Soccer
Pantomime horse
Benny Green
For years now we have all been most Pleasingly diverted by the spectacle of the Pantomime horse of English football administration frisking blissfully across the vast Gromboolian plain of gormlessness, The hind legs in particular of this lovable creature, represented by Mr Hardaker of the Football League, have Performed the most amazing contortions for our amusement, quite eclipsing the comparatively staid and sensible front legs, oPerated by Mr Fellows of the Football Association. But one day, we thought to ourselves, both sets of legs are sure to have convulsions at the same time, and then what? The answer to this fascinating question was given two weeks ago, when Mr Hardaker and Mr Fellows, in their gallant attempts to surpass themselves, actually succeeded in upstaging each Other.
In the past Mr Hardaker has achieved !ome unforgettable peaks of performance, Including the theory that football supPorters who go to matches and sing their Flub song are contributing to the improving image of the game; that most clubs in England have been placed on the very rim of bankruptcy by the abolition of the maximum wage clause, and that he, Mr Hardaker, would rather take the word of a deg than that of a professional footballer. As for the suggestion that by raising the P!aYer's wage you are bankrupting most of his employers, all Mr Hardaker is really !aying is that for seventy years the absurd.1,37 top-heavy structure of the Football eague only made ends meet by underpaying its employees. Still, all this dissolves in the light of Mr ,Hardaker's latest cartwheel. It is well itflown that both the League and the
Association, not to mention the general public, have been plagued for years by a problem which dwarfs ali others, violence in football crowds. Neither the clubs nor the administrators know what to do about this, but now, at last, Mr Hardaker has located the source of the trouble. In a speech of stupefying brilliance • two weeks ago he told, the world that football violence is the fault of a Permissive Society which no longer holds dear the sanctified ties of family, country and God Almighty. Schoolmasters must be given back, not their wages, as you might have thought, but their power to discipline pupils; parents should learn to control not themselves, but their children. The courts should give heavier sentences and the police should be firmer, because if this is not done, not only will the Football League lose its leadership, but, almost as bad, the country will collapse altogether.
All in all it was a comprehensive catalogue, showing that the fault for violence on the terraces lies with everyone except the Football League. As if in response to this birdbrained thought, two days later the front legs began twitching. Mr Fellows, having apparently performed the impressive digestive feat of swallowing Mr Hardaker's words, came up with a solution. All those under eighteen should be banned from the terraces. Quite right too. If Mr Fellows's advice were to be taken, violence would certainly subside dramatically. But having come so close to a total solution, why did Mr Fellows stop there? Having banned the under-eighteens, why not then ban the over-eighteens and wipe out not only -violence among spectators, but the spectators themselves? Of course if you ban the under-eighteens from the terraces you are wiping out at a stroke the potential audience for the game, but we can rest content that Mr Fellows in his infinite front-legged wisdom knows this and has made plans accordingly.
Notice that in all his fulminations against crowd violence, Hind-legs Hardaker forgot to look in one place, and that in his echoing cry, Front-legs Fellows forgot to look there too. Having arranged the whole of society, from Press to Parents to Priests to Police to Politicians, Mr Hardaker should perhaps then have asked himself whether the hooliganism on the terraces might just possibly have some casual link with the hooliganism which takes place on the field of play, a hooliganism, incidentally which Mr Hardaker himself, in his capacity of Secretary of the Football League, is in a sense responsible for. Why no breath of violence when 30,000 cram into Lord's for a Test match? Why no breath of violence ort the last green of the Open golf championship? Why no breath of violence inside the stadium at Munich, even though bloody assassination was happening outside? If hooliganism flourishes on the field, why expect any better from those who pay to watch it?
If a player were to be sent from the field for any foul of a physical nature, two immediate effects would follow, Teams would be reduced to five-a-side, and the hooligans on the terraces would drift away. In time a generation of players would evolve skilled enough to keep to the rules, and mature enough not to scream and cry like babies every time something happened to them. In the process it might even be that professional football would acquire a sense of proportion as to its own significance. Contrary to the belief of most people earning money from it, football, which, incidentally I have in my time loved passionately and played joyously, is not quite the most important thing in the world.
If those inside the game were to grasp this, perhaps we would then be spared the wisdom of people like Mr Don Revie, who once said after his side had been victimised by bad refereeing that, had there been violence in the streets of Leeds that night, it would have been the referee's fault. Meanwhile, the old pantomime horse plods quietly on its way, cropping the grass of a bygone age, and tripping over its own feet with all the grace of a drunken ballerina with a broken leg.
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