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ktelontour. :o)After a lifetime in love with football, Michael Henderson is appalled by the excesses of the modern game. In extracts of his highly provocative new book, exclusively serialised in The Times, he names and shames the guilty parties:There is no joy in English football today, and little dignity. The game is richer, to the tune of many billions, yet it is poorer in spirit. The big grounds are full, but the bonds that yoked club to town or city have been sundered. Where clubs used to reflect civic pride, now they exist to make or - take a bow, Mike Ashley - lose money for the people who own them.
Failure to win a trophy can bring public chastisement for even the best managers. When Arsène Wenger, who has transformed Arsenal into a side everybody loves to watch, is pilloried by Sid and Doris Bonkers, what hope is there for others?
I used to cover football. In two decades I reported from more than ninety Football League grounds, and it would be wrong to pretend that life was always miserable. Trips to Old Trafford and Anfield usually brought rewards, and you generally saw a good game at Nottingham Forest and Ipswich Town. But in time I too grew tired of the excesses, the lies, the equivocations.
Football has been shamed by people who do not hold its best interests at heart. Too few love it as a game should be loved, with affection balanced by the critical detachment one must apply to all things that are worth doing. This may be an indignant book but, as George Sand wrote, indignation is the highest form of love.
Sir Alf Ramsey
When England met West Germany, at Wembley 22 months after their 1970 World Cup quarter-final, for a place in the semi-final of the European Championship, the teams were less evenly matched than they were in Mexico.
It was the night that Günter Netzer, the brilliant Borussia Mönchengladbach midfield player, played England almost on his own. The 3–1 victory showed how much ground Ramsey’s team had ceded to opponents who had begun to embrace the Dutch notion of “total football”.
For the return leg in West Berlin Ramsey packed his team with defenders. Peter Storey, the Arsenal defender, who should never have been let anywhere near an England team, was selected alongside Norman Hunter, Emlyn Hughes, Roy McFarland and Paul Madeley, and England duly secured a goalless draw.
Afterwards Netzer joked that every England player had autographed his leg. England lost dignity that day, and it was Ramsey’s doing.
Total football, a fancy foreign term for something he didn’t understand, was beyond Ramsey. He was a meat-and-two-veg Englishman, and there is a time and a place for basic fare. There is no virtue in bending the knee to foreigners simply because they are foreign.
In this case, though, English suspicion of the exotic was pure ignorance. The Dutch, led by the great Johan Cruyff, were changing football before everybody’s eyes, and only the English affected not to notice.
The sadness is that, with the likes of Colin Bell, Colin Todd and the young Trevor Francis, England had players who might have adapted rather well. What “total football” really meant was a dissolution of hard distinctions between defending and attacking. Ramsey preferred limited football.
The world-beating manager had not moved with the times; nor had England. The beauty of Holland’s football in the 1974 World Cup showed the world just how the game could be played, although it was Franz Beckenbauer’s West Germany team who carried off the prize in Munich, with Gerd Müller, the home-town hero, scoring the winner.
When England failed to qualify for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, they dropped out of the game’s top stream, and have never regained their place.
Ramsey cannot be held entirely responsible for that. But the rot set in on his watch, when he sent out cloggers like Storey to silence ball-players like Netzer. They were grim days.
Freddie Mercury
The English have traditionally mistrusted overt displays of emotion. We like to remember Bobby Moore preparing to collect the World Cup from the Queen at Wembley in 1966 as a captain of his country should. Is my shirt tucked in? Are my hands clean? Do I look presentable? Very well, I shall proceed to meet Her Majesty.
These days, no sooner has a team won a trophy than a hundred rockets go off, the sound system is turned up full blast and players are encouraged to bounce up and down for the benefit of the great god television.
Oh dear, that coarse triumphalism. There is no need for false modesty when you can boast: “We are the champions.” Which brings us to Freddie Mercury. An exotic bird of a pop singer, dead before his time of Aids, he contributed the most horrible element to the undignified modern victory rite. We are the Champions, Queen’s hit of 1977, has become a Radetzky March for two generations of excitable victors. Every time a winner is unveiled, Mercury is reborn to tell us he has “no time for losers, ’cos we are the champions of the WOOOORLD!”
Wayne Rooney
In November 2004, playing for England against Spain in Madrid, he was withdrawn during the first half by Sven-Göran Eriksson, the head coach, who feared he would be sent off.
To his shame, Rooney tore off the black armband that the players were wearing, to honour the memory of Emlyn Hughes, the former England captain, who had just passed away.
Some observers passed it off as the behaviour of a young man. They were less eager to offer excuses when he was sent off at the 2006 World Cup, after stamping on Ricardo Carvalho, the Portugal centre half, in front of the referee.
Nor can his mood swings excuse those tiresome strops when perfectly sound decisions go against him. There is grace in his play, none in his manner. “A crazy man” was the description given to him by Fabio Capello, the present England manager. The Italian was joking — up to a point.
Rooney radiates aggression, which is useful to a sportsman only if he can master it. Untamed, it will devour even the most talented.
The history of games and games players leaves little doubt. English football can only hope that Rooney overcomes his youthful indiscretions, for he is a player of considerable talent. He could even become that rare creature, the great player, the one who eventually leads England to a World Cup triumph.
So it is important that he grows up.
Alan Green
Tune in to Radio 5 Live by day or night, and you will hear Mr Toad in human form. Alan Green sounds so tremendously pleased by the sound of his voice, and the firmness of his convictions, that no agency short of fire, flood or pestilence can prevent him from bestowing his opinions upon the public.
“Next week,” he once informed listeners, in the manner of a flunky drawing up the social diary for minor royals, “I shall be in Barcelona.” Others went as well, of course. Green, who is not the most collegiate of reporters, has no time for such niceties. Listeners want to hear him, and hear him they certainly do.
Here is a man who speaks almost exclusively in capital letters. “Awful. Disgraceful. Quite Unacceptable.” And that’s just at breakfast. His other mode, when he hosts the confederacy of dunces known as 606, is bafflement, followed by mellifluous suggestion. When listeners approach him to crave a boon, in the manner of peasants petitioning a medieval monarch, he becomes positively unctuous. “I’ll tell you what. D’you know what I think?” Oh, go on, Greeny, tell us what you think. You know you want to.
He can’t get enough of referees. “I hope I won’t have to talk about this chap,” he will announce as the game is about to kick off. In that case don’t talk about him. But he does, incessantly. Rather like those boggle-eyed folk who deplore pornography, but have to read it to make sure it is deplorable, Green feels he has to talk about the referees who were put on earth to spoil his fun. He talks over the heads of summarisers, too, even when they have something to say. Sometimes he talks about himself more than the men on the field. As often as not, he is wrong, but never is there a suggestion of mea culpa.
Gordon Taylor
The chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association receives a seven-figure annual salary, so it is not only the top players who earn a handsome living from the game. Yet how often has anybody heard him criticise the offensive, occasionally criminal behaviour of his members?
He has to tread carefully, it is true. His job is to offer advice on professional and personal matters to his members, not all of whom are big stars. But the wider football public would like to hear a clearer voice from time to time with regard to the significant minority of players whose antics have defiled the game.
For all the talk of “rights”, and Taylor is entitled to defend them, footballers must also be aware of their duties. The PFA seems to have spent more time assisting troublemakers, in their various rehabilitation periods, than helping the victims of their trouble. Some people are simply not worth bothering with.
George Best
We should remember the brilliant boy who arrived in Manchester from Belfast, and caught the mood of the Sixties. If Johnny Haynes was football’s first big star of that decade, released from the prison of the maximum wage, Best became the game’s first multimedia star, known simply as George, or Georgie. That kind of fame, his allies have said, would have broken stronger men. Well, Pelé, a World Cup winner at 17, survived it.
Perhaps we should be thankful for what Best gave us. We have to be. There was precious little to celebrate in the last three decades of a life that ended so desperately. The cult of Best even ran to his funeral, which could have been mistaken for a state occasion.
One might have thought the departed had been a great man, not an abnormally gifted footballer who had drowned his talent in a vat of booze. There is a difference.
Victoria Beckham
Before his head was turned, and football interests took second place to brand recognition, it was easy to admire Beckham the pro. But the values of the pop world he married into were bound to leave some kind of mark because they have more to do with marketing than talent. As John Giles, the former Leeds United and Ireland midfield player, said, publicity was oxygen for Mrs Beckham, cyanide for him.
Soon Beckham the one-time footballer was doing any number of daft things to keep his name before the public. He changed his barnet every month, and painted his body with odd symbols. He wore his wife’s undies, and became a gay “icon”. He posed, Christ-like, at Easter, for Time Out, the London magazine, although it wasn’t clear he knew what Easter was. Mrs Beckham said they would like the children to be baptised, but weren’t sure about the faith. And they wondered why people laughed.
They can sit on thrones at their wedding. They can build a house with mock Roman columns. They can be photographed, looking moody (him) and bored (her), at every party from Chingford to Burbank, and lavish extravagant birthday gifts on their children, but the Beckhams will only ever be Terry and June with a few bob.
This ludicrous pair are “best friends” with Elton John, “best friends” with Tom Cruise, “best friends” with anybody who happens to be passing. Such longing for stardom is cyanide, as Giles realised. Not for the lady, whose role in life is to attend an endless round of fashion shows and parties, but for Beckham.
Before he exchanged his soul for the foul dust of celebrity, he was a pretty good footballer.
Ashley Cole
You may not admire his decision to arrange a clandestine meeting with the manager and chief executive of another club who happened to have more money, and the lack of class to flaunt it. You may think that a player nurtured by a club from his school days should remain loyal to that club, unless there was something fundamentally wrong. In which case you may be amused when he was fined £100,000, reduced to £75,000 on appeal, for breaking Premier League rules.
You might think that players do not always receive the best possible advice. But then you might think that a player who writes in his autobiography (or has written on his behalf) that he “nearly drove off the road” when he heard his club were prepared to pay him only £55,000 a week to be incapable of acting sensibly upon any advice he might receive. You might recall Wilde’s remark about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Knowing all this about the player, you might not be surprised that his behaviour did not improve, on or off the pitch, when he got the transfer across London he was angling for. It reached such a level of petulance that, having switched clubs, he abused a referee in the most explicit terms during a Premier League match, belittling Mike Riley in such a vile way that, by turning his back, he let the world know he had no respect for any kind of authority. The world was not surprised. As a consequence of his behaviour the Wembley crowd, upset by a blunder that led directly to the loss of a goal against Kazakhstan, decided to boo the offender. Not so much for the error, because all players make them. Rather, as a commentary on the player’s conduct and general attitude over many years.
When he needed to reform his behaviour, it got worse. With his wife, a pop singer, out of the country on a television jaunt, he was found in a tired and emotional state one night outside a South Kensington bar. This time it was the police officers who felt the rough edge of his tongue, and he was taken to the cells, where payment of a statutory £80 fine earned his release. It did not release him from the judgment of the public, which convicted him for being drunk, disorderly — and a footballer.
Bill Shankly
How did this outstanding manager foul up football? For one overwhelming reason. It was Shankly who said, in a television interview in 1981, that the game was “more important” than life and death. Not just more important, but “much more” important.
Whether it was uttered in jest, as some have maintained, he never disowned it. Trotted out from time to time as an example of his lacerating wit (although it proves nothing of the sort), the easily impressed have used it to justify all kinds of unpleasant things in the years since, in the expectation that others will swell the laughter of recognition.
“Aggressive self-pity” was the phrase that Edward Pearce, the journalist, applied to Liverpool. These are deep waters, for the city has many attractions, and there is another Liverpool that people do not always see. It is to Shankly’s credit that he gave his adopted home so much to be proud of at a time when Liverpool’s main commercial function, as a port that looked outward to the world, found itself facing the wrong way.
But it is an ambiguous bequest. Liverpool fans have been spoilt by being told too often they are a breed apart, and Shankly did nothing to dampen that sense of exceptionalism.
Sport is not “much more” important than life or death — as those Liverpool fans who lost loved ones at Hillsborough could have told him — nor can his remark be laughed away as a merry jape by “good old Shanks”. Football should only ever be a pleasant diversion, even in Liverpool.
Geordie Blubber
The sight of supporters having a jolly good blub, which never fails to attract the attention of television producers looking for post-match “colour”, has ensured that “Geordie Blubber” has become a well-known and, if truth be known, much-mocked character.
There is a lot of talk, much of it sentimental, about Newcastle letting down their supporters. But some of those supporters are part of the problem because their expectations are impossible to fulfil.
After Bobby Robson was sacked, having taken the club to a fifth place that was considered unacceptable for such a “big” club, one of those puddled fans who turn up for the ritual coronations told television viewers that the Newcastle job was “one of the biggest three in Europe”.
When some observers say those fans deserve “better”, it is wise to remember that tosh and say: “No, not all of them do.” Thousands, dazzled by silly talk of a Geordie Nation, will remain part of the problem until they revise their expectations. Newcastle are not a big club, if size is determined by achievement.
They are a club with a proud history loved by thousands. Geordie Blubber deserves sympathy.
Newcastle have wasted millions on poor players, yet sympathy is a finite quality where Newcastle are concerned, and Geordie Blubber has earned his place in this inglorious parade.
He’s not difficult to spot — he wears a black-and-white shirt in all seasons. When it is cold, he likes to take it off. At all times he carries a freshly peeled onion.
Richard Keys
For a man who possesses few qualities that viewers traditionally value in their broadcasters, Keys has done very well. He has the sort of voice that is more commonly heard reading out badminton results at the local rec, and a chummy manner (“Jamie’s with us again”) that falls a few furlongs short of authority. But that is what his masters want: a nonentity who can be relied upon to tell white lies. At all times he must stay “on message” and the message could not be more simple: on Sky, football is always wonderful.
This is no David Coleman or Des Lynam, who had strong screen personalities. He is not even a Jim Rosenthal, an able all-rounder with a pleasing smile. Nearly two decades into his role, Keys comes over as a malleable, one-dimensional chap who is doing the job during the vac until the big boys return, full of vim and vigour, from their Tuscan adventures.
The obsequious lightweight should not carry the can for Sky’s coverage. Rupert Murdoch and his henchmen, Sam Chisholm and David Hill, rewrote the book on sports broadcasting. But, as the most visible symbol of their coverage, the one who sets up the studio experts (“Big Sam has joined us tonight”), he has become a fixture in televised sport. Suit, tie, coat-hanger smile, bran-tub of clichés. All present and correct. Off we jolly well go.
The coverage is uncritical enough to have been scripted by a Russian commissar of agriculture who has just received the latest figures on grain production.
The players are there to be petted, and joshed with (“Stevie G is with us — you were in fine form tonight, Stevie”), until, in the fullness of time, they can swell the ranks of the recently retired in the studio, where Keys will lap up their ungrammatical “expertise” with the ease of a man whose purpose in life is to be deferential. The result of this endless verbal smooching is the lionisation of second-raters.
Richard Scudamore
World domination is what Scudamore is after, and he will not cease from mental fight till he has built “Jerusalem” in every green and pleasant land beyond his own.
This policy of Lebensraum propelled his idea to introduce a 39th game in the Premier League fixture list, to be played in cities outside England, and one can almost hear him talking up its attractions. The prospect of watching some of the league’s lesser lights going hammer and tongs should have the good folk of Kuala Lumpur racing to the ground to bag the best seats. Who wouldn’t part willingly with $100 to watch Kevin Davies or Emile Heskey slice a sitter into the crowd? Roll up, roll up!
One hopes that Scudamore fails, for it cannot be right for the Premier League to trample into foreign lands like a conquering army. Nor is it easy to see how English clubs could fit a 39th game into their schedules when many of them are stretched to bursting point as it is.
Far from putting a few eggs into foreign baskets Scudamore would do well to keep a tighter rein on events at home. For, while he was drawing up his plans to dazzle foreign audiences, a tale was unfolding in London that did his reputation no good.
The Carlos Tévez affair has become a cause célèbre for good reasons. Why did the Premier League not dock West Ham points instead of issuing a fairly useless fine? There were calls for Scudamore’s head but, cushioned by all that money, he’s not a man who is troubled by self-doubt.
Michael Henderson is a writer and columnist on football and cricket. If you want to get hold of his book, 50 People Who Fouled Up Football, it is to be published by Constable & Robinson on 15th October for £12.99.
