Post by QPR Report on Sept 26, 2009 6:47:25 GMT
The Times
50 people who fouled up football
After a lifetime in love with football, Michael Henderson is appalled by the excesses of the modern game. In a highly provocative new book, exclusively serialised in The Times, he names and shames the guilty parties
September 26, 2009
(Empics)
Sir Alf Ramsey guided England to the 1966 World Cup, but he failed to move with the times and failed to embrace total football
Michael Henderson
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.
The other guilty parties on the list include:
Roman Abramovich
Sam Allardyce
Mike Ashley
David Baddiel
Tony Banks
Joey Barton
Ken Bates
Sid and Doris Bonkers
Billy Bragg
Ashley Cole
Gary Cook
Hunter Davies
Didier Drogba
Martin Edwards
Sven-Goran Eriksson
The Fans
Paul Gascoigne
Geordie Blubber
The Golden Generation
Alan Hansen
Derek Hatton
Nigel Kennedy
Richard Keys
Lord Kinnaird
Nick Love
Steve McLaren
Piers Morgan
Jose Mourinho
Graham Poll
Antonio Rattin
Charles Reep
Don Revie
Peter Risdale
Robinho
Cristiano Ronaldo
Richard Scudamore
Bill Shankly
Bob Shennan
Peter Swales
Sir Harold Thompson
Terry Venables
Ian Wright
Pini Zahavi
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/article6849344.ece
50 people who fouled up football
After a lifetime in love with football, Michael Henderson is appalled by the excesses of the modern game. In a highly provocative new book, exclusively serialised in The Times, he names and shames the guilty parties
September 26, 2009
(Empics)
Sir Alf Ramsey guided England to the 1966 World Cup, but he failed to move with the times and failed to embrace total football
Michael Henderson
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.
The other guilty parties on the list include:
Roman Abramovich
Sam Allardyce
Mike Ashley
David Baddiel
Tony Banks
Joey Barton
Ken Bates
Sid and Doris Bonkers
Billy Bragg
Ashley Cole
Gary Cook
Hunter Davies
Didier Drogba
Martin Edwards
Sven-Goran Eriksson
The Fans
Paul Gascoigne
Geordie Blubber
The Golden Generation
Alan Hansen
Derek Hatton
Nigel Kennedy
Richard Keys
Lord Kinnaird
Nick Love
Steve McLaren
Piers Morgan
Jose Mourinho
Graham Poll
Antonio Rattin
Charles Reep
Don Revie
Peter Risdale
Robinho
Cristiano Ronaldo
Richard Scudamore
Bill Shankly
Bob Shennan
Peter Swales
Sir Harold Thompson
Terry Venables
Ian Wright
Pini Zahavi
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/article6849344.ece