FOUL!

Michael Henderson believes that football

represents all that is most repugnant about modern Britain

FOOTBALL returned to the towns of England last week with a reassuring pre- dictability. Fans of Birmingham City threw bottles at coaches carrying Fulham sup- porters. Followers of the two Manchester clubs hurled bricks at each other in the city centre. Across the Severn Bridge fans of Cardiff City and Millwall traded punches and kicks before the game, among shop- pers and diners. It was as if the game had never been away.

The newspapers did not make much of it, because football violence has ceased to be a story. For all the talk of football becoming a pursuit fit for the metropolitan middle classes, most sensible people still expect the warring tribes of football to misbehave, and they are rarely disappoint- ed. The lack of coverage merely underlines how common are these incidents of disor- der, and how much they are taken for granted by the majority of folk on this island, which has little or no interest in the game.

It is not fashionable to say this, but it happens to be true. Millions of people do not attend football matches every Satur- day, and do not turn on their televisions whenever a game is featured (most days of the week, it seems, between August and May). Neither do they respond warmly to the idea that bringing the World Cup to this country in 2006, as the Football Asso- ciation intends, is a consummation devout- ly to be wished.

This week marks the start of a cam- paign, backed by a bandwagon of newspa- pers, to bring football back to the country that invented it. Despite the fact that South Africa is the world's favoured candi- date for emotional reasons, and that Ger- many has a much better case (bigger country, finer cities, better roads and rail- ways), there is a fervently expressed desire to inflict on England a summer of absolute misery seven years hence. It is, of course, the 'people's wish' that it should come here for the first time since 1966, when England won their one and only World Cup. Geoff Hurst, who scored that famous hat-trick against West Ger- many in the final, was knighted last year, before the last World Cup, as a sop to the football lobby, and was wheeled out this week by the Sun to support its stomach- churning front-page campaign to bring the Cup 'home'.

There is something fairly revolting about all this talk of football representing this country at its finest. It is fairly clear to any- one who lives in a city that it represents everything that is most repugnant about modern England, so thoroughly has the game wormed its way into every aspect of public life.

There is a complicity among newspapers and other media outlets to dazzle people into submission. Television jumped into bed with football a long time ago and radio, in the form of Five Live, makes no attempt to provide a disinterested service. As a prelude to the new season, the station trumpeted the return of 'the greatest game on earth', one that divides families, cities and countries. Yes, that's the problem. It is a deeply divisive game that encourages the basest elements of humankind.

An example of this conspiracy is the way that the European Championship, held in England in 1996, has come to be regarded as trouble-free. It was nothing of the kind. It was policed effectively, as football matches have to be if they are not to descend into open warfare, but let nobody imagine that all was sweetness and light.

As one who walked through central Lon- don after England's victory against Spain, and who drove round town after the defeat by Germany, and who saw Trafalgar Square closed on both occasions, I can con- firm that this was a grotesque untruth. Thousands of football supporters, clearly drunk or drugged, frolicked in the foun- tains and caused criminal damage to cars, leaving glass strewn across the road, as for- eign tourists watched the centre of one of the world's great capital cities gripped by marauders. That, regrettably, is the most authentic voice of the football fan.

The best definition of a snob in England today is a person who does not think that football is the greatest thing in life. Like a mephitic form of pond-life, it reproduces itself everywhere. Even a magazine like the New Yorker is not safe from encroachment by it. A pretentious piece by that prize bore, Salman Rushdie, riddled with school- boy howlers, bore recent witness to his love of Tottenham Hotspur.

It is 'tempting to lay the blame for the game's new image at the door of Nick Hornby, whose part-autobiography, Fever Pitch, was published in 1992; tempting, but wrong. Hornby's book is a mildly diverting, hugely overrated account of an unhappy Home Counties childhood, but it is not his fault that other people have chosen to amplify the themes running through it.

`There are some good men in football,' John Arlott once told me, 'but they are outnumbered 200 to one.' Arlott, who loved his football, knew whereof he spoke. The game began to change in the Sixties, when he stopped writing on it out of princi- ple (`it became seedy'), and the recent explosion, fuelled by television, has cor- rupted a great game so completely that it is now a horrible 'lifestyle accessory'.

Oh, for a sense of proportion. Years ago, when Nat Lofthouse and Tom Finney adorned the game, they travelled to play a benefit match in Grimsby. 'We didn't get paid,' Lofthouse recalled, 'but they did buy us fish and chips. I had a cod and Tommy got a haddock because he was the better player!' Finney, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the game, is regarded as the greatest English player of all, and Loft- house as the game's finest centre-forward.

There is nothing wrong with English football except the people who play it, administer it, watch it and, in too many cases, report it. This country, increasingly in hock to a grim proletarian subculture, should be barred from staging the World Cup on aesthetic grounds. If it does come here in 2006 I. shall be heading for the moon — on gossamer wings.

The author is cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.