Is English football an incurable disease? Part 4

Kick and Rush – they played for Liverpool, didn’t they?

What happened in the 1970s? I should know. I was there. Did we even recognise that what we were watching was Kick and Rush? One thing’s for sure. It was in the 70s that things went wrong. A series of interconnected and often contradictory factors made Kick and Rush an unseen development and the English Way we know today. It’s a long story, but one worth reading that you won’t have read elsewhere, because journalists and football writers are as much part of the sick English footballing system as the players, clubs and national set-up.

At its base was that deadly combination of media over-expectation and institutional incompetence that saw the FA bungle the managership of the England team. The England team in the 70s never really recovered from the chaos that ensued when Ramsey and his captain, Bobby Moore, were sacked for failing to qualify England for the 1974 World Cup and nobody could be found to take over. The public and the press clamoured for Brian Clough, but this team-building, working class firebrand was too plain-speaking for the suits at Lancaster Gate. The most successful club manager of the decade, Don Revie, asked for the job and got it, only to leave England in the lurch for a great money offer in the Middle East after three years. During this painful period, England failed to qualify for the final stages of tournaments in 1974, 1976 and 1978. Then put up very poor showings in the European Championship tournaments in 1980 and the World Cup in 1982.

Going, going, gone

The English malaise alluded to by Franz Beckenbauer has to have entered the English national game some time after the 1966 and 1970 World Cups, both of which featured England v West Germany, including Beckenbauer himself. Two World Cups in which England played good football in a series of closely fought games. Watch these games and you notice the slow pace, ball being passed to feet. Losing 3-2 to West Germany in Leon, Mexico, on 14 June 1970 after being 2-0 up was the first blow. Other nations had caught up with Sir Alf Ramsey’s ‘wingless wonder’ 4-4-2 formation. In 1972, England was knocked out of the European Championships at the quarter final stage, losing home and away to a West Germany run by a brilliant midfielder with size 14 feet, Günther Netzer. Beckenbauer was still German captain. The English national game changed, even went backwards, from this traumatic moment on.

In October 1973, England failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup, knocked out by a lowly, unfancied Poland, who did, however, go on to finish 3rd in 1974, a World Cup which saw the advent of Holland’s ‘total football’, featuring Johann Cruyff, still talked about today. And won by West Germany, who ‘found a way to win’, as they still do today. By the time he lifted the World Cup himself in 1974, Beckenbauer had surely already noticed the difference in English football. The recriminations and the rot set in here. From here on, England found a way to lose and began to believe in the ill-luck which has a place in the inquest into every major defeat today.

The Revie Plan

Yet, in 1974, when Revie took on the England managership, it wasn’t as if there was a sense of panic with English international football. As today, great things were expected of the nucleus of top players from our leading teams – Leeds, Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City, Ipswich Town – who were used to winning domestic and European trophies. But things did get worse over the next three years, as England failed to reach the final stages of the 1976 European Championships, although knocked out by the eventual winners, Czechoslovakia.

Under Revie, a certain lack of confidence pervaded the team. Unlike at Leeds, it was never a settled team, never the same twice, except for the last two matches of his reign. But, then, in the England role, Revie found that he had to pick teams of players most of whom would not have made his own club reserve side. He tried about 50 players and found most wanting. This seems to have been quite a shock to him. A man with great club credentials, but untried in the international arena (but aren’t they all?) Perhaps he was the first England manager to show that managing a country is far more difficult than managing a club. You seem to have far more players at your disposal, but where is the real quality and what is the best combination? And why are they always injured when you need them most? Certainly, everyone since Revie has struggled with the same problems. All sorts of factors are held up, from diet to tiredness to poor motivation. But, in the end, maybe the main problem is Englishness.

Just not good enough

When England failed to qualify for the finals of their third tournament in a row, the 1978 World Cup, best player Kevin Keegan refused to put the blame at Don Revie’s door. Unlike biased hacks ever since, who parrot the same hackneyed stories from clogger players and bullying managers who resented Revie’s club success. Keegan actually admitted that the available English players were just not good enough. Quality was just not there. And there you have it. Those players that were not good enough had failings which were actually documented by Don Revie’s notorious dossiers of the time. All our top players had weaknesses. Unlike Revie’s British team at Leeds, very few English players could hold the ball, last for 90 minutes, pass with both feet, use positional sense, fit into a different system. Forget your Capello Index from 2010, the evidence was there in writing as far back as 1977. Very few people could see it. And certainly not the journalists who were paid to.

From this time, with the odd exception, England games became frustrating equations of unrealistic expectation over underlying fear, as nobody understood why Revie was scouring around. The cupboard was bare and, inexperienced and ineffective, England moved into a frenzied, impatient way of playing. By and large, it reflected the lower quality of players who relied at club level on the excellence of their British team colleagues to make them look good. As the English players at our top clubs so obviously do today. Many commentators on the game do not accept this. But they are blinkered, too close to it and have every incentive to hang on to a failing system.

Leeds were the vanguard

The frustrating fact for English national football was that, even though they contained some English players, the top English club sides of the mid to late 70s weren’t playing Kick and Rush. Any more than Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal play it today. English club sides had been trying to raise their game to take on the Europeans since the early 1960s. Odd one-season sides like Spurs, West Ham, Newcastle, Arsenal and Chelsea managed to win one European trophy before disappearing. (As I’ve said, Manchester United’s 1968 Wembley European Cup win was as much of an anomaly as England’s 1966 Wembley World Cup win.) In many ways, Leeds United was the first modern, truly international English club side, based on the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ approach. Slow build-up, based on defence, neat passing, then quick around the box. Some hard knocks and a bit of referee intimidation thrown in. They put two fingers up to the English establishment and were vilified for it. But, overall, it was sheer, hard-nosed consistency that kept this club up there among Europe’s best at a time when there was no consistency in English football.

It was the English national football team that played the price for this rare consistency in Leeds United and Liverpool. The two top English club sides of the day had so perfected the British team balance in the sides they put out that there simply was a dearth of quality of English talent around. All the best roles in the Leeds team had gone to the British players. The Leeds side cheated out of the 1975 European Cup Final featured 4 Englishmen, 5 Scots, a Welshman and an Irishman. Following on with this British balance, Liverpool won the first of several European Cups in 1977, as did several English clubs picking up the trophy every year up to and including 1981. Clearly, for the media experts of the time, there could be nothing wrong with the English game at all. Nationally, it had to be Revie’s fault. He was the first of England’s fall-guy managers. Had nobody English read the signs? Beckenbauer had.

Liverpool were the tipping point

If Leeds led it, Liverpool perfected it. Is it just a coincidence that when Liverpool became the first English club to step out of the pack and dominate, first in England, then in Europe, English football in general took its nosedive into Kick and Rush? Between 1973 and 1990, Liverpool won the old First Division 11 times and finished second 6 times. They won the FA Cup 3 times, the League Cup 4 times. In Europe, they won the European Cup 4 times and the UEFA cup once. That’s 23 trophies in 18 seasons. But what’s this got to do with anything? Much the same happens in Spain. But, by the time Liverpool got to 1985, as the most dominant English club side of all time, however, there were hardly any English players in the team at all. And the reason for this was that Liverpool could not find those quality English players to sustain this success. English players just weren’t good enough. And the pursuit of continued success was all that mattered. Ron Greenwood, the England manager who replaced Don Revie, proved this. Early on, egged on by the media, he tried to base his England team around the successful English Liverpool players, but it just didn’t work. It baffled Greenwood and everyone else. Except Franz.

We cannot blame either Leeds United or Liverpool for English national failure. Both did what it took to win. By and large, that meant only selecting English players who were good enough. By 1977, they were few and far between. After decades of British players in English teams, the English national team was full of second raters. Our only world-class player of that period, Kevin Keegan, actually left European Champions, Liverpool, in 1977 because he felt he could improve by playing abroad among foreign players. He did and became European Footballer Of the Year while at Hamburg in 1978 and 1979.

Not even Keegan could help Ron Greenwood at the 1982 World Cup. England’s ineffectual, outmoded and utterly toothless and guileless way of playing was shown up for what it was, when they went out of the mini-league middle section of the tournament without scoring or conceding a goal against Spain and Germany. England’s talisman and only world class player made a 20-minute appearance at the end of the Spain game and missed a sitter. These were to be his only 20 minutes in a World Cup finals. Much expectation had been heaped upon his shoulders before the tournament. He was selected despite being injured and unfit. The end of a team-game approach, this one-man fixation would reflect English hopes at such tournaments for decades to come. England had forgotten that football was a team game.

A tale of the unaccepted

By the mid 70s, then, the English football system had reached critical mass. It actually meant that the whole generation of English footballers born between 1950 and 1955 just had poor ball skills and an unintelligent approach to the game. In comparison to their better, more skilful and creative Scottish, Welsh and Irish team mates. Nobody has ever voiced this. It may sound astonishing, but it’s true. And it’s the same story today. Just replace Scottish, Welsh and Irish with Dutch, Ivorian and South Korean. English players in top club sides are made to look good and carried by the other, foreign players.

England used to be known for the best goalkeepers in the world. Banks, Shilton, Clemence, Parkes, Corrigan. Only one could play at any one time. Today, none of our top teams has English goalkeepers. So, what do we expect? Look at midfield, where the game is won and lost today. Finally, after generations of battling Scottish and Welsh midfielders had filled the key positions of our top sides, we had nobody of quality to take up such positions. Fabregas cannot even get into the Spanish side. Today, there is no competition for English players in the national team. They know they cannot be dropped by the manager even if they do not play well. The manager even has to include players out of position and put players alongside each other who do not work well together.

70s drunk, 80s hungover

In the 60s England was at the party. But the 70s were over by the time England woke up. It was a world dominated by powers like Germany, Holland, Italy and Argentina. England had joined Brazil, Spain and Hungary in the ranks of footballing nations who had become tired and emotional.

While the 80s were to bring their own distractions and miseries, from economic depression to violence, death and destruction, including the banning of English participation in Europe, that brought our game to its knees, a spirited performance by a backs-to-the-wall England manager and his team at the 1990 World Cup promised a revival. After a decade of decline, the powers that be pounced on this uplift to launch the FA Premier League in 1992. While it changed the entire footballing world forever, not just that in England, and benefitted a relatively small group of managers and players, the Premier League only served to make a few clubs even richer and embed the same old problems deeper in the English game that are so blatantly obvious and seemingly insoluble today.

But, of course, hooliganism aside, there had been no real English problem, had there? England’s finest, Liverpool, had marched on and only been stopped when UEFA banned English clubs from European football following the Heysel tragedy. The institution was able to change the rules to declare other British players as ‘foreigners’, thus adding an extra bolt to the lock-out, ensuring the English club domination of European competitions was destroyed. A European attempt to thwart the English surge. Towards the end of the first decade of this century, UEFA faced a similar problem of English club dominance in European competitions following the resurgence of the FA Premier League. Its response? Again, to limit squad sizes and apply a set number of home grown players within it. In time, as the English club dominance in European competition is broken (four different finalists between 2004-9), this will once again lead the English FA to adapt in order to ‘beat the system’. Spot a behaviour pattern here? It’s the English way.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk