SPECTATOR SPORT
Unseemly scrambles
Frank Keating
THOSE OF an age and a particular inclina- tion remember it as the night the presump- tions and certainties still hanging over from the so-called 'swinging' 1960s came to a Juddering and discordant end. The way of the world was always more insecure after 17 October 1973, at Wembley Stadium.
By the time you reach this back page, the immediate soccer futures should have been settled for the international teams of Wales, Ireland and England, and we will know whether Thursday's headline writers dipped into the vitriol or the gold-leaf inkwell after the crucial World Cup quali- fiers. In England's case particularly these unseemly scrambles over the final fence have become par for the four-year course in recent times.
This whole phenomenon of national vul- nerability about a game can be precisely dated as having begun exactly 20 years ago this weekend when the England team's boasted and taken-for-granted primacy over all other nations was smithereened by failing to qualify for the World Cup finals for the first time since they had deigned to enter.
England had to beat Poland to go through. Poland only had to draw. The result was 1-1, national mourning, and the Sun rimmed its whole front page in a black border to enclose the one apocalyptic mes- sage: THE END OF THE WORLD. I had not long joined the Guardian, but was on a moonlighting day-off that night with my recent mates from television. They were the days of the pioneering 'TV panel' — a studio jury of know-all former players picked for their strident certainties and jin- goism as they patted their trendy hairdos and rattled the gold bracelets at their wrists as they straightened the collars and shot the cuffs of their uniform pink shirts. The Pol- ish centre-half, a muscle-bound blond called Gorgon, came out to derisive snorts from Brian Clough — 'He's Joe Bugner in boots,' he said. Clough called the Polish goalkeeper, Tomazewski, 'a right clown'. In all his career I had never known Eng- land's manager, the uneasily enunciating Sir All Ramsey, so cocksure before a kick- off. 'We are in tip-top order and ready to go. All we have to do for the next 90 min- utes is harness our adrenalin.'
Gorgon and the trampolining Tomazews- ki harnessed England's adrenalin all right. In the first-half, England had 16 clear-cut goal chances and of those from Peters, Bell, Clarke, Channon and Chivers which didn't fly a whisker wide, the heroic Tomazewski — like a slackly strung marionette with a surprised smile on his face — hurled himself at any old how. Splendour on the grass.
Ramsey had dropped the icon, Bobby Moore, for the first time — and now his replacement, Norman Hunter, contrived to give a goal and the game to Poland with a fannying mistake, compounded by a too late belly-flop from the gloved tyro, Shilton. England equalised with a penalty, but it was not enough.
Hunter, in tears, drove up the Ml to Yorkshire. His son woke up, also weeping, and said, 'Daddy, is it true you lost us the World Cup?'
The rest of the team, and us `meejer' hangers-on, went to unwind at La Val- bonne, a noisy, neon-flashing relic of `swinging' London. 'Life will never be the same', said lovely Bobby Moore, downing his lager and, with finality, his whisky chas- er. Nor, in a way, was it.
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