SPECTATOR SPORT
The great strike
Frank Keating
Twenty years ago to the month I was wasting days of my life sitting in the back of a chauffered car from Mexico City to Toluca or Puebla with that scholar of the offside trap, Barry Davies, the BBC soccer commentator. Me holding the cribs for hour upon hour, testing Barry on the names of the teams for the afternoon's match, Uruguay, Israel, Sweden, and Argentina were in our group — 22 guys to a squad, so 88 unknown names for Barry to get off pat and parrot-fashion. His swotted, sweated, litany of gringos, dagos and Swedes was always admirably word perfect by kick-off time. But could anyone back home really have cared less? We want a bit of atmosphere, sure, but not a breathless reading of the Montevideo or Stockholm telephone directories.
Two decades on, and some other poor sap's holding the cribs for Barry as he speeds down the Appian Way. I was hoping, for old times' sake, that this week he might have got South Korea v United Arab Emirates . . . 'Park Kyung-Hoon to Gu Sang-Bum to Hwang Seon-Hung, in- tercepted by Ibrahim Meer Abdulrahman who passes to Abdulrahman Mohamed Hadad, and ooh! it's a chance! oh, and not a good shot at all by Adnan Khalis Talyani.' By which time the ball's at the other end of the field. Whenever our Barrys and Brians criticise these unknowns so knowingly I'm reminded of that one- liner review by Dorothy Parker when an allegedly famous German actor made his Broadway debut — 'Guido Natzo was natzo guido.'
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the pun- dits in suits have no qualms about not naming the numbers. 'That big Number Five's struggling a bit eh?' muttered the monosyllabic Kenny Dalglish when Egypt were playing on Sunday evening. For a famed motivator in management, Mr D. remains a puzzle, so furtive and reluctant is he to let words out of his mouth. Tight- lipped ain't in it; he looks at one and the same time like the ventriloquist and the dummy. On the other hand, big Ron Atkinson was of the opinion that the big Number Five, was the man-of-the-match. `What a super player, this 'Arry Ramsey,' he kept enthusing. Could Sir Alf have had a son called Harold? No, Monday's papers named the star of Egypt as Hany Ramzy.
That was in Palermo. Up in Genoa, Alan Parry also had his eye on a foreign Number Five, also big, from Costa Rica. `This big Number Five, Monetero, is not the sort of man you'd like to meet on a dark alleyway at moonlight, is he? — or, indeed, on a sunny afternoon in this beautiful Luigi Ferraris stadium, as Scot- land are finding out at the moment.'
In television soccerspeak you never hear the verb `to kick' (unless it's one another). It is always flicked, laid off, squared, crossed, hammered, or, 'Ooh, great strike!' It is never simply, a header; it is a `knockdown' or a 'flick-on', or an 'Ooh, great climb!' Goalkeepers don't ever simp- ly catch the thing — with Davies it's invariably, 'Well claimed!' with John Mot- son it's, 'Ooh, nicely gathered!'
Elton (`Well, Graham, it all went according to plan. Er, what was the plan exactly?') Welsby's taste in shirts is as strobingly neurotic as Emlyn Hughes's grinning-loony twitch, which is as uncom- fortable to watch as England's draw against Ireland. Halfway through that tedium, the Italian director bunged up a shot of a Union Jack, scrawled with one word, Bollocks, and at the end the rubbery-faced Mr Robson took the analysis further. `Long balls and short balls, at the end of the day that's what football's all about.' England had been kyboshed by a goal from Ireland's Kevin Sheedy, who said, 'I felt a lump in my throat as the ball went in.' Nice one, Key — perhaps that's why Mr Dal- glish keeps his mouth shut.
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