SPECTATOR SPORT
A long hard slog
Frank Keating
UP TO TOWN this week for our annual cricket lunch at The Spectator and adieu to a funny-peculiar, soggy, but certainly singu- lar, summer. And so I suppose it was natu- ral to spend the buffet-car journey studying soccer's small print for the first time to see what's what, who's where, and which teams have 'kicked off with a rush' as the old scribes had it.
Golly, some of them have already played ten matches in the League. I daresay all is considered well with the world if Manch- ester United and Arsenal are leading the Premier division. To find Swindon Town bottom of it is only a gawping surprise inas- much as one had totally forgotten they were going to be there. It is an awful long time since midsummer's promotion and rel- egation play-offs, but, now one comes to think of it, P9, WO, D3, L6 is just about the early season prognosis one would have come up with the moment Swindon them- selves came up.
Dear old Swindon. Only occasionally bobbin' red robins down the years, but they were one year in the 1950s very famously When Dad took me to my first ever Cup tie — against Cardiff City who were then, briefly, a force in the land: or far more forceful, anyway, than Swindon. It was some sort of treat from school because, on the drive over from Stroud, we stopped off for lunch at a hotel in Cirencester's market square. And there, lo and behold, were the Cardiff team — only 90 minutes before kick-off but just finishing a plate-heaped slap-up of roast beef, Yorkshire, and full trimmings, plus apple-pie. They still outplayed Swindon — but could not get anything past the red-headed Irish goalkeeper Norman Uprichard, who threw his green polo-neck all over the shop with a still memorable and quite mesmeris- ing sandbag resplendence. By extra-time, the Desperate Dan luncheon portions began to tell on Cardiff's stamina, and Swindon sent the County Ground into delirium when they scored the solitary and winning goal a few minutes from the end. It was my first experience of sport's collective ability to go crackers with delight. Poor old Swindon. Dear old Swindon. They'll be down long before Easter this time and hap- pier for it.
But that Liverpool is in the bottom half of the table and, by all accounts, playing some pretty lukewarm stuff is a far greater surprise. The knives are out for the Anfield manager, Souness. Word seems to be that Liverpool have lost, under his stewardship, all their finesse and delicacy as well as the romantic 'pure footballing' primacy of their decades of greatness and grandeur.
Eh, what? I cannot recall they have had much of that down the years. Not too many garlands of purity and fun and laughter. The Liverpool sides of Shankly, Paisley, Dalglish and that other squat little tank- commander NCO type in between them for a couple of seasons always fielded two or three extremely hard men, picked to intimi- date. The happy coincidence was that' — like Souness himself and the lethal Tommy Smith — the intimidators were also foot- balling winners.
Meanwhile, alas, the bunch of berks I am irretrievably lumbered with for winter after winter — Fulham and Hereford — are already down among the dead men and conjoined in frenzied relegation struggles. And it is only the first Saturday of October. It was ever so. The long hard slog begins here.
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