Leeds United 1973-4

I’m still silent, but this isn’t: a fantastic multiparter on Leeds at their Revie height. Thanks due to Leeds4EvEr1992 for posting. I think Part Two might be the same as Part One, but patience will be rewarded:

Cardiff City Parade The English Cup: 1927

Wales enthusiasts might enjoy this clip of Cardiff City taking the open-top bus route through Rhyader.

Link via this BBC website page

Beckham and the Century-Makers

Although I’m not the only one pleased to see Beckham make it to his century of England caps, most commentators aren’t. In particular, it’s said over and over again that Beckham isn’t worth the honour when put up against his “colleagues” Shilton, Moore, Charlton and Wright.

That’s my instinctive reaction too. At least it is at first. Moore and Charlton were both World Cup winners, and but for illness might have been twice over. Shilton has Ray Clemence to thank for not passing 150 caps or more in his twenty years as an international. And Billy Wright.. has long been swallowed by the football nostalgia movement.

But add to that the suggestion that Beckham is long past his best, and should make way for a younger man, and add to that the suggestion that Beckham hasn’t been good enough for England for some time, and I part company.

I’m going to address these things in reverse order, beginning with the idea that Beckham is a long time past his best England performances.

The problem Beckham faces in this respect is that his best performance for England was the extraordinary, phenomenal one that it was. There is no doubt, in any sane minds, that Beckham v Greece in 2001 was the outstanding England performance of modern times.

Where’s the fabled John Terry performance? I can think of Sol Campbell ones, and Terry Butcher ones, but none for England from the slit-eyed man with scrub hair. Or the Gerrard one? Do we have to go back to “5-1″ for that? Or the Lampard one? I can think of recent Michael Owen performances, but he’s another man the oafs want to defenestrate. Lampard’s relatively minor annus mirabilis was four years ago.

If Beckham isn’t good enough, who’s better? Which colleagues’ performances have left his so far behind?

What of the other century men? I’ll take them in turn.

Peter Shilton

He, and Gordon Banks before him, stand out not only in English goalkeeping history but world goalkeeping history. But even Homer etc., and Shilton was keeping in both of the matches against Poland in 1973-4 that saw England fail to qualify for the West Germany World Cup. It does feel harsh to suggest, 34 years later, that he might have done better at Wembley once Norman Hunter had missed his tackle, because Shilton was part of a quiet golden age in England’s defence between 1982 and 1990. There is no ball-between-the-legs-against Scotland, no famous flaps, just endless hard work and a reliability that was always taken for granted. Why Liverpool never came for him will always be a mystery to me.

Shilton was worth his caps, and retired from internationals at exactly the right time. Which brings us on to…

Billy Wright

Wright hails from an era that was strange in its giving out of caps. He wasn’t the best defender of his day. He played in both of the gigantic 1953-4 humiliations against the Hungarians, and his most remembered passage of play came in the first of the two, when Puskas sent him flying in the wrong direction. On the other hand, he skippered the best ever England international team, that serendipitous 46-48 group which also boasted Raich Carter, Stan Matthews, Stan Mortenson, Tommy Lawton, Tom Finney and Wilf Mannion. Later, he skippered the 55-58 side of Edwards, Byrne and Taylor that, but for Munich, would surely have starred in the World Cup in Sweden.

But what of himself? It’s almost as though he were captain in the cricketing sense, a fixture purely on those grounds, kept going by avoiding injury and delaying retirement. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it’s noticeable that of our centenarians, Wright is the only one who has never been considered one of the greats of the game, whereas he’s the one of the group who played alongside great players the most.

But he married a singer. No, Beckham’s done more, and been through more, for his hundred than Billy Wright.

What about…

Bobby Charlton

Bobby Charlton, of course, scored 49 goals for England, a record that sits waiting for Michael Owen’s next blue streak. Beckham’s only managed 17, the last one coming two years ago in the World Cup. But Charlton’s international goals come in a lump at the beginning of his international career. As a goalscorer, he thrived alongside Jimmy Greaves, not Geoff Hurst or Martin Peters. Charlton’s last 17 international goals took him six years to compile. Nevertheless, it was during this period, comparatively late in the day that Charlton truly came to be accepted as an international. Philip Larkin said of John Betjeman that his greatest achievement was to become Betjeman. Much the same could be said of Charlton, who did it during the 1966 World Cup. After his goals against Mexico and Portugal, all criticism of his inconsistency and selfishness on the pitch, so common before, fell away and were soon forgotten. So complete was his rehab that defeat to West Germany in 1970 is put down in part to his being taken off. Apparently, he’d kept Beckenbauer out of the game (Der Kaiser had in fact scored before Charlton left the field).

Did Charlton hang on too long? Three goals in his last nineteen internationals is comparable to Beckham’s three in his last 25. Charlton was 32 when he was retired by Sir Alf Ramsey, 35 when he eventually retired altogether, something he later felt he’d done too early (he was almost certainly right about this). No, in other words. There’d have been more, had he only realized it. Beckham knows there’s something valuable left in him, and won’t make Charlton’s mistake.

On the other hand…

Bobby Moore

Moore was Ramsey’s skipper as Beckham was Ericksson’s. He was England’s outstanding player in their outstanding performance, the 1-0 defeat to Brazil in 1970 at which international football peaked. He made England’s third goal in the 1966 Final with that last, long, sweeping pass for Hurst to run onto.

But he was only just into the nineties in terms of caps when the real rot set in for England. Moore skippered England against West Germany and Netzer in April 1972, and then there was this the following year - it’s at about 2:40 :-

Moore was dropped after that, only for Norman Hunter to repeat the error in the return match at Wembley. There’d be three more internationals, then an Indian summer at Fulham ending with a Wembley Cup Final. Life could have been fairer to Moore. He’d had to recover from cancer in his early career, which must have chopped years off his best playing days. Had any of the myriad chances gone in at Wembley, he’d have had an appropriate send-off at a World Cup Finals, as Charlton had had. (But for the string of injuries that raddled England in 2005-6, perhaps Beckham would have had his). But nevertheless, there is not the sense of unfinished business about Moore that there is with Beckham. Four months ago, this:

But there’s one piece of history that David Beckham can never claim. Because he wasn’t the first Englishman to score at the new Wembley. That was this man - and on that note..

Celtic v Inter: 1967 European Cup Final in Colour

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.

A few weeks earlier, this:

1954 World Cup Final : Hungary v West Germany

It was the most important World Cup Final in European football history - and the most meaningful for the country that won. For the neutral, a Final has never been more dramatic or emotional. Here is a largely successful colourization of the Final, which illustrates just how distancing and alienating black and white film can be. That one change out of greyscale makes it “look like football” in the way we’d understand it today:

And here, in four parts, is the bulk of that Final, along with what seems to be the original German radio commentary. About which, plus ca change.

Part one:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll reiterate - for what it’s worth - that on this evidence, the Hungarian complaints, about disallowed goals, goalkeeper obstruction and offside, seem bottomless.

Sam Bertram in the Smog

From here:

“Soon after the kick-off,” he wrote in his autobiography, “[fog] began to thicken rapidly at the far end, travelling past Vic Woodley in the Chelsea goal and rolling steadily towards me. The referee stopped the game, and then, as visibility became clearer, restarted it. We were on top at this time, and I saw fewer and fewer figures as we attacked steadily.” The game went unusually silent but Sam remained at his post, peering into the thickening fog from the edge of the penalty area. And he wondered why the play was not coming his way. “After a long time,” he wrote, “a figure loomed out of the curtain of fog in front of me. It was a policeman, and he gaped at me incredulously. “What on earth are you doing here?” he gasped. “The game was stopped a quarter of an hour ago. The field’s completely empty”.’

(Bertram retired in 1956, before the Football Association permitted floodlighting, a technology that had first been tested in Sheffield in 1878..)

“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?

British Movietone Archive Now Free Online

A sleepless night, not helped at all by the discovery that the entire British Movietone film archive is available to view free online.

British Movietone were/are a newsreel company, competitors to Pathe News whose archive is already online.

Naturally this means that the amount of historical football clips available on the net has pretty much doubled immediately - the pre-WW1 stuff is particularly good, and there is what amounts to near full coverage of the great 46-48 England team, who were poorly served before.

Start with England v Scotland 1930 - with sound, but no commentary.

What Where the Worst Years in Football History?

No trouble naming the great years: 1946 (England’s greatest ever national side), 1953 (Puskas and co.), 1962 (Garrincha and Pele), 1966, 1970 (Pele and co again, this time in glorious technicolor), 1972 (Netzer’s West Germany), 1974 (total football) and 1982 (Brazil once again), 2006 for the Argentines. You’ll have your own candidates in spades.

It’s harder to work out the “worst” years. Worst in what respect? No one could be interested in rehearshing a list of dull, uninspired seasons or the tedious likes of the ‘90 and ‘94 World Cups. Some guidelines are required, and I offer the following:

• Years in which football culture changed for the worse in some tangible way
• Years in which politics and war did football real and lasting damage
• Air disasters
• Individual tragedies

I’m going to leave out stadium disasters, as they turn into rather unpleasant numbers games when put into lists. In 1988 I was shown the Fire Brigade video of the Bradford City disaster, and what’s in it still invades my dreams from time to time.

It’s all very grim.

Here are my nominees:

1. 1883: Blackburn Olympic become the first professional side to win a tournament, beating Old Etonians in the FA Cup Final. They were among the first teams to be specifically coached, by a former international called Jack Hunter who introduced them to the Scottish passing game and took them away for a rest break in Blackpool before the Final.

   The football codes in Great Britain bungled professionalism, in the end. Within thirty years of that Final, both rugby and football had ghettoized themselves along class lines, to their enduring detriment. As for Olympic, their advantage became their undoing. Local rivals Blackburn Rovers received better financial backing, and tempted the best Olympic players away. Their ground is now buried beneath a local school.

2. 1925: the Offside Law changes, allowing only two defending players to come between the last attacker and the goal, instead of three. Right away, it took less thought and skill and guile to score. Within a year, George Camsell of Middlesbrough scored his 59 goals in a season, immediately followed by Dixie Dean’s 60. Both had enormous talent, both benefitted from a period of defensive chaos. Herbert Chapman, writing at the start of the 1930s, complained that the game had lost its quality and subtlety, that the new rule favoured physical strength and the hopeful long punt upfield. He and Charles Buchan pioneered the third back approach - a defensive measure seen as boring at the time. In the long term, the South Americans didn’t, and by 1950 the difference was beginning to tell.
3. 1931: the death of John Thomson, Celtic goalkeeper. Before World War I, the deaths of players in action was far from uncommon, even in soccer as opposed to rugby (although neither on the scale of American Football, some of whose Edwardian tactics were intrinsically lethal). But Thomson was the greatest keeper in Scottish football, a capped international, a trophy winner and a star. Colliding with Sam English, a Rangers forward, Thomson fractured his skull and died later that afternoon. The event was captured in a thankfully blurred press photograph. Thomson’s death came as a shock and a body blow: his home town is still a place of pilgrimage for Celtic fans and Scottish football enthusiasts in general. Coming as it did at the time of Scotland’s greatest economic peril, it can only have deepened an already dark national mood.
4. 1938-9: the Anschluss and the annexation of Czechoslovakia. Austria and Czechoslovakia were the true European powers in football before World War II. The events of the 1934 World Cup, in which a bent referee muscled Italy past the pair of them at the tournament’s climax, rankle still, and some Czechs regard themselves as the tournament’s true winners. Germany was not so football-orientated, and the first thing annexation did was to kill off a vibrant, growing football culture. It wouldn’t grow again in quite the same way. It was also the real end of the Mitropa Cup, a real European club tournament, best imagined as a mix of European and UEFA cups. And it led to personal tragedies. For a long time, the death in 1939 of Austria’s greatest footballer, the “Man of Paper” Matthias Sindelaar, was thought to have been accidental - carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked stove. It’s now thought to have been suicide. Sindelaar had refused to play along with Nazification, continuing in fellowship with Jewish colleagues in the face of demands that they be ostracized. He couldn’t live under the Nazis: but in preWar Austria, suicide was illegal, and his friends wanted to spare him the posthumous ignominy.
5. 1949: The Superga plane crash wipes out “Il Grande Torino”, the last flowering of Italian football’s first golden age. They still hold an astonishing array of Serie A records, and the team made up the overwhelming bulk of the Italian national team. The only scar on their record is an unfair one: a 4-0 home defeat to an England side whose like we have never seen again. It must have been one of the matches of the century. The accident crippled the Italian team in the World Cup of the following year, and it would be over a decade before Italian football found itself back at the cutting edge of the game.
6. 1958: the Munich Air Disaster. Little more need be said.
7. 1971: the creation of a single state championship in Brazil. Brazil was the last of the great footballing powers to institute a countrywide football league. The sheer size of Brazil, and the relatively undeveloped transport system, had ruled out such a development before, and not enough had changed to make it a success by 1971. Instead of raising standards, it triggered the foundation of many new clubs, spreading the available talent too thinly, damaging the finances of the likes of the famous Santos and bringing a partial end to the production line of outstanding talent that had been Brazilian football since the 1930s. Enough momentum remained to bring forth the 1982 Brazilian side, but nothing remotely comparable since.
8. 1989: Surinam Airways Flight PY764 crash wipes out the “Colourful 11″ from Surinam. The Colourful 11 were an exhibition side made up of Surinamese talent playing in the Dutch leagues. Amongst their number were names such as Ruud Gullit and Bryan Roy. On this occasion, prior commitments held the famous names back in Holland, and it was the second string who perished. Football can distort thinking to the extent that one might almost regard this outcome with relief.
9. 1993: Gabon air crash wipes out the Zambian national side. We are still waiting for the African World Champions. This Zambia team were a very serious candidate to make an impression at the ‘94 World Cup. Because of the crash (and some bent refereeing) they didn’t qualify. Zambia have yet to fully recover, in footballing terms. In human terms, the families of the dead, who lost major breadwinners, have yet to be properly compensated.

Time to do something more cheerful…

The Ten Greatest Mistakes in British Football History

Most of you will have read the contributions to Danny Finkelstein’s Ten Greatest Mistakes in British History question in The Times. I found most of them dubious - the Chartists not arming the London masses?

But it led me to think about what the top ten mistakes in British football history might be. In the week of the Munich commemorations, trying to take off through that bloody slush springs to mind. That’s half a club, half an “England” error. Every other club has its moments of regret, if not on the same tragic scale. What might have happened had Spurs been able to keep Gascoigne and Lineker? Or if Manchester City hadn’t sacked Joe Mercer when they did?

Anyone’s list of ten will betray something of their vision of the game as a whole. I want to see British football the best, the smartest, the most skilful in the world. I’d like to see a national programme sustained over twenty years to bring this about. It might not win us the World Cup - blind luck matters too much in football for that. But it might earn us what great achievement earned Brazil in 1982, Holland in 1974 and Argentina in 2006: the honour of being the best in the world in the eyes of the World. Whose ‘82 highlight reel do you prefer?

So that’s what’s behind my ten. Here they are:

1. The imposition at the start of the 20th century of retain-and-transfer and the maximum wage. These measures guaranteed that football would develop into a working class ghetto sport in the UK, owned and run by middle class businessmen. Not only did this prevent football from becoming a truly national game - it had much to do with the long-term ghettoization of rugby at the other end of society. The impact of this system on the life of the likes of Brian Clough and Wilf Mannion and Charlie Mitten is enough alone to render it a moral disgrace. But there were so many others.
2. The 1925 change in the offside rule. Made for commercial reasons, the change led to the rapid adoption of the long-ball game, the emphasis on physique and the end of the classic Scottish passing game. Most observers at the time, including Herbert Chapman, noticed an immediate and lasting drop in standards, a retreat from what they saw as the more subtle, clever Edwardian game. Although this rule change applied worldwide, other countries, notably Brazil, drew different conclusions from it, and 1925 is one potential date for the loss of our leadership in the global game.
3. Allowing the likes of Jimmy Hogan and Fred Pentland to go abroad. All of the most visionary coaches of the early twentieth century went overseas, barring Herbert Chapman and Jimmy Seed. Hogan in particular found his stress on skills coaching and thinking tactics rejected in England, and it wasn’t for nothing that he sat with the Hungarian contingent at Wembley in 1953. He was accused of being a traitor: the traitors were the English blockheads who rejected his methods in the ’10s and ’30s.
4. Failing to enter the 1930 World Cup. We’d have been exposed to South American football twenty years earlier than actually happened. When we eventually played Brazil in 1950, the effect on the thinking of men like Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney was profound, and both reflect at length about it in their excellent autobiographies.
5. Persisting with separate Football Associations for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It’s done for silly, jingoistic nationalistic reasons, and has actively damaged the game in Wales, let alone preventing a UK national side benefitting from UK clubs’ dominance of European club competitions 1965-85. “Auld Enemy”? If Liverpool could pull together Scots and English and Welsh and Irish, if Leeds and Manchester United could, and with such results, and later Rangers and Celtic, then just mourn what such silliness has lost.
6. Failure to learn from 1953. The lesson there - that we were no longer world leaders in football - met with no concerted national response, and has not done so since. All we’ve had is occasional bleating about catching up, or the assertion that an organized side can beat a skilled one, as though a skilled side won’t be organized or won’t be capable of effective organization beyond the reach of journeymen. We should be talking about taking steps now that in twenty years will get us ahead of the world - or just admit that we’re too bone thick to work the long term.
7. Failure to get to grips with fan violence earlier - it should have been nipped in the bud in the 1960s. Quite apart from that ‘85 Everton side being denied a run at the European Cup, which is quite loss enough, it led to the effective exclusion of all but the all-out fan from large parts of some grounds. “Green Street” didn’t used to be part of “fan culture” (ugh) in the good old days that we’re always being told about by mockney fakers on Sky Sports, but it is now. And it led to the abolition of standing areas, of which more anon.
8. The split between the Premiership and the Football League. We can all see where this is going. Including the new and monstrously tasteless idea of playing a round of matches abroad. It has also led to the decay of the FA Cup as a competition.
9. The introduction of league formats in the European Cup. The tournament has lost a great deal of its former glamour, and the UEFA Cup has lost all of its. European nights benefit from scarcity; and “four teams qualifying from the Premiership” is just crass and tasteless.
10. The abolition of all standing areas at English top level grounds. It’s killed the atmosphere. More has been lost than gained.

Other candidates throng. Giving Clough a run at England instead of Revie in ‘74 was more than one step beyond the FA, whose shortlist that year was a shocking joke. Giving it to him in ‘78 wouldn’t have been fair on him; he deserved better than to have to clean up after others, for all that he was willing. By ‘82 it was too late for him, as we can now see, and his appointment then would have been cruelly unfair on Bobby Robson, another man who’d done remarkable things with a small club side. ‘74 was the year, the last chance to sustain the momentum of ‘66 and ‘70 before it was gone for good. Ramsey had been unfortunate, and a confident hand to take over from him would have saved the situation. But who knew? Revie was the obvious candidate…

The treatment of Hoddle by England - as a player, obviously. And, still more so, of Waddle after he went to France and there played the best sustained football by an English midfielder in recent memory.

Gascoigne’s treatment by the various therapists he’s had over the years: the constant misdiagnosis, the grandstanding and advantage-taking by professional men both starstruck and condescending. British football’s bigoted attitude towards mental illness.

Selling Jaap Stam; selling Beckham. Dropping Beckham. Substituting Charlton. Picking Derek Kevan.

Dropping Tommy Lawton.

Trying to take off through slush.

Trying to take off through all that bloody slush.