WSC 178 Dec 01

So, England’s manager has had a heart attack during the qualifying stages of the World Cup, to be held in Brazil. In a smoke-filled room at FA headquarters, the powers-that-be realise that for want of better applicants, they must approach Norwich City man­ager Mike Bassett (Ricky Tomlinson) for the England job. They need one win from their last three games to qualify. However Bassett, whose tactical nous doesn’t appear to extend beyond blustering about pressure, com­mit­ment and 4-4-2, very nearly makes a balls-up of it.

At the finals, in the face of media derision, fam­­ily harassment and a sequence of howlers involving arrests, drunken binges and mis­sing footballs, the team make an appalling start. They play Argentina needing to win in order to progress from the group stage, having drawn 0-0 with Egypt and lost 4-0 to Mexico.

Mike Bassett:Engand Manager could have worked as a naff two-minute Bovril commercial. As it is, it’s as dismally unentertaining a 90-odd minutes as you’ll witness outside a Thursday evening BBC UEFA Cup tie. The footballers are barn-door stereotypes. There’s Wackett, the Stuart Pearce-type psycho, played by what looks like a 53-year-old man. There’s “Tonka”, a Gazza-type pisshead, a Beckham-type always on the phone to his missus, etc, etc. There’s a Barry Fry-style half-time bust-up, a nodding-dog Phil Neal-style assistant man­ager, tabloid comparisons with vegetables. These ancient types and scenarios are tire­­some enough in real life. How much more so when recreated here in the waxwork of Brit­film cliche?

The “mockumentary” format invites invidious comparisons with Do I Not Like That. But Taylor’s hapless outburst “Can we not knock it?” says more about the endlessly frustrated, in­articulate, hit-and-hope mentality that once passed for English management than this film musters in its entirety. It was also funny be­cause it was real. This isn’t. It’s made up. Badly.

If the gags aren’t easy to see coming, to the extent of being preceded by men waving flags (players unwittingly get off with Brazilian transvestites, etc) then they’re simply implausible. Bassett writes his team selection on the back of a fag packet and so two players named Benson and Hedges get called up. Because, naturally, no secretary would be able to tell the difference between her boss’s handwriting and a very well-known cigarette logo.

Then there’s the very premise that an Eng­land needing only three points from three games to qualify for the World Cup would be considered such a moribund prospect than only a lower division journeyman would want to manage them. Hmm.

There’s also a problem when they mix in documentary footage of the 1998 World Cup match against Argentina as a build-up to the climactic fixture here. So are we to believe that some sort of clean sweep took place in the Eng­land squad, with dead wood like Beckham, Scholes, Owen et al replaced by a new cast? These inconsistencies are bothersome to any­one who hasn’t traded their brains for popcorn at the cinema door.

Another obvious snag is that the film has been rendered obsolete by Sven-Goran Eriksson. That needn’t have mat­tered too much if Mike Bassett had been constructed as a Taylor-type figure of fun, a thor­oughgoing satire à la Peter Cook’s Alan Latchley, a final mocking burial of the blood ’n’ guts, headless chicken-style English manager of old. Instead, Bassett comes out an implausible winner.

The feelgood finale of the film turns on Bassett going red in the nose and improbably reducing press and pub­lic to cowed tears by reciting Rudyard Kipling’s If. It invites us to believe that, despite a total absence of strategic thinking and man man­agement, a sentimental belief in the sup­eriority of English spunk, in Three Lions patriotism, might some-how override such sci­entific niceties and en­able our boys to barrel through against foreign foes. This, as events have emphatically proven, is wishful bollocks. It still lurks in the English psyche, however.

Ricky Tomlinson, a fine fellow in danger of spreading himself too thin, battles gamely here but, as a far greater comic persona than Mike Bassett once said, it’s an Impossible Job.

From WSC 178 December 2001. What was happening this month

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