The not so beautiful game
Lloyd Evans
THOSE FEET: A SENSUAL HISTORY OF FOOTBALL by David Winner Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp. 274, ISBN 0747547386 ✆ £12.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Same rubbish, new wrapper. This is the criticism usually levelled at those big bad soccer clubs who put out a new kit every season with minor alterations. Where the clubs lead, the publishers follow. David Winner, the author of this rambling and incoherent discussion of the national game, is a theoriser so prolific that he can prove his case on one page and refute it a few paragraphs later. To show that English football is bloodier than the continental game he quotes the Frenchman Robert Pires: ‘Some of the tackles are like rugby. People will run you over.’ A little further on we hear that Ravanelli and Zola came from Italy and ‘enjoyed English sportsmanship, the relaxed atmosphere, and the huge amount of space they had to play in’.
Winner is captivated by the idea that football of old was a sport played by gentlemanly heroes. Nat Lofthouse is offered as the embodiment of these ancient virtues, and the enumeration of his saintly deeds includes the story of his attempt to score during the 1958 cup final by shoulder-charging the Man U keeper across the line. Hardly fair play. Yet the goal was given. The saga of Dixie Dean contributes further conflicting evidence. At 17 young Dixie was brutally hacked down while appearing for Tranmere reserves. His ruptured testicle had to be removed by surgeons. Years later, after a glittering career, Dixie was sitting in a Chester pub when a stranger passed him a pint of beer. He recognised his old assailant, went across and introduced himself. Dixie recalls, ‘I done his face up and they took him to the hospital so we’re evens.’ Clearly footballers are as selfish, vain and violent as ever, and sports writers as sentimental and dogmatic.
With hooliganism Winner is on to another loser. These strange rites of bloodshed are, predictably enough, ascribed to Britain’s loss of empire. The geography of this thesis is unconvincing. The psychology is bananas. How does smashing up a Swedish piazza compensate for, say, the independence of Bangladesh? And what exactly is going through the head of a hooligan as he pounds the streets of a foreign capital, his eyes blazing with postcolonial chagrin? ‘Gandhi succeeded in India therefore this bierkeller must be torched. Maltese sovereignty was a step too far, so I’m going to upend a hot-dog stand. We lost Suez, ergo your town-centre shall die.’ This elaborate fairytale reveals nothing about the hooligan, but it says quite a lot about the hooliganalyst. Football theorists tend to be backroom academics and fretful, inadequate, unmanly intellectuals. I rather suspect that I’m one myself. Publicly we deplore the brutish In-guh-land supporters. Privately we blush with pride when we see them break free and run amok. The mindless rioters are, we feel, our cousins in spirit, raised on the same islands as us, nurtured by the same air, shaped by the same manners, pressures and hungers. Their violence proves to every gutless Englishman that deep down he too is a lusty raging animal, and that beneath the effeminate surface lies a murderous hulk waiting to be unleashed.
The colonial hangover theory (‘declinism’ is its new title here) furnishes the hooliganalysts with a handy excuse to study all kinds of titillating imagery. They pore over drunken belly-wobblers racing around Austrian shopping malls flinging bar-stools at the Polizei; or half-naked crowds getting flattened by jets of water fired by evil gendarmes; or mobs of shrieking maniacs rushing at each other with improvised murder weapons. Riveting stuff. And little wonder that serious-minded people enjoy sitting around all day watching it. But serious-minded people need a moral framework for their secret fancies. Hence the baloney about the end of empire. But let’s get it straight — the material is not examined in order to arrive at a theory. The theory is arrived at in order to examine the material.
Football fans like books that are snappier and jollier than this one. Even in satirical vein it misses the mark. To illustrate the gormless solecisms of managers Winner quotes Kevin Keegan in the commentary-box: ‘He’s using his strength. And that is his strength: his strength.’ Everyone knows that Keegan’s greatest boob is, ‘I’m not disappointed — just disappointed.’ And the pick of the bunch is nowhere to be found. Bobby Robson: ‘We didn’t underestimate them. They were a lot better than we thought.’
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