ve missed a trick.

You see, they should have abandoned policing for football.

Really. Imagine the following. A young Manchester United star, wealthy at an early age and world famous, is playing late in the season in a home game at that intimidating high-tec arena. He’s involved in a clash of heads, and goes down like a sack of potatoes, knocked cold.

He comes to, to find his face being swabbed in freezing cold water. As he sits up, he doesn’t recognize the wizened ancient wielding the sponge. And the air smells of cigarettes.. cigarettes, and more deeply smoky besides. His kit hangs on him, heavy suddenly, and soaked in sweat and a little blood. His hand, touching the pitch, finds itself in a bare patch - no grass, just dust and dried mud. Other players are gathering around. That’s not the right strip they’re wearing.. and this isn’t Old Trafford! Everyone’s standing up - and where are the stewards?

His head is aching heavily, and he looks to the touchline, expecting to see a sub warming up. No sub? and hands are hauling him to his feet, pushing him towards the wing: a northern voice yells at him to play wide until he feels better.

You can see where this is going. I have in mind the Manchester United of season 46-47. Old Trafford is bombed out, and Manchester full of other Luftwaffered sites. The young Busby is in charge, but new and finding his feet under impossible circumstances. Our hero doesn’t know where he is - he knows nothing of the era, but boy, is he ever going to find out. And when he asks why he’s here, he’s told that he put in for it. People don’t understand: he could have gone to Arsenal. A strange choice he’s made there. And there’s something people are keeping from him, mentioning only in whispers behind his back, something about his war record…

He’ll play the last game of the season out in his heavy boots and his scratchy kit, and spend most of it on the ground being kicked. Referees will allow this to happen, and his team mates will show no sympathy.

And the season will end, and he’ll go onto close season pay. Ah, yes, close season pay: and there’s no going elsewhere for more money, not without the gaffer’s permission. The club hold his registration. Retain and transfer keeps him there as effectively as bars on a cage. Then there’s the question of the maximum wage.

His huge footballer’s house in Southport is exchanged for frusty digs run by an exhausted woman who has spent the war in queues with a ration book in hand by day and underground by night waiting for the bombs. Her husband and son have not come home. There are other players there - members of what looks like a huge professional squad, far bigger than he’s used to. Across the road from the digs is a huge railway marshalling yard, which shrieks and clangs 24 hours every day; in the next street, a factory that makes the ground tremble and hum. 30s and 40s cars kick up their own kind of row. There is an entire industrial soundscape to be recaptured. And the perpetual smoke from factories, railways, home fires, for this athlete to deal with.

Our hero has one of the treasured starting places in the first team, and his “colleagues” want it off him. There is no coaching, no training as he understands it, no development. In fact, everyone smokes and drinks, especially the trainer.

But there is the young Matt Busby, and he’s quite another thing. Especially for someone who has become used to Sir Alex.

Outside is a seedy, smashed grey-and-redbrick world with nothing to buy, hours needed to buy it, and little to do besides pile into the cinema. Our hero shares a radio, but there are only BBC stations, and nothing he would think of as music. Travel to away matches is a vile experience: overnight train journeys on a broken network, packed in with everyone else, with only cheap hotels and bad food awaiting at the other end before a similar journey back.

The war is over, but things are not getting better, and tempers are frayed. Rationing is tightening further. And then comes winter 1947…

But when everything is a struggle, and everything is a struggle for everyone else too, there is little time to be depressed and genunine camaraderie has a habit of breaking out. Although the binge drinking he’s used to seeing isn’t present - the men in Salford pubs drink beer by the half pint (fact! “Mass Observation” in nearby Bolton..) - there’s a social life and a warmth to just lean back and disappear into.

Why is he there? How does he get back? I don’t know. But then, neither did Sam Tyler’s scriptwriters. And my man isn’t jumping off any tower blocks any time soon.

Does he want to get back? when he finds himself alongside Matthews, Finney, Lawton, Carter, Mannion, Mortensen and Franklin in the greatest ever England squad? Or in a United side who are improving fast and heading for the 1948 FA Cup? Or when he finds his landlady’s daughter to be a very different kind of woman to the ones he met in 2008.

Perhaps, little by little, his memory of 2008 fades. A cartilage injury ends his career before the Cup Final; he marries and runs a pub. When Cristiano Ronaldo joins United half a century later, people scratch their heads and say, wasn’t there another one like him at United, briefly, years and years ago? What was his name? Something shady during the war, never talked about it.. salt of the earth, though, salt of the earth, his grandson’s just been sacked by Chelsea, and they don’t know a good thing..

(By all means have Gene, Ray and Chris in the eighties, but at least have it that Sam finally convinced Gene of his story. So that Drake, who really is deranged, who really doesn’t come from the future - you know in your heart that it’s better that way - causes REAL confusion. Odd rather to have her behaving so strangely, as they’ve set it up, and yet have the heroic trio acting as if nothing bizarre is going on. People call us mental constructs all the time..)

By the way, this is the best FA Cup in living memory, surely?

More on that word “Soccer”

In pursuit of something quite different, I came across the following.

In New Zealand and Australia, “soccer” has been the most common usage since the early part of the twentieth century. In 2005, the game was relaunched in Australia as “football” and the nickname for the national side, the “Socceroos” was expected (by the relevant bureaucrats, of course) to fade away. Naturally, that hasn’t happened, and the nickname is once more appearing on official websites, merchandize and so on. In May 2007, the governing body of New Zealand football, “New Zealand Soccer”, was renamed “New Zealand Football.”

In the United States, however.. the “US Football Association” didn’t include the word “Soccer” in its title until 1945, and didn’t drop the “Football” until 1974. Early US associations overwhelmingly used “Football” e.g. the American League of Professional Football, which was founded in 1894. Some regional leagues did use “Soccer” before World War II.

(This came about as a result of musing over how Commonwealth countries picked up some of our sporting inventions - cricket, rugby, tennis - but it was south and central Europe and America that picked up football. There’s no single answer to why this should be, although it evidently is. Football was actually quite a late developer - recognisable rugby had a 10-20 year head start, and cricket much more: the sports picked up by Commonwealth countries seem to relate to what was popular in Britain at the time of first colonization. And, football seems to have favoured areas experiencing the growth of heavy industry and mining specifically).

Why British Football Needs To Become More British To Succeed

This man went to the same state school as David Beckham:

Twenty years earlier, and in the north, these men were also products of ordinary backgrounds:

..whereas the man you see here was an autodidact:

I was on my uppers during the last recession, and took comfort in the humble location of this man’s blue plaque:

And this man was born in working class Salford. The Tate owns 25 of his paintings now, and good ones can fetch more than half a million pounds at auction:

Men from a country that boasts 101 Nobel prizes - Germany, with approximately twice our population, muster only 76, France 49. Men from a country that published 206,000 books in 2005, more than the US (172,000), China (100,000) and Germany (71,515).

Britain is a country notorious for originality and eccentricity. We saved the modern world in ‘39-’45, then built it, with the jet engine, the transistor, the first proper computer (or was that another Brit, Babbage’s?), and who knows what else..

More recently, another man who had to fight for his education exemplified just what I’m getting at:

Has there ever been a more beautiful car?

Hell, we even invented football.

Which is why we should be ashamed to read this, from Franco Baldini, after his first few days with the best footballers in the country:

We are trying to play more with the ball because the English culture is after two, three passes to hit a long ball. We have to try to play more. We need more technical skill. We have to practise, practise, practise. Also, many times we think about why some players are so important for their club - not just domestically but in European competition too - but they are less effective for England. What we have to work out is why that is. Maybe with their clubs, they play with less pressure than they play with for England. We know they want to play and perform but it’s a problem we want to address. This week has been very important for us so we can see things at first hand.

Our football, if it were truly British, would be original, clever, thinking (and I don’t mean intellectual. I left academia in ‘91 because I wanted colleagues who could find their way out of a paper bag) and one step ahead. It would be subtle, ironic, but effective. Instead, it’s hackneyed, backward.

Superficially exciting, but as embarrassing in international company as Daphne Moon’s brother.

It’s not a class problem. English rugby is a middle class pursuit, and won a world cup during a brief moment of applied intelligence under Sir Clive Woodward, but it couldn’t get away from all that kind of stuff fast enough once he’d resigned.

Motor sport aside, it’s hard to think of a single major British sport that is ahead of its rivals. Everywhere else, the talk is of doing enough to catch up. There’s no ambition at all to do any overtaking.

Given how popular football is, why doesn’t it enjoy the services of the British eccentric and original (I distinguish these from the “great characters” the media creates from time to time)?

In football’s case, I think it’s all about fear. Fear of the obviously intelligent, fear of those people who can do what you can’t. British sport is a safe haven from the “clever”: a place where you can get into a crowd and laugh at what secretly frightens you, makes you feel inferior.

Even football journalists don’t want to look clever. Instead, so many of them talk in a wierd, obviously-fake laddish version of mockney, a language as far away from working class accents as Bertram Wooster’s but twice as ridiculous. That daft change in register when the news team hands over to the sports correspondent..

There’s Simon Clifford, of course. But whereas all British schools once had Acorn’s BBC Micro in their classrooms, how many British schools have taken his approach to the game on board? It’s even non-contact and non-competitive and there are infant versions, so what’s the problem?

The fact is, British football just isn’t very British. It’s not British to be importing expertise - the brain drain’s supposed to be going the other way. It’s not British to be found gormless and clumping, unless it’s in our attempts to brew lager.

So the British game is fast and exciting.. but Arsenal fans don’t miss playing “British”, and neither would you if your club could perform like that. And even that isn’t how British players and British teams should play.. we should be much better than that. It should be impossible for foreign players to use merit to get into the Premiership, and England and Scotland, at least, have it in them to recover the Edwardian lead over the rest of the world. Not through hubris, but by being like the rest of the country.

It doesn’t have to be la-di-da or fancy dan. Tony Harrison isn’t, but look at this! This is what British is like..

I

Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.

Shocked into sleeplessness you’re scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don’t try.

You’re like book ends, the pair of you, she’d say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare…

The ’scholar’ me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.

Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.

At night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we’re alike!

You’re life’s all shattered into smithereens.

Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between ’s
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.

II

The stone’s too full. The wording must be terse.
There’s scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it–

Come on, it’s not as if we’re wanting verse.
It’s not as if we’re wanting a whole sonnet!

After tumblers of neat Johnny Walker
(I think that both of us we’re on our third)
you said you’d always been a clumsy talker
and couldn’t find another, shorter word
for ‘beloved’ or for ‘wife’ in the inscription,
but not too clumsy that you can’t still cut:

You’re supposed to be the bright boy at description
and you can’t tell them what the fuck to put!

I’ve got to find the right words on my own.

I’ve got the envelope that he’d been scrawling,
mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling
but I can’t squeeze more love into their stone.

If only we realized it, we could do to 4-4-2 what Harrison does to that simple ballad form. And then invent new forms, faster and more easily than anyone else. Our popular musicians have. Bowie came from Croydon; Morrisey from Hulme. Harrison himself was a Leeds boy, of course.

Given the state of Arsenal, the reBritishization of football will have to start in the capital. And I have a poster to rally the ranks (click to enlarge):

(copyright cambridge2000.com)

Tout changes a Wembley, next, tout changes a Hackney Marsh, tout changes at the public parks and school pitches and non-league grounds. You can keep your hat on, as they say. But we were being British when we invented this brilliant game, and invented all of the structures that have kept it thriving for so long. Let’s be British in how we play it, once again.

Put Clifford’s methods into primary schools, and in 15 years the world won’t be able to touch our young players. And football will be British again. Because heaven knows what country it resembles now.

AFTERWORD: You’re all going to hate this, aren’t you? But please tell me why - I’d be particularly interested in answers to the question of our national ambition regarding the game, why we don’t seek to be the best, just to keep the rest vaguely in sight, and why it is that our technical skills are still behind fifty-five years after 6-3.

The Perfect Pub For Football - London and Environs

We all have our Platonic Pub ideal. Orwell’s Moon Under The Water comes closest to what most have in mind. But that’s a fictional tavern, and we know that when fictional taverns have the electricity applied to their nipples to bring them to life, terrible things result.

Some Platonic Ideals have remarkable shadows, however. The White Bear in Hampstead - open fires, wood-panelled walls, good food, a decent wine list and plenty of guest beers - is a remarkable shadow. So was this place, once. And, when it rises again, so too will my other corner of a domestic field.

But a football pub needs something that none of these have. A telly. And only a special kind of shadow can fit one in without destroying itself.

Ye Olde White Bear does have one, it’s true. But what a waste to go there for that. They’d have been better off throwing it in through the window of the Duke Of Hamilton next door and hiring deckchairs outside for prospective fans.

Pub plus telly plus fans must fit.

I watched England v Croatia here. They’d probably describe themselves as “environs” rather than London per se, and the television was rather winningly propped up on a chair with its cable trailing along behind. And it was a real “telly”, big, fat and hot, the kind which you’d have had to hit on the side to get it going thirty years ago. The pub’s buildings are older than they look from the outside, and there are many nooks and crannies from which the TV couldn’t be seen. But the gentle cries and groans in warm West Country accents spoke for England. (They did - and now whoever wins from the shortlist, England get a proper manager. It’s a rare no-lose situation for the national side. Let’s enjoy it before it’s spoilt by any actual football).

England v Germany, however, happened here, at what most people would recognise as a more central location. It’s an Arsenal pub, which I think helps although they aren’t my team. It’s one of Youngs’ refurbs, luckily one of those that took place after their wanton destruction of the Britannia in Allen Street. Leffe by the pint, that traditional British standby, and it’s the model for the Mother Black Cap in Withnail.. so the next MTMG meetup might happen here.

Lamb’s Conduit Street used to be the ultimate pub street in Central London. Not only was there the immortal Lamb, but the Sun with its huge cellars and tens of real ales on tap at once - and a trucker’s caff yards away that had kept its plastic decor despite having been bought up by a culinary genius from Bangladesh (now demolished for a new hospital wing - I hear the NHS made the genius a rich man: good). The Lamb is still there, and so is Vats. But no one has a TV, so either bring a MW radio (this is mine; recommended) or use the Force.

The last MTMG meetup took place in the Cardinal, near Victoria, on the evening of the Champions League Final. A great evening, but typical of the kind of year I’ve been having that they’d taken down their big screen and replaced it with Victorian lumber since my previous visit, and it was the next day before delegates learned ‘Pool’s terrible fate.

Sam Smiles’ pubs are odd, aren’t they? Don’t try the wine, but their draught cider is OK, and most other things are extraordinarily cheap. The Cittie of Yorke is a great football pub, if you don’t mind the fact that it isn’t - everyone has drunk under the beady eye of those huge casks and mankilling stoves in the back chamber. And that’s part of the trouble: everyone’s still trying to, and you are driven to the Olde Mitre, (attn. TG) which is actually in a different bishopric to the one you were in five minutes before. I like this - it reminds me of Magdalen days, when my Bedfordshire home was in the Bishopric of Oxford, but my college was under Winchester, and college statutes allowed you to assault poor Richard Harries should he ever step inside.

That’s five or six football pubs without a television, but one that does is the nearby Yorkshire Grey. But you’ll prefer the Ship and Shovell near the Strand at Charing Cross - a pub of two halves for a game notorious for something of the kind. I recommend the half on the northern side of the alleyway - really excellent beer lovingly kept and cheerfully served. And they show games… the Davy’s Wine Bar in the same alley isn’t bad, either.

The best wine bar for football in London - at all, in fact - is Gordon’s Wine Bar on the Embankment. I once found a slew of blacked-out photographs on my phone and wondered for quite some time what they were of - they were of Gordon’s, where every day is like the immediate aftermath of some great victory, and you lost in the crowd and crush, the bar out of sight, your head subjected to repeated blows from invisible assailants and you not caring. It’s not so much watching the match - and this medieval cellar has no TV, only ghosts - it’s like being at the match, or, if you sit outside, abruptly quiet..

The Wellesley Arms was my local, once, the only pub I have ever had where I never had to name my drink. I saw England qualify for the 1998 World Cup here, in that incredibly exciting 0-0 draw in Rome against Italy. Just as happiness writes white, so 0-0 draws don’t Youtube, so if you can’t remember, and it was nine years ago so many intelligent readers will be pushed to bring it to mind, it was the kind of game that got me reprimanded for standing on the tables (alongside my poor, new, Italian friend who found himself surrounded by drink and sympathy when the final whistle came). The pub has a secret passage to.. the Old Church or somewhere, allegedly.

So, no 0-0. Have some live Stones instead:

The best pub in Chelsea - like a good half of pubs in the area that I once knew - has closed. It was the King’s Head and Eight Bells, but for our purposes it was very much a rugby pub. One corner of it was devoted to the remnants of a cafe called the Blue Cockatoo, which closed in 1939, and had been home to a group of local artists and poets (the area around is still thronged by working studios, Julian Barrow’s stamping ground); the ancient leftovers from this would come in for shaky shorts and chasers every month, and I’d sit there in their absence.

Once upon a time, Wimbledon was a place to go for watching football in civilised but beery surroundings. The Hand in Hand was where I saw Holland take apart Yugoslavia in Euro 2000 before not marching to the title itself. But it chavs me out, now, and the Crooked Billet is the place, for all the lack of a TV. (Look for the Edwardian photograph on the wall in the side corridor - the family in a woodland - striking and mightily hard to interpret. I’d like to know, though). For football, you go to the Rose and Crown, where I was once interviewed on the subject of hangovers. It’s almost too good for purpose - you have to bar-hang to get a good view of the screen, but the regulars are friendly and knowledgeable.

It might seem odd to have discussed so many football pubs in which you can’t actually watch football. But consider. In 1999, my team completed the “treble” with an ending to a Final at once so unlikely and now so hackneyed that surely it is etched onto the memory of every fan who was there or who was, like me, in the middle of an ecstatic crowd.

It must have been one of my great moments. I had it here. In the Marlborough Arms in Bloomsbury. I went back there this year to see England beat Russia, the time that they did. Beckham, both times. But my memory of the evening is of afterwards, chewing coffee in another bar nearby, trying to muster up some feeling for the event.

When England lost to Argentina on penalties, I was in O’Neills in Sutton. It was a passionate crowd, chanting in unison, greeting each England penalty-taker with a roar of…something. This was English pride on display, English commitment. We are England!

Batty missed. Everything went quiet. I took my hands from my eyes. Everyone had left. Immediately.

That was probably the moment when I stopped listening to tales about passion and commitment. My pain at defeat was real, though - it was a long time, years before I could bear to watch England again. And when the football is on, and you can’t bear to watch it, and can’t bear to linger at home waiting for the shouts and groans to reach you from neighbours’ windows - that’s when you need a good football pub, one that doesn’t have any football.

One like this, or this.

UPDATE: Mentioning the Mother Black Cap above had me hunting around, and I think I’ve found the ultimate clip to tie this post together. It’s a realistic facial animation, in line with Paul Ekman’s research into emotion (see this site’s reading list for more from Ekman), based upon the episode in Withnail. All it needs is Kenneth Wolstenholm and I can die, my work complete. Here it is - the first part only is silent:

Why Playing Away From Home Is Hard

I was reading some newspaper or other on a late train home last week when I came across the opinion, expressed by an established football journalist, that all football pitches were the same and that home/away advantage was a mystery.

Of course, it isn’t so, and all the reasons why it isn’t so are fairly obvious. Here they are.

Travel

You have to get to the game. This is more tiring than not travelling. And home games usually mean not staying in a strange hotel away from everything familiar. There’s a lot of travelling in football at most professional and semi-professional levels, but top managers still regard it as sapping.

All Football Pitches Are Not The Same

The rules of football specify a range of pitch sizes, not an absolute standard, which is why a club will, for instance, widen or narrow their pitch to suit their style of play. Off the top of my head, I believe Goodison Park is currently the largest pitch.

What’s more, what surrounds the pitch - stands, running tracks, advertising bits and pieces - are all different. Footballers have to know exactly where they are on the pitch in relation to their team mates moment by moment. One way they do this is via the pitch markings, but familiarity with a ground enables them to use pitchside gubbins to place themselves more accurately. When Arsenal first moved to Ashburton Grove, Thierry Henry pointed out that the home team were every bit as unfamiliar with their surroundings as the visitors, and that he was having to work hard on his pitch navigation.

Fans

It goes without saying that you play more easily with support in the stands than with opposition. But the unwritten rule in football is that abuse from supporters is “water off a duck’s back”. Don’t you believe it. Even the most experienced and skilled of public speakers prefer an attentive and interested audience over a crowd of yawners and texters. Multiply that to a crowd of 40,000 and allow them to shout and swear at you, even to throw things at you, and see how you feel. Some players undoubtedly tune the crowd out - but it won’t be all.

There are other factors, but those will do for now. Here is a beautiful example of a stadium which, big when built, can only have become ever more intimidating over the years. It scarcely looks like a place for playing games these days. Some people will rise to the occasion of playing here - others will feel crushed and try to hide. Wait till we get them back to our place:

Long Overdue

Is football becoming middle class? It’s not that simple. The old industrial north from which professional football sprang is gone. That “working class” exists only in the lives of its elderly surviving members. You have to stake your claim to being working class nowadays. But the idea of what being middle class was has also changed. It used to mean more than just being white collar. Those values too have changed. And no one really wants to lay too much claim to them.

Anyone who knows anything about British sociological change since World War II will find that preceding paragraph entirely unsatisfactory, and that’s OK. It’s a huge subject.

What is true is that people do want to claim roots within, links from, a “working class” and that many use football as one of their means of doing so. Especially in the media.

The way they choose to do this shows ignorance of what real working class life was like. Instead, what comes forth is a bizarre mixture of pretend accents, gangster-worship, and cod nostalgia. Professional football was an overwhelmingly northern phenomenon, but this is a southern one. Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, Sunderland and Glasgow are innocent.

I’ve just moved away from a small town in the south that’s got this real bad. Imagine a miniature Milton Keynes full of rootless people locked into a neverending audition for EastEnders.

It can have the look of satire at first, but then you realize that they’re deadly serious. Which brings me to satire. Easily the most overrated and self-seeking form of comedy, it’s become the locus of many middle-class people’s political education. But this time, it’s found a proper target. I hope you agree with me here - that what follows is long, long overdue. I think it should be on continuous loop on huge screens hung over a thousand high streets and malls in the south until the message gets across.

Enjoy. I certainly did.

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?

Innovation Elsewhere

The last real footballing innovation that came from England was the W-M formation - the Chapman/Buchan third back game, invented in 1925 as a response to the mayhem inspired by a change in the offside laws.

My previous post on this subject mused on some of the reasons why Britain ceased to be the engine of footballing development. This post is about some subsequent developments - about what I really mean by innovation.

New Ball Skills

One of the joys of the game is its frequent beautiful novelty:

That’s the Cruyff turn, obviously - an explicitly seventies creation.

The last distinguishable skill I can trace that has British roots is the body swerve, which is likely to have been Jimmy Hogan’s invention. Sadly, he found few takers for it on his home shores. Stanley Matthews later made it his own, by which time it was a staple of football in Austria, Hungary and South America.

The first explicitly non-British skill might have been the bicycle kick, attributed to a number of South American players including the Great War era Chilean Ramón Unzaga Asla, who is alleged to have used the technique in matches in 1914 and 1916.

New Directions in Playing Kit

Of course, the kit you wear has a direct bearing on what you can actually do. Between 1905 and 1955, the principle change in British football kit concerned the shirt, which became looser and lost the potentially dangerous laces on the collar. The boots and shorts changed little.

The spread of the game into warmer climates in Europe and South America made change in those places inevitable - British kit was just too hot and heavy to be tolerable. Here are Argentina and Uruguay in 1928: the boots have already exposed the ankle, although shirts and shorts look British:

By 1950, as Brazil and Uruguay demonstrate here, South American kit had become the model for the rest of the world. This is what football at the very top would look like up until about 1980:

From there, only commercialisation and new artificial fibres would provoke substantial change. Except for one thing: the demands of European mud. This mud, to be specific:

Adi Dassler - founder of Adidas - whose brother kept it in the family by founding Puma - equipped the West German team’s boots with his new screw studs, which - in appalling conditions - enabled them to lengthen their studs and gain an advantage over the up-until-then unstoppable Hungarian side.

Playing Styles

This is a difficult area. Does the unloveable catenaccio count and Charles Reep’s long-ball game not? And what about the influence of Paisley’s Liverpool? And how much does the Dutch Total Football owe to Jack Reynolds working in Holland in the 1940s?

Fortunately, perhaps, in any rock-paper-scissors of football, Total Football beats Catenaccio:

The Brazilian style, so dominant yet so hard to copy in the 1958-74 golden age, is actually a development of the original Scottish short-passing style, taken to South America by Archibald McLean in the years immediately before the Great War.

What the Brazilians added to it was training and preparation. But for Brazil becoming entangled - as every footballing power became entangled at some time - in arguments over professionalism, they would probably not have waited until 1958 to win the World Cup. The sheer size of Brazil held them back too. Transport was inadequate for a properly functioning national organization for many years, and early Brazilian national sides were taken for the most part from one or other of the competing regional administrations.

The 1938 World Cup took place in Europe. Brazil’s team spent a month together prior to the long voyage out, and arrived some three weeks before their first match. In 1958, they were the first team to bring sport psychologists along as part of their camp (the shrinks covered themselves with glory by declaring Pele not to be a big match player and recommending that he not be picked). It took until Glenn Hoddle’s reign as England manager for our own preparation to reach this kind of level of care and planning.

International Competitions

Britain was not against international matches, of course - after 1907, most summers saw an England side of some kind touring Europe. And the first real, properly organized and executed international football tournament took place in London, as part of the 1908 Olympics. (Had FIFA followed through on its plans, the first World Cup proper might have taken place as early as 1906 - and England would have been there).

But the inspiration was French, as were the Olympics themselves. As would be the World Cup itself, founded in response to the spread of professionalism to the international game and the consequent devaluing of the Olympic tournament. As would be the founding of UEFA, just one of a number of pan-European bodies of the 1950s that the British held back from.

In the first half of the twentieth century, England at least can be excused. The first game against non-British opposition came in 1908, a 6-1 away win against Austria - which was followed shortly afterwards by an 11-1 win, also away.

It would be 1929 before England lost an international match against foreign opposition. But that game, as was the case with most of these early internationals, was played with an unusually weak England team - and in the heat of midday Madrid, that weakened team were unfortunate to go down 3-2.

It’s a shame that England never faced Uruguay or Brazil or Argentina before the 1950s; until World War II, English teams assembled by bumbling amateurs, at the last minute and on the back of a fag packet, were enough to see off most of what Europe could come up with. The odd close shave, the odd ill-tempered scrap - but otherwise, England bestrode the soccer world as the USA bestrides the American Football world today.

It’s also worth remembering that in the pre-War era, Europe was scarcely the social democrat paradise of the ’60s and ’70s: Jimmy Hogan’s work in Hungary and Austria took place amidst huge corruption, state and public violence (including guns at games) and vicious racism. And it’s worth asking what point the World Cup had for England back then - or for Scotland, also absent, but who escape much of the opprobrium for it.

Why Did British Football Cease To Innovate?

What British football had become by 1905, the world game reflects now. League systems, knock-out cups, international matches, the basic rules, professionalism, the nature of the football club, football administration - they’re all British inventions dating from a hectic 42 year period beginning in 1863 with the formation of the Football Association.

But in the 42 years after 1905, there is only one innovation to add to the list, and it’s a minor one, not universally adopted: the Buchan/Chapman third-back game. British men were responsible for innovation abroad - see the excellent El Bombin site for more on this - but Herbert Chapman’s many other frustrated ideas aside, the domestic game goes quiet.

In the subsequent sixty years, we’ve become wholesale importers of ideas and trends - some good, some not so good. We have exported Bobby Robson and hooliganism.

It’s worth asking why this is so. When English thinking has changed the design of rugby union kit in the last decade, when English cricket has invented the 20-20 game in the last decade, when British designers have dominated Formula One racing - it’s worth asking what happened to our national game to make it such a passive affair, content to jog along behind.

What follows are ideas, not conclusions: have at them.

The end of Britain’s industrial dominance

Industrialisation happened to Britain first, and had the effect of creating in short order a large number of large towns and cities with new wealth and few traditions of their own. Football clubs appear in these places as soon as the first shoots of reform free up time and energy, when there is enough of a railway system to make competition possible, but before suburbanization pushed available clear land out of range of the high-density inner cities.

By 1914, that development had run out of steam in many respects. The railway network had peaked, leaving no new territory that could be opened up. The industrial north, changed out of all recognition since 1840, would remain in its essential Edwardian form until World War II. The football clubs of the north would do likewise. They were born in innovative places, and stagnated in stagnating ones.

Football was an entertainment, not a sport

Once the idea of the large football stadium had been made real, starting with Everton’s Goodison Park, it found its typical form very quickly. Today, as in 1905, there seems to be a maximum crowd size of 60-100,000. Beyond that, the fan is too far from the pitch. Pace television, that imposes an upper limit on the income available from playing matches - and, as a maximum wage had been imposed by 1905, it imposes an upper limit on what’s worth building. There are few significant new stadia built after 1914, and no extensions of capacity beyond that maximum.

Most of the changes seen between 1863 and 1905 had served to create the situation in which football could perform as a mass entertainment - the standardization of rules, the incorporation of professional players, the creation of competitions. Once this was done, the question of why the game should continue to change became moot. The next major change - the loosening of the offside rule in 1925 - came because the status quo was not providing the same entertainment and football, already an expensive option for working and lower middle-class men, was facing strong competition for its audience.

British international dominance

South America and Europe caught up with Britain because we were there to be caught up with. We allowed ourselves to be caught up because we were ahead for a very, very long time, and our psychological advantage endured for a good twenty years after that. Since 1953, we have never regained the lead, but we have kept the rest of the world sufficiently in sight for the situation to be relatively painless. This is because of the relative strength of the Football Association and domestic football structures which have shown incredible resilience over the years and have kept standards up to a level above that which would trigger drastic remedial action.

Education

That first generation of professional footballers were, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the first generation of working class people to undergo compulsory education. As a result, there were a large number of highly intelligent men playing professional football - the kind of intelligence that white-collar work and red-brick universities would claim in ever increasing numbers in subsequent years.

Because the idea of football as a lifelong career didn’t exist as it does now, few of these men remained in the game. Those that did - and Herbert Chapman is the supreme example - did not have successors. Edwardian football was a home to the intelligent and articulate; these people would find better homes in later years, the game itself undergoing a brain drain that has never really gone into reverse, not even now in an age where footballer’s wages dwarf those of white collar professionals.

Significant numbers of the great postwar managers - Busby, Shankly, Paisley - came from Scottish or north-eastern mining stock, areas where white-collar escape remained difficult longer than in the big industrial cities. Others - Clough, for instance - failed to take the opportunities of their education.

Football’s economics after 1914 limited the need to think and innovate - the run-on from educational reform meant that there were ever fewer people in the game able to do the thinking.

Gentlemen and Tradesmen

The traditional British idea of the gentleman - not sullying his hands with work - lives on: the dream of the country house and the ownership of land as the ultimate goal of the approved British life is as powerful now as ever. British sport has a version of this - most recently seen in the resistance to professionalism in Rugby Union. Games are for enjoyment, not to be taken seriously; training spoils the fun. And that British nostrum, “don’t be clever” converts into a sporting “don’t be skilful” - unless you propose to justify your skill in the manner of a Best or Gascoigne, that is.

In short, the very idea of improvement, of innovation, is suspect in the British game and always has been.

Alongside that is the determination - the tenacity of the idea - that there are such things as English or British values and that these are more important to victory than skill or intelligence. “Passion and commitment” in short. The Australians, who show both of those qualities in spades, disagree with us, and want intelligence and strategy too. We don’t: witness the steady, stealthy writing-out of Clive Woodward from the English memory of the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

Those who are keenest on the “passion and commitment” idea think themselves the salt of the earth; in reality, they are the dupes of snobbery, ignorant of their need of Langland’s advice and prisoners to an invisible, Austenesque social snare.

Homophobia

The rest of British life has benefitted from the cultural, economic and moral energy released by the horribly belated correction of moral attitudes towards homosexuality. I don’t know why the hell football doesn’t want that too, other than its usual reasons of childish, sniggering cowardice. Football is prone to mistake intelligence or creative thinking for homosexuality and to see that in a negative light.

Feminism: repeat to fade. Poor Jackie Ashley.

Football has done a great deal to fight racism in Britain - perhaps that deserves the term “innovation” in the light of recent experiences in Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe. That it felt it to be in its own interests to do so doesn’t take away from the courage shown by the pioneers who set that change in motion thirty years ago. But in relation to other things, it can seem anomalous.

Coaching

The Premier League’s coaching certificate is a qualification that you cannot fail - all you need do is put in the hours. Isn’t that extraordinary? but it comes from a tradition that insists on coaching, if it really must take place, mustn’t be too clever and must come from the heart, from natural talent, not from actual learning.

On Radio 5’s 606 last night, a Chelsea fan urged the replacement of Avram Grant as manager by Kerry Dixon and Gianfranco Zola. In British football management circles, you have to have been a horse if you are to become a jockey. Wenger, Mourinho and Benitez, none of whom played top level football, are living arguments to the contrary, but this conundrum has a habit of failing to impose itself on the national sporting consciousness.

“The lads in their wisdom,” in Gordon Strachan’s phrase (used after his Coventry City side ignored his instructions and took a beating) has always been the attitude. Edwardian football didn’t have managers in charge of tactics and strategy until Chapman, and there haven’t been that many in truth since. Foreign managers working in Britain or with British players complain at the lack of interest in matters of tactics, of strategy or problem solving, something exemplified by the difference between Sven Goran Ericksson’s approach with Manchester City compared to his treatment of England.

Conclusion

The British game that grew out of industrialization was an entertainment, not a sport: it was “only a game” albeit one with serious life lessons to teach. Once it found a viable form, as it had by 1905, the season in which the six-yard zone ceased to resemble breasts, once it was making as much money as was possible, why change, and how?

The British were top dogs at football for a very long time - and have never been so very bad at it as to feel the need for any significant alteration in their approach to it.

Football was, and perhaps still is, badly positioned to attract the active interest of the kind of British person who is responsible for the UK’s reputation for ideas, inventions, eccentricity, Clive Sinclair and Beagle II. But it’s good at engaging the interest of the type of person who hates all that sort of thing. Wodehouse divided humanity into golfers and poets. Football probably thinks Wodehouse was a ponce.

But football’s a frightened little lad in an overlarge body, laughing too loud at the rest of the world with the boys in the crowd, and the cheap words still come too easily.

What do you think? Nonsense? What other angles of this deserve coverage? Did British football cease to innovate?

Billy Meredith in Motion

I’ve known for some time that there’s film out there of football’s “first superstar” Billy Meredith, but only now have I found it, and here it is:

Hokum, obviously, but the tracking by the camera is interesting and one wonders at the skill with which Meredith’s opponents muff their tackles..

Like Herbert Chapman, Meredith was originally set on life as a mining engineer - and it’s noticeable that both men began playing professional football in response to uncertainty in the mining industry in the 1890s. Unlike Chapman, Meredith was unsatisfied with the pay and conditions of footballers at the time, and, following his two-year ban on charges (which he denied) of match-fixing and accepting illegal payments, the Welshman took a leading role in the formation of the Players’ Union. He had need to: in 1909, a fire destroyed his Manchester sports shop and left him bankrupt.

Like Chapman - and like many players of his day - Meredith was an educated, highly intelligent man. Ahead of his time, too: the ODNB states

in an era when jogging and physical jerks were considered sufficient preparation for a game, he wrote many articles placing great emphasis on developing ball control. Until his fiftieth year he continued to polish his skills, insisting that no professional player could ever cease learning his trade.

The above film, Ball of Fortune, dates from 1926, two years after his final professional game. In the same year, Meredith made a number of coaching films, and made personal appearances in cinemas showing his films in order to answer audience questions.

This, also from the ODNB, illustrates something of the social status of the Edwardian game and its essentially showbiz nature:

He was good friends with many music-hall stars of the pre-Second World War period, including George Robey (who designed Manchester United’s cup final shirts in 1909) and Harry Weldon (who played Stiffy the Goalkeeper in a Fred Karno sketch that also featured Charlie Chaplin). The catch-phrase ‘Meredith, we’re in!’ from another pre-First World War Karno sketch was said to have been inspired by Meredith.

Now all I have to do is find his 1947 Radio Wales interview. Meredith would live another eleven years, dying shortly after the Munich air disaster so devastated his old club. (One of his old clubs - his time at United was sandwiched in between long and relatively unsuccessful spells with Manchester City).