The Archive

Cameron Carter Begins our new column by scrutinising the way we decide which team to follow

Morality is nomadic, we know this from history. The Ancient Greeks believed it was perfectly acceptable for a man to love a boy – and I mean any boy – whereas trousering stray apples was punishable by death. In the West it was only in the last decade that fidgeting was legalised in infant schools. Yet there remain some last taboos that prevail across most cultures: murder, incest and changing the football team you support.

Most of us have selected our team for life by the age of five – an age when we can spend the best part of an hour smacking a mud hill with the back of a spade while conspicuously wearing safety pants. Would we choose our career, our political affiliation, our life partner at this age? The answer must be a resounding no – otherwise there would be a surfeit in society of apolitical train drivers holed up with a jingly panda. So surely there should come a point later in our lives when we might legitimately, and without censure, make a more informed choice about which club we would like to follow and, as a consequence, switch allegiance.

Just as we are permitted to vote for one of three Conservative parties upon turning 18, so we should have the opportunity to fix upon our football team at that age. I chose to support Arsenal when I was five, probably because they won the Double that year but also because I liked the kit and Charlie George looked like every single one of my older brother’s friends.

Had I waited until my 18th birthday, I may have opted for Southampton, as the nearest team to my hometown and one I could more easily mention – along with names like Reuben Agboola and Ivan Golac – in a facetious tone, to comply with the prevailing college-boy snobbery towards the game. It would actually be quite reasonable for a psychometric test to be applied in early adulthood to match individuals to the most fitting club.Home-loving, spirited but ultimately unambitious? Try Norwich City. Confident and charismatic in public but afraid of the inner silence when alone? Take Chelsea. New to football? Sign up to the Manchester City Project.

For that matter, why not free ourselves of these self-administered chains entirely and change teams whenever we choose – or not support an individual team at all? If the owners of clubs wish to commercialise the game to make maximum profits, then perhaps fans should act more like conventional consumers and treat the game as a product and the teams as brands. Should we cling to a half-remembered childhood vow when most players manifestly look elsewhere towards the end of every season, and our club tacks and lists on the commercial whims of a foreign gentleman who made his money in the post-communism cupcakes boom?

Shouldn’t we, as consumers, look around for a cheaper or more accessible team that brand loyalty had previously prevented us from considering? Why not try another team on a trial basis, at trial size (say, two or three games) and if they give us a better experience than our previous club, or the same experiences at a lesser cost and inconvenience, we might legitimately stay with the new brand.
But we are not ready for this yet. Researching this topic, I asked a handful of people if they would ever consider changing team. The query resulted in four swift one-word rebuttals, with only one person bothering to supply a rationale, peppered with abuse words, to their answer. Loyalty is not necessarily a force for good. Many more atrocities are committed through loyalty to a flag or charismatic leader than by dangerous loners acting on their own free will. Loyalty also breeds complacency in its subject. Look what happened to Tonight-period David Bowie and to West Ham every other season.

The philosopher Josiah Royce argued that to lead a morally significant life, one’s actions must express a self-consciously asserted will. It is not good enough to simply copy the conventional moral behaviour. This is the time to assert that self-will and wield our little wooden sword of consumer choice. The herd mentality can be consigned to the past – we should by now be heading towards an enlightened society of limitless possibilities, as acted out by the Deal Or No Deal participants in their hotel and television studio demi-monde.

It is time to be moving away from the one man-one club mentality of those ghostly pre-Premier League days. As we are paying 21st century prices and player wages, we must counter with a vigorous new philosophy and go where the spirit and the marketplace take us. Or veer towards the football that is most aesthetically pleasing to us at any given time. Love of tradition has painted the British fan into a corner: we allow ourselves to admire foreign teams, we merely support our own.

From WSC 295 September 2011

Summer is a time for dreaming of coming success for your club, before grim reality kicks in. Enjoy it while you can, says Jon Spurling

Before the start of the campaign, each team is technically dead level. Even the most battle-weary of supporters may cling to the belief that the new owner/chairman will usher in “a new age of prosperity”, that the “dynamic” and “forward-thinking” new boss will cajole and inspire the troops and that the new striker will rip through opposition defences at will. Reality can sink in within minutes, or the belief may seep out of the club like a slowly deflating balloon over a period of weeks. Unless you happen to follow one of the elite group who actually land trophies regularly, supporting a football team is just one long false dawn.

Read more…

Players used to keep themselves busy by swapping sports on a seasonal basis. Si Hawkins looks at why that’s no longer the case

A few months ago, as the news broke that a house fire had cruelly curtailed the long innings of England batting stalwart Trevor Bailey, a lesser-known strand of his career cropped up in conversation. “Old ‘Stonewall’ Bailey,” mused my grandad, fondly. “I used to watch him play for the Avenue.”

Read more…

Looking at football in print, Harry Pearson discusses how the game has become more important to the broadsheet press

In the late-1980s I decided to investigate an incident that had occurred at Ayresome Park just after the Second World War. Within my family the incident was infamous, or celebrated, it was hard to tell which, because it involved my grandad’s cousin, Davey. Middlesbrough were playing Arsenal and, after a mêlée in the goalmouth, Boro’s goalkeeper Dave Cumming had walked up to the Arsenal centre-half Leslie Compton, decked him with a right hook and then marched off the field. As Compton rose groggily to his feet a group of fans had run on the pitch and one of them – possibly Davey – had felled Compton again.

Read more…

David Stubbs looks at the tabloids’ unique style of football reporting

In Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale’s Stick It Up Your Punter!, their study of the Sun during the 1980s editorship of Kelvin MacKenzie, the authors recount a journalists’ strike during which sub-editors had to write up the football match reports. Wizened old cynics that they were, they decided to turn the task into an exercise of which of them could come up with the most meaningless cliche with which to pad out their copy. The winner was “kick and rush glory boys”.

As with tabloid coverage across the board, their headlines, straplines and copy have, over the past quarter of a century, generated a tag cloud of grab-bag buzz-words – “blast”, “probe”, “lions”, “tragedy”, “flops”, “fury”, “blast”, “swoop”, “sensational”, “glory”, “shame”, “thugs”, “heroes”, and so forth. Not a great deal has changed in 
this respect.
Some have fallen by the way with time. Gary Lineker was habitually described as “hot-shot” back in his mid-1980s pomp, a mode of description which eventually died of hackneyed shame. Even “skipper” seems in danger of extinction.

All of these words have one thing in common. Like the word “pesky”, which was only ever uttered by the likes of Little Plum in the Beano, they are at once deadeningly familiar and yet unspoken by actual people in real life, least of all tabloid readers. A particular example of this is “shaker”, used not to allude to a member of The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, but to convey in six letters an injury scare.

These devices also function to contrast with the inconsequential reality of the football world on a day-to-day basis, as well as the warily, dully discreet equivocations favoured by players and managers when talking to journalists. Much as on Football Focus they’re forced to jazz up a teeth-grindingly tedious interview with a Scott Parker by switching in and out of grainy black and white or zooming in on his hands, so these words add a falsely incendiary gloss.

So, in October 1986, we read in the Daily Mirror that Tony Adams was Gunning For Kerry Dixon on the eve of an Arsenal v Chelsea fixture. Here are the fighting words from Adams whose psychologically warfaring mood that headline captures: “All First Division strikers need careful watching and facing Kerry will be another good test for me.”

Look for sensationalist cliche and you would assume the first port of call to be the Sun. It’s certainly had its moments of crass extremism, such as Argies Get Their Revenge, following England’s World Cup exit to the Hand of God goal in 1986, or the pillorying of Messrs Robson and Taylor. However, it’s almost disappointing to find, on closer inspection, that their coverage throughout the 1980s and 90s was restrained by the standards of the rest of the paper.

So, when flicking through its 1980s pages, with those abysmal Franklin cartoons, red-baiting and headlines like Rape: Why Men Are Hidden Victims, there is also relatively considered prose from the likes of Martin Samuel. Nothing masterly, mind, still tabloidese, with every paragraph beginning with the words “And” or “But”. Yet by no means as addled or moronic as you might fear. Even in 1996, though the coverage of England’s semi-final against Germany is depressingly festooned in flags of St George, there is virtually no “Kraut” bashing.

That, infamously, could not be said for the Mirror under Piers Morgan’s editorship. It was prior to England v Germany that he produced the mock-up cover of Stuart Pearce and Gazza in tin helmets and the Achtung! Surrender headline, a stunt which he recently described as prompting a “massive sense of humour failure” on the part of his detractors. It turns out he unapologetically regards the cover as a sense of humour 
success.

This wasn’t a one-off. From the mid-1980s onwards, the Mirror was more startlingly prone to martial imagery than its Wapping counterpart, real Orwellian “war minus the shooting” stuff, tastelessly so a time when hooligan firms were squaring up to each other for real – indeed, you could read all about these “thugs” and their “nights of shame” on the aghast Mirror back pages.

The word “killer” is deployed frequently and airily on its back pages, Leeds manager Billy Bremner is “blitz Billy”, Paul and Clive Allen, up against each other for QPR and Spurs, are a “family at war”. Man Utd are “shell-shocked” to be beaten 1-0 at Wimbledon, while a 15,000-strong fans’ petition to regain the their ground and presence at a club meeting goes under the headline 
VALLEY WAR. The gruesome, bloody details follow – police were called as directors Derek Ufton and Michael Norris “reeled under a barrage of questions”.

Then, of course, there are those trenches, from which the likes of Crystal Palace are forever charging “with bayonets fixed”, in which burly, yeomen English defenders line up side by side, in which the real nitty-gritty business of football is conducted, and to which the foreign influx would probably be averse. In the Daily Express, in 1992, James Lawton worried about how “battle hardened” Eric Cantona, then of Leeds, would prove in the impending Premier League season, in a piece titled Dainty Eric Must Face Up To Trench Warfare.

If foreigners weren’t conspicuous in tabloid-land decades ago, black footballers certainly were. If you hadn’t noticed in the 1980s that John Barnes, for instance, was black, then the tabloids were on hand with constant reminders. He was, in 1988, our “brightest black pearl”, or, according to Emlyn Hughes, the “best black player ever produced in this country”, an important distinction. In 1986, Steve Curry in the Express felt obliged to describe the “happy Calypso manner” in which Barnes told him he would be prepared to play anywhere for England.

However, when Barnes, Ricky Hill and Brian Stein flew unannounced to Jamaica to take part in a fundraising match there was Fury At Missing Black Aces in the Mirror. Much has remained constant in tabloid coverage. Though Wayne Rooney’s rise has prompted a depressing increase in the penchant for dreadful name-based puns, the England team still vacillate between “lionhearts” and “flops”, as opposed to the routinely, chronically middling 
mediocrities that they are. But some things at least have changed for the better.

From WSC 295 September 2011