'Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being' (Camus)
Remember undergound public toilets with steep steps down to their shadowy echoing depths? Remember rampant homophobia and it being ok to sing racist songs in the playground? Remember short shorts? Remember when cars were all different shapes? Remember Bukta and Admiral and Barry Davies? Remember when Micky was football's best known Hazard? Remember those plain generic football kits you could get for PE at school that were cut like it was still 1978, even though ten years had passed? Remember Top of the Pops and guessing who was miming or not? Remember when paedophiles were just known as 'strange men?' Remember ha'penny sweets in 10p mixes? Remember when people used to come to your house and light up a tab without even asking, even though your your mum and dad didn't smoke and they'd happily get them an ashtray? Remember Brian Moore?
The old days. Entwined with your memories of your first and purest love. Football.
Do you miss it? I do. I miss the faint frisson of danger and the simplicity of it all. Football starting at about 1.30 on Saturday with the first bit of team news and over by the end of the drive home or 'Sport on 2.' Competitions that made sense (like the winners of each league playing each other in Europe) and divisions whose names were easily understood. Beautiful old trophies instead of brash oversized tacky ones. One game a week on telly, and the rest of them played at the same time, so you'd get a glorious, manic, fizzing rush of so much football all at once, instead of these days, where it's like having to drink a pint in a series of sips spread across 3 days so by the time you get to finish it, it's gone all flat and warm.
Thing is, as much as I miss it, I don't think I'd flick a switch and have it all back, just like that, just as it was. I remember Bradford, the vaguest of memories at the time, but rendered vivid by the pictures in one of my football annuals of a stand replaced by a primal nightmare of flame and smoke. I remember sitting on a square sandstone block outside my house as Hillsborough unfolded, minute by shocking minute, the unmatched Peter Jones using his brilliance to evoke a scene that my 9 year old mind didn't know was possible. I remember pictures of the 'new Ibrox' and explanations of how not one, not two, but three disasters had been the part of the impetus for this most modern seeming of stadiums.
I remember it being years and years till I saw European football. I remember Manchester Utd's European Cup Winners' Cup campaign being heralded as some kind of cleansing and renewal for the English game, after Heysel and charging fans and collapsing walls. (A knockout trophy it took just 5 games to win I can't help but point out, when the contemporary football world is tying itself in knots about how to fit all the matches in) I read about the Burnden Park disaster and the injuries at the White Horse final, marvelling at the pictures of an impossible seeming number of people massed at the edge of the pitch and on the banking all around. I came to understand that these things seemed to happen with a surprising regularity.
I still miss the old grounds though. Even though I know that their threadbare and creaking state was due to a woeful lack of investment that in part was due to the social stigma that football faced prior to Gazza crying it back to fashion again. I miss the old Bloomfield Road tremendously. The history soaked shambles of ground, the tinderbox wooden stand and odd corner with what seemed like a shed balanced above the tunnel, the vast yawning Kop, weed strewn and crumbling, but seemingly permanent, rising out of the earth itself, more of a geographical feature than a stand, the whole place a hotchpotch of corrugated iron and stanchions all held together by layers of thick paint. The new ground is nothing on it. It's fine. It's breezeblock and mostly uniform. I like it, don't get me wrong, I love it even, but it's just not the old place.
That doesn't mean I want the old place back. My nan was lovely and I adored her beyond measure and without reservation, but eventually she reached a point where her passing was inevitable. That happens. One day I might have my own grandchildren and that'll be different, but it'll be what happens. Things change. The new replaces the old. I still miss her but it's the province of weird tech billionaires with proto fascist ideals, unresolved issues and enough money to dream the impossible to try and extend life beyond what is natural. It's ok for things to be fond memories and no more.
The clock cannot rewind. I want to lie in my childhood bedroom and fill the time up with nothing but dreaming, free from obligation and worry, but now as I write, my own child is dreaming his own dreams about 4 yards away and I have to accept that the world has turned and I am grown...
I can't freeze the world at some point in about 1989, when everything was as it was before my infant eyes grew cynical, before I knew what it was to really hurt, to have a heart broken, before I knew the hollow emptiness of a come down or the hollow greed that underpins the world, before I was tired and wished the end of the day to come quickly so I could close my eyes and escape, harbouring a secret desire to sleep forever.
The idea that football has turned bad, simply because it 'isn't what it was' is wrong.
Each generation sees changes. The amatuer game gives way to the professionals and we move from Corintthian values to hard nosed professionalism. From a gung ho kick and rush and may the best man win, to a Scots inspired world of tactics and passing. The game becomes famous, Steve Bloomer changes hands for literally thousands and his image adorns cigarette cards and hair tonics. Offside turns tactics on their head and George Camsell and Dixie Dean plunder 119 goals between them in a single season's worth of games.
Wizards of Dribble, clown princes, wild men, team men, solid pros and loose cannons, golden visions, lions of vienna, champagne charlies and chopper 'arris's all come and go, el Beatle glides through a decade and a half of rock n roll football, leaving the image of the game changed forever. Floodlights rise and bathe crowds in light, bringing magic to industrial nights in industrial towns across the nation. Players come from diverse backgrounds as migration becomes normalised. TV cameras bringing pictures into homes, making stars of many, ever sharper focus bringing ever more opportunity for ever more lucrative worship.
Football has always evolved and it should always carry on doing so. The beauty of football is, for a simplistic game, it seems to be able to spawn a remarkable number of variations in how it should be played. That's part of the joy. Long ball, short passing, WM, wingless wonders, the high press, counter attacking, physicality versus skill, team vs individual. Things go in cycles, what was new once, becomes old, and returns in the guises of a new idea or a brilliant innovation only when it's been forgotten and condemned as old fashioned. Even VAR has its roots in an idea from the 1890s of an extra referee sat in the stands who could rule on contentious decisions from a different angle. (it was widely loathed and swiftly abandoned...)
Fashions change, grounds change, styles of play change, boots change, haircuts change, balls change, chants change, what we eat at grounds changes, everything changes. Football evolves and that is fine.
Do you miss it? I do. I miss the faint frisson of danger and the simplicity of it all. Football starting at about 1.30 on Saturday with the first bit of team news and over by the end of the drive home or 'Sport on 2.' Competitions that made sense (like the winners of each league playing each other in Europe) and divisions whose names were easily understood. Beautiful old trophies instead of brash oversized tacky ones. One game a week on telly, and the rest of them played at the same time, so you'd get a glorious, manic, fizzing rush of so much football all at once, instead of these days, where it's like having to drink a pint in a series of sips spread across 3 days so by the time you get to finish it, it's gone all flat and warm.
Thing is, as much as I miss it, I don't think I'd flick a switch and have it all back, just like that, just as it was. I remember Bradford, the vaguest of memories at the time, but rendered vivid by the pictures in one of my football annuals of a stand replaced by a primal nightmare of flame and smoke. I remember sitting on a square sandstone block outside my house as Hillsborough unfolded, minute by shocking minute, the unmatched Peter Jones using his brilliance to evoke a scene that my 9 year old mind didn't know was possible. I remember pictures of the 'new Ibrox' and explanations of how not one, not two, but three disasters had been the part of the impetus for this most modern seeming of stadiums.
I remember it being years and years till I saw European football. I remember Manchester Utd's European Cup Winners' Cup campaign being heralded as some kind of cleansing and renewal for the English game, after Heysel and charging fans and collapsing walls. (A knockout trophy it took just 5 games to win I can't help but point out, when the contemporary football world is tying itself in knots about how to fit all the matches in) I read about the Burnden Park disaster and the injuries at the White Horse final, marvelling at the pictures of an impossible seeming number of people massed at the edge of the pitch and on the banking all around. I came to understand that these things seemed to happen with a surprising regularity.
I still miss the old grounds though. Even though I know that their threadbare and creaking state was due to a woeful lack of investment that in part was due to the social stigma that football faced prior to Gazza crying it back to fashion again. I miss the old Bloomfield Road tremendously. The history soaked shambles of ground, the tinderbox wooden stand and odd corner with what seemed like a shed balanced above the tunnel, the vast yawning Kop, weed strewn and crumbling, but seemingly permanent, rising out of the earth itself, more of a geographical feature than a stand, the whole place a hotchpotch of corrugated iron and stanchions all held together by layers of thick paint. The new ground is nothing on it. It's fine. It's breezeblock and mostly uniform. I like it, don't get me wrong, I love it even, but it's just not the old place.
That doesn't mean I want the old place back. My nan was lovely and I adored her beyond measure and without reservation, but eventually she reached a point where her passing was inevitable. That happens. One day I might have my own grandchildren and that'll be different, but it'll be what happens. Things change. The new replaces the old. I still miss her but it's the province of weird tech billionaires with proto fascist ideals, unresolved issues and enough money to dream the impossible to try and extend life beyond what is natural. It's ok for things to be fond memories and no more.
The clock cannot rewind. I want to lie in my childhood bedroom and fill the time up with nothing but dreaming, free from obligation and worry, but now as I write, my own child is dreaming his own dreams about 4 yards away and I have to accept that the world has turned and I am grown...
I can't freeze the world at some point in about 1989, when everything was as it was before my infant eyes grew cynical, before I knew what it was to really hurt, to have a heart broken, before I knew the hollow emptiness of a come down or the hollow greed that underpins the world, before I was tired and wished the end of the day to come quickly so I could close my eyes and escape, harbouring a secret desire to sleep forever.
The idea that football has turned bad, simply because it 'isn't what it was' is wrong.
Each generation sees changes. The amatuer game gives way to the professionals and we move from Corintthian values to hard nosed professionalism. From a gung ho kick and rush and may the best man win, to a Scots inspired world of tactics and passing. The game becomes famous, Steve Bloomer changes hands for literally thousands and his image adorns cigarette cards and hair tonics. Offside turns tactics on their head and George Camsell and Dixie Dean plunder 119 goals between them in a single season's worth of games.
Wizards of Dribble, clown princes, wild men, team men, solid pros and loose cannons, golden visions, lions of vienna, champagne charlies and chopper 'arris's all come and go, el Beatle glides through a decade and a half of rock n roll football, leaving the image of the game changed forever. Floodlights rise and bathe crowds in light, bringing magic to industrial nights in industrial towns across the nation. Players come from diverse backgrounds as migration becomes normalised. TV cameras bringing pictures into homes, making stars of many, ever sharper focus bringing ever more opportunity for ever more lucrative worship.
Football has always evolved and it should always carry on doing so. The beauty of football is, for a simplistic game, it seems to be able to spawn a remarkable number of variations in how it should be played. That's part of the joy. Long ball, short passing, WM, wingless wonders, the high press, counter attacking, physicality versus skill, team vs individual. Things go in cycles, what was new once, becomes old, and returns in the guises of a new idea or a brilliant innovation only when it's been forgotten and condemned as old fashioned. Even VAR has its roots in an idea from the 1890s of an extra referee sat in the stands who could rule on contentious decisions from a different angle. (it was widely loathed and swiftly abandoned...)
Fashions change, grounds change, styles of play change, boots change, haircuts change, balls change, chants change, what we eat at grounds changes, everything changes. Football evolves and that is fine.
It's more than fine.
It's fucking brilliant. What else do we still do, that we've been doing, more or less without a break since the Victorian era?
I think there's one aspect of longing for the past that isn't nostalgia though.
Throughout football history, the game has been competitive. Whether by accident or design, the glories and failures have been shared out. Football has been a hard sport to stay at the top of, a genuine challenge to dominate. The reason why Liverpool are venerated so highly, is that they managed to stay at the top of the English game for so long at a time when it was truly hard to do so. I've written at length on this before, both about the statistical evidence that demonstrates the game has reached a period of stasis (and who likes stasis?) and the means by which to reinvigorate it and I don't intend to revisit that now.
I think there's one aspect of longing for the past that isn't nostalgia though.
Throughout football history, the game has been competitive. Whether by accident or design, the glories and failures have been shared out. Football has been a hard sport to stay at the top of, a genuine challenge to dominate. The reason why Liverpool are venerated so highly, is that they managed to stay at the top of the English game for so long at a time when it was truly hard to do so. I've written at length on this before, both about the statistical evidence that demonstrates the game has reached a period of stasis (and who likes stasis?) and the means by which to reinvigorate it and I don't intend to revisit that now.
What I want to do in this piece of writing is make a suggestion to those of us (and there are many) who think the same. It's too easy to paint us as the luddites. Dreaming forever of times gone by and bemoaning lost grounds and clinging to our late 80s (or whatever decade you recall most fondly) replica kits like comfort blankets. We're accused of wanting to 'take the game backwards' or 'undo the progress.'
The truth is somewhat different. All we want is football to be competitive. We don't recognise that having 5 or 6 teams who hoover up all the trophies and look set to do so for the next decade is competitive or progressive.
We don't accept that the 'quality' of the game has improved by creating a vast disparity between sides whose resources were once far more equally matched. We think the quality of a football match comes from the competition between the players and whilst throughout history, there has always been mismatches, if those mismatches become baked into the very structure of the game and repeated year after year and the governance of the game seeks to make these mismatches permanent there is something rotten at the core of football.
The pragmatic truth is - those of us who remember terraces and players earning relatively sane amounts of money, unpredictable cup competitions and teams from unfashionable towns getting into Europe are aging. I'm in my forties and I'm acutely aware that even people in my friendship group have little or no memory of anything other than the financial arrangements as they are now. They don't see that 'something has changed' - they might be vaguely aware that things weren't exactly as they are, but they don't look on he pre-Premier League era with the same eyes as I do - it doesn't evoke the same fluttering memories of young love, it's just some blurry footage of weird kits and grounds they don't recognise. They fell in love with the game in the late 90s or early 2000s, when, despite what we may think, it was and (is still) football. It's still enough to get your heart racing.
Imagine telling someone their girlfriend wasn't as nice as yours. Telling them 'our football' is better than 'their football' is kind of like saying - 'oi, you can't have her cos she's mine, but you should fancy my bird not yours, yours is all plastic and fake and mines the real thing'
Railing about 'how it used to be' isn't going to appeal to anyone under about 35 years old, anymore than someone blathering on about the 50s or 60s appealed to me in the 1990s. I wasn't likely to ditch my Nirvana records, just so I could listen to Bill Haley or Herman's Hermits. No one in the Hacienda was likely to be persuaded to go to a milk bar followed by some jiving because 'that's what we used to do'
We can't give up on the game and retreat to what was once but is no more. We need to coalesce round simple demands - maximum ticket prices and a salary cap would be my suggestion (as above, I'm not expanding on this except to say, the two things go hand in hand.. I've written about it elsewhere, at length and I'm painfully aware my blog suffers from overwriting at the best of times.) We need to put those demands across in such a way that they speak to everyone.
You might get misty eyed over Peter Reid in short shorts or the smell of the pies at Highfield Road. That's fine, but to the next man, that means nothing.
To put in terms a teenager of today might grasp instantly, without the 'once upon a time, there was a land where everything was better' or 'things were better before the war' attitude - FIFA is extraordinarily popular and not simply because it recreates the game in extraordinary detail. What makes FIFA satisfying, is the way you can take your club on an adventure - you can win the league and the cup in a fairytale land. What if real football had a bit more of that magic? What if it was a bit more unpredictable, a bit more tense, a bit more meaningful? What if there were a few more fairy tale runs and unlikely teams winning things? Who didn't enjoy Leicester?
That shouldn't be too much to ask for and as both Martin Calladine (in 'The Ugly Game') and John Nicholson (in 'Can We Have Our Football Back) make plain - the route to achieving this is not a difficult one, in theory at least - and if something is theoretically straightforward, but difficult to imagine in practice then it needs a shift in mindset to take place. The latter book should be read by anyone who cares even in passing about the game. It lights a fire in the heart and in the cold of the modern world, that can only be good for you.
Calladine's splendid tome asks (amongst many excellent + at times very funny observations) - if the NFL and the golden children of the free market in the USA can be committed to the competitiveness of their sport and apply a strict and fair salary cap, then why can't the authorities in England do something similar?
The notion that 'this is the way it is' or that 'it's just modern football' is a lazy cliche that doesn't cut it when placed against an example of a sport that manages to be both highly commercial and highly competitive. There is a model in place. We just choose to ignore it. What is the health of the game if it can be described as 'predictable' and 'a parade' - What is the role of the game's authorities if it isn't to ensure the health of the game?
To put in terms a teenager of today might grasp instantly, without the 'once upon a time, there was a land where everything was better' or 'things were better before the war' attitude - FIFA is extraordinarily popular and not simply because it recreates the game in extraordinary detail. What makes FIFA satisfying, is the way you can take your club on an adventure - you can win the league and the cup in a fairytale land. What if real football had a bit more of that magic? What if it was a bit more unpredictable, a bit more tense, a bit more meaningful? What if there were a few more fairy tale runs and unlikely teams winning things? Who didn't enjoy Leicester?
That shouldn't be too much to ask for and as both Martin Calladine (in 'The Ugly Game') and John Nicholson (in 'Can We Have Our Football Back) make plain - the route to achieving this is not a difficult one, in theory at least - and if something is theoretically straightforward, but difficult to imagine in practice then it needs a shift in mindset to take place. The latter book should be read by anyone who cares even in passing about the game. It lights a fire in the heart and in the cold of the modern world, that can only be good for you.
Calladine's splendid tome asks (amongst many excellent + at times very funny observations) - if the NFL and the golden children of the free market in the USA can be committed to the competitiveness of their sport and apply a strict and fair salary cap, then why can't the authorities in England do something similar?
The notion that 'this is the way it is' or that 'it's just modern football' is a lazy cliche that doesn't cut it when placed against an example of a sport that manages to be both highly commercial and highly competitive. There is a model in place. We just choose to ignore it. What is the health of the game if it can be described as 'predictable' and 'a parade' - What is the role of the game's authorities if it isn't to ensure the health of the game?
'But it's such a big business - surely, they've done a good job, there's so much money!?' I hear you protest. - Overseeing the inflation of wages and costs to a point where any form of community or local ownership is unthinkable and it cost the price of an oil empire to compete, isn't really a triumph of governance, but a failing in their obligations... It's a question of perspective. See the above comment about mindset. Repeat after me: 'It's only a game'
In a strange way, FIFA offers a simulation of 'old fashioned', pre Premier League Football when less fashionable or glamorous teams could dream of breaking into the big time, because from time to time teams like them did. It recognises that a world in which most of the teams couldn't win anything, would be a pretty poor set up for a game. The game would be pointless to play from most perspectives and we'd begin to wonder why they bothered including all the other teams at all. Why can't actual football realise that as well?
No one would expect the league to suddenly turn on its head or for Manchester United and Liverpool to drop out of the professional game. Big clubs will still be big clubs. They just might not win everything ALL THE TIME.
No one would expect the league to suddenly turn on its head or for Manchester United and Liverpool to drop out of the professional game. Big clubs will still be big clubs. They just might not win everything ALL THE TIME.
We're asking for something realistic, we're asking for something that can only be good for the game itself and good for those who watch it. If the joy of playing the game is to win matches, then it can only be good for the vast majority of those within the game and those who love it to make the game fairer thus give people more hope of winning next week. That's not nostalgia and we can't let it be dismissed as so. It's exactly the opposite. It's forward thinking. It's about how even when it looks like your team are utterly hopeless, 'there's always next year...' and about how every football fan should be able to feel that way.
We're a fifth of the way through the 21st century. The sad truth is, no matter how many righteous books and lengthy, earnest blogs are written - to really get anywhere, we need a decent hashtag... Suggestions on a postcard please!
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If we can't dream, what can we do? |
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