SPECTATOR SPORT
The runaway quartet
Frank Keating
MMM, ALL of a sudden there is the satis- fYIng whiff of an old-fashioned vintage about the contenders at the top of English soccer's new Premier League. Having rounded Tattenham Corner, the bunch in the front are gathering themselves for the long, uphill slog to the post. More than five Points clear of all the others are Manch- ester United, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, and Norwich City. Only the last FIMPy souls would admit to being upstarts In an ancient breeding line. The Norwich club was founded in 1902 When two schoolmasters were aggrieved that the senior local team had been barred from entering the FA Amateur Cup on the grounds of professionalism. They called a meeting at the Criterion Café in Norwich to establish a new club — but it had to wait till 1920 before being elected to join the Third bivision (South) of the Football League. Nor without a fuss — the likes of Plymouth Argyle and Exeter City resented such exPense for rail journeys. Two of the others in this season's run- , _aWaY quartet were founding fathers of the b'eagne itself. Aston Villa and Blackburn ,'‘overs were each 'invited' to join the Foot- „,uall League at its bold inception in 1888. "0th were youth clubs funded by do-good- 111,1g (okay, 'socially aware') public school- • FS, keen to bring a Christian's communal sPlrit to Victoria's reeking inner cities. Blackburn's was an Anglican foundation begun in 1875 to get the urchins off the streets for Bible classes, Villa's a Wesleyan meeting house at Aston Cross which began as a cricket team in the summer of 1872. Both Rovers and Villa thereafter enjoyed a garlanded soccer history for the first half of this century. For the past 40 years each has had many more bad times than good, reflecting uneasily the corresponding health of the industrial base from which they grew.
But their names remain resonant in foot- ball the world over — and many a native from a South Seas atoll to an Arctic ice-floe will this week give a satisfied grunt of plea- sure and recognition that two legendary, faraway football clubs, whose names they took in with their mothers' milk, are once again leading the lot of them — and strain- ing for home.
By which token, it must be said that Manchester United remain, more than probably, the most famous association foot- ball team in the history of the world. And I have no doubt that supporters of Real Madrid, Inter Milan, Juventus, Moscow Dynamo, Spartak, Ajax, Barcelona, Santos, Benfica, or the Estudiantes of Argentina (plus Glasgow Rangers, Celtic and not even grudgingly, Liverpool FC) would agree.
'Man. U', as it is fondly known in 50 lan- guages, was founded as, and at, Newton Heath in 1878 by a bunch of cricketing workers on the Lancs. & Yorks. Railway. They tossed up whether to play rugby or soccer in the winters.
They joined the first division in 1892, and on their tenth anniversary in it they grandly proposed the name 'Manchester United' as a direct challenge to the Ardwick team down the road, which had begun to call itself Manchester 'City'.
United were any old team until in the drab, post-war years a Scot, Matt Busby, opened his 'theatre of dreams' at bombed- out Old Trafford. Then came Busby's 'babes' — many to be wiped out in an air crash. Then Best, Law, and Charlton . . . and the parade and the panache and the pageant. The whole parish was uplifted.
United, the world knows, has not won a championship in a quarter of a century. Because the style mattered more than the results, perhaps. This year, the two seem to have come together again.
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