England will be the first to go
Modern English footballing history started with the USA and Hungary, so it’s fitting that I pen my final piece on England’s football sickness on the morning of a friendly with Hungary, while thinking about what I have to say about a future with America.
Everything is unravelling now. It’s a far from meaningless friendly. For the media is hunting for Capello’s scalp early on this season and this gives them an opportunity. What do they have to do to get him out? Encourage fans at the Community Shield to boo England players? Suggest that Ashley Cole spurned him by refusing to shake his hand at the end? Insist that Capello’s effectively lost the dressing room by constantly repeating how he said that England played with fear at the World Cup? Make him look a chump when players of the calibre of Wes Brown and Paul Robinson can thumb their nose at England when called up? Put forward Irishman, Martin O’Neill as the next England manager, one day after resigning from Aston Villa? Yes, all these things. And more. After all, Capello can and should take it. That’s why we pay him £6million a year.
Although several players have done a Robinson and Brown over the course of the years ahead of their time, notably Alan Shearer and Paul Scholes, the timing of this latest snub just adds to the criticism of the way both Capello and the FA do things. While it does show a lack of respect for players in the modern world, it also reveals the priorities of players – they all cite longevity in playing for their clubs as the reason for international ‘retirement’. Who will be the first player to say, in the interest of prolonging my international career, I’ve asked my club to play me less?
Enough of wishful thinking. Only young upcoming players now need to play for England. So, actually, the real question will be this. How long before Wayne Rooney decides that enough is enough and calls it quits at international level? I give him till he’s 26.
Whose side are the media on?
Most of this stuff takes place in the media. How else would we mortals ever learn about it? For some time, it has felt like it is only our tabloid media that sustains the myth of the national team: (a) that we actually have one and (b) that it is capable of winning anything. The clubs and players long ago gave up on the illusion. Some people don’t even bother to hide it. Last week, Sir Alex Ferguson went on a rant about international football and how there hasn’t been a decent World Cup since 1986. This came after Harry Redknapp’s hypocritical condemnation of the Hungary friendly fixture, just three days before the Premiership season starts. It wasn’t so long ago that he was saying there should be 8 Spurs players in the England World Cup squad. Before they qualified for the Champions League and somebody told him about Spurs’ draining pre-season shirt-selling tour of the USA, that is. Was it only a few weeks ago that England’s so-called best hope for a home-grown national team manager was saying that fans didn’t care whether Saddam Hussein owned their club? If Redknapp is the future for English football, then there isn’t one.
Admittedly, it’s not just England. Bayern Munich have just refused to let Franck Ribery attend a World Cup inquest by the French FA, saying they do not have to release players for such a matter. Pre-season training is more important. It isn’t that Bayern are wrong. Or Robinson is wrong. Or Ferguson is wrong. Or Redknapp is an idiot. It’s that these people are individually adding to a collective drive, voiced through a willing media, to discredit international football in the effort to pursue global club football. It’s the logical move from the establishment of the FA Premier League, nearly two decades on. There is more money to be made. At least three of the top English club sides pre-seasoned in the USA this summer (I cannot and will not call the game ‘soccer’). That can’t be a coincidence. These club sides are quite happy to use international tournaments these days as a TV shop window, a kind of lure for a global audience. But their idea is to replace international team football with global club football once and for all. TV media is driving this. Print media, at least in the UK, seems to be on the verge of accepting it at last and moving over to the other side. It is committed to constant hounding of the England team, its managers and players and that part of the FA that governs the national set up. The FA is torn in two and doesn’t know how to respond. In terms of the hurricane that is coming, it knows it is powerless to intervene.
Sweet FA
On 21 April 2010, The FA Premier League was awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the International Trade category in recognition of its outstanding contribution to international trade and the value it brings to English football and the UK’s broadcasting industry!!!
Yet last week, Richard Scudamore, chief exec of the FA Premier League, felt bound to defend the Premier League while giving ground on its role in taking some blame for England’s dismal showing in the World Cup. The media didn’t really know how to report this. “What every England fan should expect is that the players we do produce are world class. They should be able to give world class performances at these tournaments - that's our focus,” said Scudamore, attempting to palliate those who point to the decreasing lack of opportunity for English players in our top division. It’s a brazen faced lie. Either that, or, like Crapello, he’s just somebody who’s paid enough to live with an impossible duality – the success of English club sides and a successful England team.
The Premier League is run by the FA. The England national team is run by the FA. Perhaps the clue to the dilemma with English football is in the two letters at the end of the last two sentences. Isn’t the FA responsible for the development of football in this country from top to bottom? The problem is clearly how you define the ‘top’. Some people including me think it should be the England national team. Others think it should be the clubs. In practice, it is currently the clubs. But this failure to agree what the ‘top’ should be, as opposed to what it is currently, prevents us doing what needs to be done at the bottom. Because the ‘bottom’ looks different, depending from which ‘top’ position you happen to be looking down from.
But all this is one huge red herring, to distract your attention from what’s ahead on the big clubs’ agendas – their own suicide – but more of that at the end. Add all this up and it feels like the speeding up of the end for international football. In the sense that, the players already feel they play international football, but at a club level. Why should they have to do it on behalf of their nations as well?! In the Community Shield, Rooney supplied a class pass to set up the first goal. Just like he did all through last season for his club side. Shame about the insignificant tournament in between. The man epitomises the end of English international football. But he is not responsible for the creation of the venal set of knuckle-dragging, under-performing unconscientious objectors who no longer want to wear three lions on their shirt because they see more honour in filling their already over-stuffed bank accounts than they do in representing their country. Let’s raise statues to the greedy or disingenuous or self-serving or plain deluded men who, in creating the breakaway FA Premier League and handing TV rights to Brit-hating foreigners, have ensured that the international game will soon founder and be replaced by global soccer, American style...Greg Dyke, David Dein, Alan Sugar, Rupert Murdoch, the G14 clubs and their owners and managers with the much lauded Arsene Wenger at the forefront (but don’t Arsenal play such wonderful football?! – will you be saying that when they’re the Arsenal Aardvarks playing out of Boston, Massachusetts?).
English football – in memoriam or per ardua ad astra?
When I set out on this journey, I was more optimistic about a possible future for England at international level. I’m now tending to believe that spoilt working class brats like Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney, John Terry, Steven Gerrard, Rio Ferdinand and his ilk are not just aberrations, the first real product of the FA Premier League, but more like the norm. In them, we’re just seeing the vanguard. In which case, I’d rather shove them off onto the global club football stage and watch football closer to home. As Platini says, if you’re sponsored by Coca Cola, why not just call yourself Coca Cola and go off and play wherever Coca Cola can get you the best TV rights? But while there’s still life in this international dream, I’m going to give it space. And raise a last cry, as England take on Hungary this evening.
LISTEN, WHAT I’M SAYING IS THIS: AS A RESULT OF THIS EXHAUSTIVE, DECADES-LONG INVESTIGATION, I CAN CONCLUDE THAT, WHEN IT COMES TO FOOTBALL, THE ENGLISH FOOTBALL DISEASE IS VERY SEVERE BUT IT’S NOT LIFE THREATENING. I’VE COME VERY CLOSE TO SAYING THAT THE ENGLISH WAY OF STUPID FOOTBALL IS INNATE. WHAT I REALLY MEAN TO SAY THAT IT’S THE ENGLISH WAY OF EXPLOITING THE WORLD FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES THAT IS STUPID. FOOTBALL IS JUST PART OF THIS.
THE ENGLISH WAY HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN TO EXPLOIT AND IMPORT WHATEVER IT NEEDED TO, RATHER THAN TAKE THE TIME TO GROW IT AT HOME. THE ONLY WAY TO CURE THIS IS TO STOP AND DO IT DIFFERENTLY. BUT WHY CURE WHAT’S LUCRATIVE? IT’S MUCH EASIER TO CONTINUE WITH THE FAILURE THAT SUITS A VERY FEW PEOPLE MOST OF THE TIME AND DISAPPOINTS THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ALL THE TIME. IT’S OK FOR A BUNCH OF DISINGENUOUS STATISTICIANS AND NUMBER-CRUNCHERS TO SAY THAT THE BIG FOUR IS THE WAY IT IS AND THAT MEANS THIS IS THE WAY IT’S GOING. OK, FOR NOW, WE’RE STUCK WITH CHELSKI, ARSENALE AND THE THEATRE OF PRAWNS. I’D BE HAPPY FOR THIS LOT TO MOVE OUT TO BRAZIL, IN ADVANCE OF THE NEXT WORLD CUP, TOMORROW. ALL THIS IS TEMPORAL, TRANSIENT. BUT ONE THING LIVES ON. THE DREAM OF THE BEST AGAINST THE BEST.
I THINK THAT WHETHER FIFA AWARD ENGLAND THE 2018 WORLD CUP IS NOW IRRELEVANT. THERE MAY NOT EVEN BE A 2018 WORLD CUP. A MASSIVE LOST BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY FOR THE NATION, YES. A HUGE BLOW TO OUR IDENTITY, CERTAINLY. YET THE CLUBS WOULD RUB THEIR HANDS WITH GLEE AND SEE IT AS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE A CHANGE AS CATACLYSMIC AS THE BREAKAWAY FA PREMIER LEAGUE.
IT’S PROBABLY TOO MUCH TO HOPE THAT THIS CHANGE WOULD BE SOMETHING POSITIVE, THAT ENABLES INTERNATIONAL FOOTBALL TO SIT ALONGSIDE AND COMPLEMENT CLUB FOOTBALL. SOMETHING THAT ENABLES OUR LOT TO PIT THEIR WITS AGAINST THEIR LOT. AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. FOR THE DREAM WE ALL DREAM OF. I DREAM OF.
The end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
Where’s it all going? In case you haven’t noticed...America. While you’ve been distracted by the part-time circuses of Russian billionaires like Abramovich and Middle Eastern oil sheiks, the Americans have been taking over your football clubs and turning them into American business machines. Manchester United. Liverpool. Arsenal. Aston Villa. None of these clubs any longer spends ridiculous sums of money on buying players. They allow the playboy billionaires to pay ridiculous sums like £30 million for the likes of James ‘concrete boots’ Milner. They are sellers, not buyers. The American owners want their return on investment. No sooner than O’Neill is gone from Villa than American Bob Bradley is installed as favourite to take over. An American manager in the English top flight? Whoda thought it?
Make no mistake. Despite calling their glorified game of rounders the World Series, the Americans have finally realised that they do not have a universal, global game of their own. Their version of football is a sealed unit. No ins or outs. It’s washed up and there’s no more money in it. These businessmen have seen the emotional grip proper football has over the rest of the world. And they don’t just want some of it, they want all of it. They’ve learned something from the English. If you can’t be it, buy it (the Americans didn’t invent capitalism, the English did; the Americans just perfected it).
So, forget the transition to a European League. Poor old Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini are helpless in the face of the wave of change. History will see them as men who resisted the inevitable: the Americanisation of football. Our big clubs are tired of regulatory UEFA practices and will be playing in America before you can remember that your game used to be called football. Will the rules be changed? You betcha. Are you happy with that? Whaddya mean ya never saw it coming? Ya bought Sky TV. Ya let it happen. Weren’t you listening to Golden Balls? Didya think he was in California for his health?
For those of us who are awake, there is a choice: DC United or FC United. After all, it’s our game, not theirs. We could always start again. Football. English rules.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Showing posts with label FA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FA. Show all posts
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
Friday, 30 July 2010
Is English football an incurable disease? Part 5
Stop the rot
Until the recent South African World Cup proved otherwise, we still believed in England that, because our Premier League is the best in the world, the English national team was among the best in the world. There is a huge gulf between our top Premiership sides and the English national side. The former would beat the latter nine times out ten. We all know that today. I think that’s wrong. I want to see international football as the pre-eminent level in the game, not club football. So, I don’t care what statisticians and economists like Szymanski and Wenger say. The direction in which things seem to be heading is not inevitable. If it were, every top FA Premier League side will be fielding 11 Brazilians in five to ten years’ time and English players will be relegated to lower divisions. Who really wants that? For all the reasons I’ve given, therefore, I believe in cutting our top division down to size, so that we and all the world can see English football for what it truly is. And maybe we can start again and get better at it. A romantic view, eh? Well, that’s football.
We know where it all started to go wrong. The 1970s. It was the failure to understand that English football was going wrong during a period characterised first by the inability to qualify for successive World Cups in 1974 and 1978 (with traumatic experiences in the European Championships of 1972 and 1976) and second the sustained success of ‘English’ clubs in European competitions, that first showed us the rot. The same rot is now institutionalised in our so-called successful ‘English’ Premier League, where Welsh, Scottish and Irish players have been replaced by French, Spanish, Italian, German, Ghanaian, Ivorian, Dutch, Australian, American, Russian, you name it. With the result that an already shallow English player quality base has been so thinned, we now invariably rely in tournaments on one player to carry the hopes of a nation.
44 years of hurt
Today is the 44th anniversary of that day. We still believe that, despite this anomalous one-off, this complete home-turf, referee-assisted fluke, that England should be world beaters. Winning in 1966 seems to have instilled in the English football supporting mind a sense of just deserts, moral superiority, the right to keep winning, a sense of invincibility. Not just through winning, but by beating West Germany. It was a war thing. Britain was a country fuelled still by war films in the 50s and 60s. Boys’ comics were full of wartime heroes giving the Hun a good bashing. Winning the World Cup went with the territory. Captain Hurricane won the World Cup as much as Bobby Moore. There was little thought given to the fact that it had been won at home and with a great deal of luck and fortune. But that team was feted as heroes. And still is today. So, even more the shock, then, when the team went out at quarter final stage in the 1970 Mexico World Cup, having been 2-0 up to West Germany. This, it is reckoned, was where the rot set in. Certainly, the 1970s were where it all went wrong. And it was largely down to a misbelief that the success of English club sides in Europe meant that English players were good and, hence, the English team were world-beaters.
We’re clearly not world beaters. The statisticians tell us that history shows we’re lucky to qualify for two out of every three tournaments and, in those tournaments, we have a much lower chance than 20% of ever getting to a final. We should settle for quarter finals, a good result, as Sven knew.
Yet there is always a problem. Nobody seems to know what to do about the English footballing problem. Every tournament since 1966 has seen us caught out in one way or another. The latest excuses are unfamiliarity with the new FIFA ball and tired players. There’s truth in both. Sometimes, such problems are addressed after the horse has bolted, only for others to emerge next time around. In fact, the common factor is England’s inability in tournaments to show the form that the team shows in qualifying, or that the players show week in week out for their clubs. This is a problem that, due to entrenched money interests, is very difficult to address. So, instead of reducing the Premier League down to 16 clubs, we allow the free market its reign. It all conspires to mean that, with every tournament, we have to go through the charade of blaming the latest group of players, or the latest manager, looking to the next young golden generation – all of whom earn more and more and perform less and less.
It’s too late for anyone now playing for England at any level
We can’t just look to youth. Reports coming back from the performance of our Under-19 team at the current European Championships show that it’s already too late for the latest generation of young English players. They reached the semi-finals where they inevitably lost to Spain. That achievement masks a sad reality. These young players have been trained in the English way of pace and strength and giving the ball away. They are already lost to history.
Just read this review from an earlier match in this tournament. ‘Sub-standard kids play stupid football’, explains John Nicholson’s headline on the Football365 site. Describing the Under-19 performance against Austria: “Throughout, the Austrians consistently passed it through midfield with greater precision and purpose. England's defence relied on power and strength. Could they play the ball more than five yards? No. Was anyone comfortable on the ball? Who knows - they didn't keep it long enough to be able to tell. There were a lot of balls into the channels, lots of those annoying 30 yard chips from the front of the last third to the back of the first third which achieve nothing except to cede possession. There was sufficient long ball football to suggest it was still 1985 especially with the keeper aimlessly booting it long. It can't be difficult for a coach to tell a goalkeeper not to do that and surely even a retard could remember not to do it, so we must surmise that they have been coached into the notion that this is a good idea when, to anyone with half a brain, it's obviously a stupid waste of the ball. The English lads’ control was often sloppy; the midfield was all-running, box to box, relying on pace and power over technique. There was no sign of a player who could take someone on and beat them with skill. Against this opposition and indeed against most opposition this combination of a powerful engine room and big, broad-shouldered defence will be victorious, just as it is at full international level. Despite being constantly out-played on the deck, the sheer physicality against a smaller, lightweight side combined with some powerful shooting will win most games. However as a template for successful, tournament winning football it is palpably the same old same old which has failed England for years. This is but another generation that has been inculcated into The English Way. It looks like a form of the game coached and played by stupid people. It's not unfair to call this Stupid Football. Yet, I'm reluctant to believe they are all as stupid as their football suggests. It's just become entrenched as a tradition.”
Reading that really saddened me. How do we stop this conveyor belt that began moving in the 1950s and was out of control by the mid 70s and ‘entrenched’ today? Now that a few people have made loads of money from the Premier League over two decades, isn’t it time we ripped it up and started again for the benefit of all? What can we do to derail the destructive FA and recreate English football without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater?
The problem is institutional
Two bits of news came out this last month. First, that Alex Ferguson turned down the England manager job in 1996 and 1999, considering it a ‘poison chalice...a horrible job’. He also cited his Scottishness as preventing him from taking the job. Too right. When a top manager says such things, however, we have to say that something is wrong. But he’s a foreigner and the FA system suits his club and maybe two or three others, also managed and run by foreigners, so he can say and do what he likes. The second and related bit of news is FA member, Trevor Brooking, announcing that the FA is looking for a future series of English managers for the job, after the tenure of Fabio Capello. The FA needs to do more than this. It should be a given, but it’s only the icing on the cake.
The problem lies in the FA and its approach to the game. In early July 2010, after the South African debacle and the swift reconfirmation of Capello in the England manager role, former UK sports minister, Richard Caborn, came out and said that the FA is no longer fit for purpose. "I believe the governance of the game is not prepared to stand up to its responsibilities. The FA need to say we have to look at ourselves very seriously and we need to modernise ourselves. In Germany in 2000 there was a repositioning of the governance of German football. I think that has been to the benefit of German football, and we are seeing some of those results at the current World Cup."
Caborn cited the fact that many of the recommendations of the 2005 Burns Report had not been implemented. Conflicts of interest. Excessive influence of the Premier League. Lack of representation for important groups. "We have more reports and investigations then anyone else, and even though they are largely accepted they are never implemented. We can't just deal with the symptoms, we have to get to the root of the problem. English football and the Premier League have to come together to develop young English players."
Caborn also pointed to the 2007 recommendations of Richard Lewis to improve youth football and the academy system. While calling for the creation of a ‘parliament of football’ and three independent members on the FA board, Caborn knows that it goes deeper than just cultivating young players. Back in March, 2010, FA Chief Executive, Ian Watmore, left his role after less than a year in the job, citing disagreements with senior figures on the FA Board. Given that every board of directors has disagreements, these must have been significant. Then, of course, we had FA Chairman, Lord Triesman, having to step down after a Mail on Sunday entrapment case found him suggesting that the Spanish and Russians would collaborate illegally to win matches at the forthcoming World Cup. While he got it wrong (it was the Germans and Uruguayans), it seriously damaged England’s 2018 World Cup bid on the very weekend it was launched. While this signalled serious problems at the FA, it also highlighted the vindictive and destructive role of the English press in working against the interests of the national game, while claiming to be doing the very opposite.
What do you expect from a bunch of pirates?
In England, football is a form of emotional currency. It’s the start of many a business meeting. And, now that young women have embraced it, it is no longer the bête noire of male exclusivity it once was. However, as a currency, it no longer packs the purchasing punch it used to. By and large, the players who come to the Premiership are not the best in the world, just among the best in the world. They’re either very young or past their sell-by date, rarely in their prime. They’re all obviously here for the money. Why else would they come? Not for the quality, the English winter or the higher amount of games we play. As a currency, the English game needs devaluing. UEFA quite rightly resents that England has the pulling power to draw footballers away from their home audiences and is doing what it can to impose restrictions on squad numbers and introduce home-grown player quotas.
Clearly, the FA is a product of the historical English approach to business. Taking short cuts to success and success at any cost. English football is an English business disease. It’s a freemarket disaster that builds in success for the few and failure for the many. It’s the unregulated, ungovernable, unreformable arse-end of 400 years of English capitalism. We are the pirates of the world. If you do not have it at home take it from elsewhere. We used to call it Empire. And this new government wants to remind our children of our proper history about how the Empire once ruled the world. As well show them constant re-runs of Pirates Of The Caribbean. That’s about it. Our cultural insistence on continuing to be a world power by whatever means. If that means paying the earth to bribe footballers away from their own leagues to our league, creating dazzling teams of slightly tarnished glittering Galacticos, then so be it. It benefits the big clubs and money trickles down to the lesser ones. We get to see some good football. It’s not English football, but it is very lucrative. I wish the Government had the power to do to the FA what it's doing to state education and the health service. We'll have to look to Europe to rein us in. UEFA is trying to put a stop to a situation that, as with the 1970s, was leading to European finals dominated by ‘English’ teams that were not really ‘English’. (The only way they could manage it back then was by banning English clubs for reasons of hooliganism – it worked, but it led, after a moribund late 80s, to the creation of the Premier League as a means of ‘English’ resurgence.) Now, there is a limit on squad size with a set number of players in that squad required to be home-grown between the ages of 18 and 21. And the top club managers like Wenger, Redknapp, Mancini, Ancelotti and Ferguson are rebelling against it. Yet the fact that their own club owners signed up to it is a reflection of the belief that football should be, at its heart, home-grown. Call it emotional, call it what you will. But that’s what people want. Otherwise, in five to ten years’ time, the Premier League will contain no English players whatsoever and the likes of Arsene Wenger will still be able to say ‘because they’re not good enough to break through.’ There is an unbending logic towards every top side being full of the best players available from the world. Brazilians. So, why not just move Arsènale, Chelski and the Theatre of Prawns to Sao Paolo, Rio and Belo Horizonte? That way, the players won’t have that far to travel. And we can watch it all on Murderorc TV.
So, as interfering and troublesome as it will be, UEFA’s intervention on squad numbers and home quotas is good news for me. It’s the first thing I’ve heard in ages that attempts to halt the footballing disease in its tracks. There are certain globe-trotting managers who spread this ‘disease’, Mourinho being the prime example. Winning trophies at Chelsea and Inter Milan, he has done so with very few home grown players. Admittedly, the few he had at Chelsea did form the basis of the England ‘golden generation’ in South Africa. But he inherited them. At Inter Milan, however, he brought them their first Champions League in decades with a team comprised entirely of foreigners – a huge shock to the Italian football psyche. So, maybe these UEFA-enforced changes will help all nations produce a truer version of their own game. To begin with, however, it may well expose English football for the kick and rush it really is. But we’ve never really seen the even playing field. And I prefer the truth.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Until the recent South African World Cup proved otherwise, we still believed in England that, because our Premier League is the best in the world, the English national team was among the best in the world. There is a huge gulf between our top Premiership sides and the English national side. The former would beat the latter nine times out ten. We all know that today. I think that’s wrong. I want to see international football as the pre-eminent level in the game, not club football. So, I don’t care what statisticians and economists like Szymanski and Wenger say. The direction in which things seem to be heading is not inevitable. If it were, every top FA Premier League side will be fielding 11 Brazilians in five to ten years’ time and English players will be relegated to lower divisions. Who really wants that? For all the reasons I’ve given, therefore, I believe in cutting our top division down to size, so that we and all the world can see English football for what it truly is. And maybe we can start again and get better at it. A romantic view, eh? Well, that’s football.
We know where it all started to go wrong. The 1970s. It was the failure to understand that English football was going wrong during a period characterised first by the inability to qualify for successive World Cups in 1974 and 1978 (with traumatic experiences in the European Championships of 1972 and 1976) and second the sustained success of ‘English’ clubs in European competitions, that first showed us the rot. The same rot is now institutionalised in our so-called successful ‘English’ Premier League, where Welsh, Scottish and Irish players have been replaced by French, Spanish, Italian, German, Ghanaian, Ivorian, Dutch, Australian, American, Russian, you name it. With the result that an already shallow English player quality base has been so thinned, we now invariably rely in tournaments on one player to carry the hopes of a nation.
44 years of hurt
Today is the 44th anniversary of that day. We still believe that, despite this anomalous one-off, this complete home-turf, referee-assisted fluke, that England should be world beaters. Winning in 1966 seems to have instilled in the English football supporting mind a sense of just deserts, moral superiority, the right to keep winning, a sense of invincibility. Not just through winning, but by beating West Germany. It was a war thing. Britain was a country fuelled still by war films in the 50s and 60s. Boys’ comics were full of wartime heroes giving the Hun a good bashing. Winning the World Cup went with the territory. Captain Hurricane won the World Cup as much as Bobby Moore. There was little thought given to the fact that it had been won at home and with a great deal of luck and fortune. But that team was feted as heroes. And still is today. So, even more the shock, then, when the team went out at quarter final stage in the 1970 Mexico World Cup, having been 2-0 up to West Germany. This, it is reckoned, was where the rot set in. Certainly, the 1970s were where it all went wrong. And it was largely down to a misbelief that the success of English club sides in Europe meant that English players were good and, hence, the English team were world-beaters.
We’re clearly not world beaters. The statisticians tell us that history shows we’re lucky to qualify for two out of every three tournaments and, in those tournaments, we have a much lower chance than 20% of ever getting to a final. We should settle for quarter finals, a good result, as Sven knew.
Yet there is always a problem. Nobody seems to know what to do about the English footballing problem. Every tournament since 1966 has seen us caught out in one way or another. The latest excuses are unfamiliarity with the new FIFA ball and tired players. There’s truth in both. Sometimes, such problems are addressed after the horse has bolted, only for others to emerge next time around. In fact, the common factor is England’s inability in tournaments to show the form that the team shows in qualifying, or that the players show week in week out for their clubs. This is a problem that, due to entrenched money interests, is very difficult to address. So, instead of reducing the Premier League down to 16 clubs, we allow the free market its reign. It all conspires to mean that, with every tournament, we have to go through the charade of blaming the latest group of players, or the latest manager, looking to the next young golden generation – all of whom earn more and more and perform less and less.
It’s too late for anyone now playing for England at any level
We can’t just look to youth. Reports coming back from the performance of our Under-19 team at the current European Championships show that it’s already too late for the latest generation of young English players. They reached the semi-finals where they inevitably lost to Spain. That achievement masks a sad reality. These young players have been trained in the English way of pace and strength and giving the ball away. They are already lost to history.
Just read this review from an earlier match in this tournament. ‘Sub-standard kids play stupid football’, explains John Nicholson’s headline on the Football365 site. Describing the Under-19 performance against Austria: “Throughout, the Austrians consistently passed it through midfield with greater precision and purpose. England's defence relied on power and strength. Could they play the ball more than five yards? No. Was anyone comfortable on the ball? Who knows - they didn't keep it long enough to be able to tell. There were a lot of balls into the channels, lots of those annoying 30 yard chips from the front of the last third to the back of the first third which achieve nothing except to cede possession. There was sufficient long ball football to suggest it was still 1985 especially with the keeper aimlessly booting it long. It can't be difficult for a coach to tell a goalkeeper not to do that and surely even a retard could remember not to do it, so we must surmise that they have been coached into the notion that this is a good idea when, to anyone with half a brain, it's obviously a stupid waste of the ball. The English lads’ control was often sloppy; the midfield was all-running, box to box, relying on pace and power over technique. There was no sign of a player who could take someone on and beat them with skill. Against this opposition and indeed against most opposition this combination of a powerful engine room and big, broad-shouldered defence will be victorious, just as it is at full international level. Despite being constantly out-played on the deck, the sheer physicality against a smaller, lightweight side combined with some powerful shooting will win most games. However as a template for successful, tournament winning football it is palpably the same old same old which has failed England for years. This is but another generation that has been inculcated into The English Way. It looks like a form of the game coached and played by stupid people. It's not unfair to call this Stupid Football. Yet, I'm reluctant to believe they are all as stupid as their football suggests. It's just become entrenched as a tradition.”
Reading that really saddened me. How do we stop this conveyor belt that began moving in the 1950s and was out of control by the mid 70s and ‘entrenched’ today? Now that a few people have made loads of money from the Premier League over two decades, isn’t it time we ripped it up and started again for the benefit of all? What can we do to derail the destructive FA and recreate English football without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater?
The problem is institutional
Two bits of news came out this last month. First, that Alex Ferguson turned down the England manager job in 1996 and 1999, considering it a ‘poison chalice...a horrible job’. He also cited his Scottishness as preventing him from taking the job. Too right. When a top manager says such things, however, we have to say that something is wrong. But he’s a foreigner and the FA system suits his club and maybe two or three others, also managed and run by foreigners, so he can say and do what he likes. The second and related bit of news is FA member, Trevor Brooking, announcing that the FA is looking for a future series of English managers for the job, after the tenure of Fabio Capello. The FA needs to do more than this. It should be a given, but it’s only the icing on the cake.
The problem lies in the FA and its approach to the game. In early July 2010, after the South African debacle and the swift reconfirmation of Capello in the England manager role, former UK sports minister, Richard Caborn, came out and said that the FA is no longer fit for purpose. "I believe the governance of the game is not prepared to stand up to its responsibilities. The FA need to say we have to look at ourselves very seriously and we need to modernise ourselves. In Germany in 2000 there was a repositioning of the governance of German football. I think that has been to the benefit of German football, and we are seeing some of those results at the current World Cup."
Caborn cited the fact that many of the recommendations of the 2005 Burns Report had not been implemented. Conflicts of interest. Excessive influence of the Premier League. Lack of representation for important groups. "We have more reports and investigations then anyone else, and even though they are largely accepted they are never implemented. We can't just deal with the symptoms, we have to get to the root of the problem. English football and the Premier League have to come together to develop young English players."
Caborn also pointed to the 2007 recommendations of Richard Lewis to improve youth football and the academy system. While calling for the creation of a ‘parliament of football’ and three independent members on the FA board, Caborn knows that it goes deeper than just cultivating young players. Back in March, 2010, FA Chief Executive, Ian Watmore, left his role after less than a year in the job, citing disagreements with senior figures on the FA Board. Given that every board of directors has disagreements, these must have been significant. Then, of course, we had FA Chairman, Lord Triesman, having to step down after a Mail on Sunday entrapment case found him suggesting that the Spanish and Russians would collaborate illegally to win matches at the forthcoming World Cup. While he got it wrong (it was the Germans and Uruguayans), it seriously damaged England’s 2018 World Cup bid on the very weekend it was launched. While this signalled serious problems at the FA, it also highlighted the vindictive and destructive role of the English press in working against the interests of the national game, while claiming to be doing the very opposite.
What do you expect from a bunch of pirates?
In England, football is a form of emotional currency. It’s the start of many a business meeting. And, now that young women have embraced it, it is no longer the bête noire of male exclusivity it once was. However, as a currency, it no longer packs the purchasing punch it used to. By and large, the players who come to the Premiership are not the best in the world, just among the best in the world. They’re either very young or past their sell-by date, rarely in their prime. They’re all obviously here for the money. Why else would they come? Not for the quality, the English winter or the higher amount of games we play. As a currency, the English game needs devaluing. UEFA quite rightly resents that England has the pulling power to draw footballers away from their home audiences and is doing what it can to impose restrictions on squad numbers and introduce home-grown player quotas.
Clearly, the FA is a product of the historical English approach to business. Taking short cuts to success and success at any cost. English football is an English business disease. It’s a freemarket disaster that builds in success for the few and failure for the many. It’s the unregulated, ungovernable, unreformable arse-end of 400 years of English capitalism. We are the pirates of the world. If you do not have it at home take it from elsewhere. We used to call it Empire. And this new government wants to remind our children of our proper history about how the Empire once ruled the world. As well show them constant re-runs of Pirates Of The Caribbean. That’s about it. Our cultural insistence on continuing to be a world power by whatever means. If that means paying the earth to bribe footballers away from their own leagues to our league, creating dazzling teams of slightly tarnished glittering Galacticos, then so be it. It benefits the big clubs and money trickles down to the lesser ones. We get to see some good football. It’s not English football, but it is very lucrative. I wish the Government had the power to do to the FA what it's doing to state education and the health service. We'll have to look to Europe to rein us in. UEFA is trying to put a stop to a situation that, as with the 1970s, was leading to European finals dominated by ‘English’ teams that were not really ‘English’. (The only way they could manage it back then was by banning English clubs for reasons of hooliganism – it worked, but it led, after a moribund late 80s, to the creation of the Premier League as a means of ‘English’ resurgence.) Now, there is a limit on squad size with a set number of players in that squad required to be home-grown between the ages of 18 and 21. And the top club managers like Wenger, Redknapp, Mancini, Ancelotti and Ferguson are rebelling against it. Yet the fact that their own club owners signed up to it is a reflection of the belief that football should be, at its heart, home-grown. Call it emotional, call it what you will. But that’s what people want. Otherwise, in five to ten years’ time, the Premier League will contain no English players whatsoever and the likes of Arsene Wenger will still be able to say ‘because they’re not good enough to break through.’ There is an unbending logic towards every top side being full of the best players available from the world. Brazilians. So, why not just move Arsènale, Chelski and the Theatre of Prawns to Sao Paolo, Rio and Belo Horizonte? That way, the players won’t have that far to travel. And we can watch it all on Murderorc TV.
So, as interfering and troublesome as it will be, UEFA’s intervention on squad numbers and home quotas is good news for me. It’s the first thing I’ve heard in ages that attempts to halt the footballing disease in its tracks. There are certain globe-trotting managers who spread this ‘disease’, Mourinho being the prime example. Winning trophies at Chelsea and Inter Milan, he has done so with very few home grown players. Admittedly, the few he had at Chelsea did form the basis of the England ‘golden generation’ in South Africa. But he inherited them. At Inter Milan, however, he brought them their first Champions League in decades with a team comprised entirely of foreigners – a huge shock to the Italian football psyche. So, maybe these UEFA-enforced changes will help all nations produce a truer version of their own game. To begin with, however, it may well expose English football for the kick and rush it really is. But we’ve never really seen the even playing field. And I prefer the truth.
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
Monday, 26 July 2010
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
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
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Is English football an incurable disease? Part 3
English teams were British teams
If we’ve never been as good at international football as we’ve always thought, perhaps the reason is that we have never had enough quality and strength in depth. I think we created this problem for ourselves, first unintentionally, and then, in the last two decades, deliberately.
After 18 years of the FA Premier League and all the clamour around foreign players, people seem to have forgotten that club sides in the old English First Division were rarely made up of just English players. Our top teams all had at least 3, 4 or 5 players in key roles who were Scottish, Welsh, Irish. There are still one or two dotted about – Giggs, Fletcher, Healy - but not in the same numbers as before. They’ve been replaced by other ‘foreigners’. But the same principle applied back then as applies today – fewer English players in teams by choice = less strength in depth for the English national team.
You won’t care about that if you support Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham or Manchester City. It’s many years since most of you had an English manager, let alone an English owner, so why should a team made up entirely of foreign players cause you any concern, as long as it’s successful? But the rest of us care. The majority. Those of us who still hold true that dream of football every five year-old has.
60 years ago, when all this was in its infancy, the fact that our top English teams were actually mixtures of the Home Nations was something that (a) we ignored and (b) our European neighbours were irritated by. For historic reasons, we had been very used to accommodating the Scottish, Welsh and Irish into our English way of life. Our European football competitors regularly pointed out that we should have only one Great Britain team, to reflect the everyday status of our football league system. Maybe there was a moment after the Second World War, or in the 1950s, when there could have been a Great Britain team that went on to a world-beating future. But, truth is, not many people actually wanted it, except the Europeans. And the times were all about the shedding of empire and the acquiring of independence. Besides, if you had a good team, why sacrifice it for a Great Britain team? And the Home Nations had good teams. The 1958 World Cup in Sweden saw all four qualify – the only time this has happened. Wales and Northern Ireland even made the quarter finals of a 16-team competition.
Even when England was awarded and won the World Cup in 1966, this did not stop international footballing institutions pointing at the existence of four national teams in two small islands. In qualification for the 1968 European Championship finals, UEFA put England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland together in one group that could produce and progress only one winner. While Scotland actually beat the new World Champions shortly after that victory, England went forward and actually lost in the semi-finals, to Yugoslavia, in Italy, our only semi-final tournament appearance overseas. Bizarrely, the home nations qualifying group was formed by combining the results of the 1966-67 and 1967-68 British Home Championships. We wouldn’t stand for that today.
We didn’t know we were building weakness into our system
The English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish FAs had developed separately back in the 19th century. There was always the intention to go it alone. But we have to ask why English club teams took players from the Home nations. The answer could be that, as the economic giants among them, they could. It’s surely not that there was not enough talent locally. We were a mixed nation, where Scots, Welsh and Irish lived and worked among the English. Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham refused to join a Welsh League, understanding the economic implications. We were a small nation. Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff are not far from London or Manchester. It was never a clear strategy. It just happened. It didn’t tend to work the other way round, however. England was just the hub of football action in the UK.
So, in the 50s onwards, when people started taking notice of international football, our top teams were never filled totally with English players. This meant that, from the very start of our international ambitions, there was never strength in depth or any English way of playing. Successful club sides adopted different styles – Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, in particular – but there was no consistency. It was a period when League and Cups were won every year by a different team. For example, in the 10 years between 1945-55, 8 different teams won the FA Cup and 7 different teams won the League. 1955-65, 9 different clubs won the FA Cup and 7 different teams won the League. 1965-75, 10 different teams won the FA Cup and 7 different teams won the League. 1975-85, 7 different clubs won the FA Cup, and 4 different teams won the League.
So, there was no English way. Until 1966. Bizarrely, the one big blip in all this was England winning the World Cup in 1966 with Ramsey’s ‘wingless wonders’. But this has always been the exception that proves the rule. The tail that wags the dog. Past romance over present reality. And, as is typical with any English sporting successes, no sooner had we achieved it, than we lost the spark.
The earlier unintentional misalignment between English club football and English national football actually suited the Scots, Welsh and Irish because, by and large, their top players were playing in the English league against better players. Not surprising then that they had good national teams in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Look at them now – the place of British players in top English league teams has been taken by other ‘foreigners’ from around the world. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all slipped down the rankings. Their players find it harder to get into the top teams. They get less exposure to top-level football. They lose strength in depth. Well, the same has happened to English players in our own League. Some of our top teams, particularly Arsenal and Liverpool have played first teams featuring hardly any Englishmen. Some people say ‘So what!’ As I said at the beginning of this essay, I believe it’s wrong to put club before country. If you disagree with that, then you won’t want to see any change. But my whole argument is based on seeing the national game as the pinnacle to which a 5-year-old footballing kid could and should aspire, then creating the conditions for that to be possible.
Every successful English club side was a Team GB
People point out to me that, if I supported one of those clubs that keep winning, I would be quite happy with the status quo. As I don’t and that perpetually winning scenario is hypothetical, I feel free to air my views about this historical problem with English strength in depth.
If, due to the British contingent, the England national team did not have as many quality players to draw on as it might, at least it had enough in 1966 for England to win the World Cup on home soil. And, before 1984, none of the 7 English European Cup winning sides had ever fielded fewer than 7 Englishmen in a starting line up of a final.
In 1984, Liverpool changed that. It was down to 4, and one of those was really Australian. But the club had its reasons for that, as we’ll explore in Part 4. By the time Liverpool lost for the first time in the tragic Heysel encounter in 1985, this was down to 2. In all instances, only on very rare occasions were any of these ‘foreigners’ from outside the British Isles. The next time an English club side won the European Cup, in 1999, there were only 4 Englishmen in the side. By this time, ‘British’ players were deemed foreigners and Manchester United featured players from Denmark, Norway, Holland, Ireland, Wales, Sweden and Trinidad & Tobago. So, even the pipeline for British players was largely gone. Little surprise, then, that their national teams went down the pan. Yet Scotland had been strong enough to rival England in the 60s and 70s, even qualifying for World Cups when England didn’t.
This is not a call for Team GB. That’s a different conversation. And, as we’ve seen with the fiasco around the British football team for the 2012 Olympics, it’s all too political. It’s pathetic that the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish FAs have pulled out of Team GB for the 2012 Olympics on the grounds that they could not gain assurances from FIFA that playing under one flag would not affect their status. What status? Their individual flames are at their lowest since football records began. At 41st in FIFA rankings, Scotland is worse than Gabon, Israel and Peru; at 59th, Northern Island is worse than Burkina Faso, Lithuania and New Zealand; at 84th, Wales is worse than Cyprus, Albania and Mozambique.
I’m just saying that because our English club teams of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s all contained between 3 to 7 players who were actually British, this had a negative effect on the strength and consistency of our national English football team. After 1966, we did not prevail. For too long, there has been a mismatch between the way our English club sides have been made up and the English national team. While this was an unintentional English/British problem, it’s now become a purposely created English/World problem.
Support the English national team or knock it down forever
The FA Premier League, in cahoots with the people who run our top clubs, has deliberately created a misaligned system which puts club before country. So, unless we change this, we’re crazy if we think that the English national team has any chance of competing successfully on the world stage.
The problems lie at the senior end, with the clubs in the FA Premier League being allowed to block the pathways for developing English talent. Today, aided and abetted by anti-English and anti-European satellite TV moguls, the entrenched powers that be at club level are so powerful and determined in their view that a few top clubs shall prevail, come what may, that it’s astonishing that we even maintain the pretence that the national game is the most important of all. Today, the national game is really a sideshow circus perpetuated by our national print media for the latter’s own purposes. Even Wembley, our national football treasure, is barely used for the purpose it was so expensively built and even then, the pitch is not fit for purpose.
In which case, isn’t it about time we admitted that and took it to its logical conclusion – the formation of a global league of the top clubs and to hell with the national game? Or shall we continue pretending? Or shall we consign the last 20 years of celebrity histrionics to the dustbin of experience and try to do something about restoring the national game to the pinnacle of footballing achievement? Do we even know how? Isn’t good football something that we forgot about somewhere in the long distant 1970s when we opted for ‘Kick and Rush’?
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
If we’ve never been as good at international football as we’ve always thought, perhaps the reason is that we have never had enough quality and strength in depth. I think we created this problem for ourselves, first unintentionally, and then, in the last two decades, deliberately.
After 18 years of the FA Premier League and all the clamour around foreign players, people seem to have forgotten that club sides in the old English First Division were rarely made up of just English players. Our top teams all had at least 3, 4 or 5 players in key roles who were Scottish, Welsh, Irish. There are still one or two dotted about – Giggs, Fletcher, Healy - but not in the same numbers as before. They’ve been replaced by other ‘foreigners’. But the same principle applied back then as applies today – fewer English players in teams by choice = less strength in depth for the English national team.
You won’t care about that if you support Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham or Manchester City. It’s many years since most of you had an English manager, let alone an English owner, so why should a team made up entirely of foreign players cause you any concern, as long as it’s successful? But the rest of us care. The majority. Those of us who still hold true that dream of football every five year-old has.
60 years ago, when all this was in its infancy, the fact that our top English teams were actually mixtures of the Home Nations was something that (a) we ignored and (b) our European neighbours were irritated by. For historic reasons, we had been very used to accommodating the Scottish, Welsh and Irish into our English way of life. Our European football competitors regularly pointed out that we should have only one Great Britain team, to reflect the everyday status of our football league system. Maybe there was a moment after the Second World War, or in the 1950s, when there could have been a Great Britain team that went on to a world-beating future. But, truth is, not many people actually wanted it, except the Europeans. And the times were all about the shedding of empire and the acquiring of independence. Besides, if you had a good team, why sacrifice it for a Great Britain team? And the Home Nations had good teams. The 1958 World Cup in Sweden saw all four qualify – the only time this has happened. Wales and Northern Ireland even made the quarter finals of a 16-team competition.
Even when England was awarded and won the World Cup in 1966, this did not stop international footballing institutions pointing at the existence of four national teams in two small islands. In qualification for the 1968 European Championship finals, UEFA put England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland together in one group that could produce and progress only one winner. While Scotland actually beat the new World Champions shortly after that victory, England went forward and actually lost in the semi-finals, to Yugoslavia, in Italy, our only semi-final tournament appearance overseas. Bizarrely, the home nations qualifying group was formed by combining the results of the 1966-67 and 1967-68 British Home Championships. We wouldn’t stand for that today.
We didn’t know we were building weakness into our system
The English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish FAs had developed separately back in the 19th century. There was always the intention to go it alone. But we have to ask why English club teams took players from the Home nations. The answer could be that, as the economic giants among them, they could. It’s surely not that there was not enough talent locally. We were a mixed nation, where Scots, Welsh and Irish lived and worked among the English. Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham refused to join a Welsh League, understanding the economic implications. We were a small nation. Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff are not far from London or Manchester. It was never a clear strategy. It just happened. It didn’t tend to work the other way round, however. England was just the hub of football action in the UK.
So, in the 50s onwards, when people started taking notice of international football, our top teams were never filled totally with English players. This meant that, from the very start of our international ambitions, there was never strength in depth or any English way of playing. Successful club sides adopted different styles – Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, in particular – but there was no consistency. It was a period when League and Cups were won every year by a different team. For example, in the 10 years between 1945-55, 8 different teams won the FA Cup and 7 different teams won the League. 1955-65, 9 different clubs won the FA Cup and 7 different teams won the League. 1965-75, 10 different teams won the FA Cup and 7 different teams won the League. 1975-85, 7 different clubs won the FA Cup, and 4 different teams won the League.
So, there was no English way. Until 1966. Bizarrely, the one big blip in all this was England winning the World Cup in 1966 with Ramsey’s ‘wingless wonders’. But this has always been the exception that proves the rule. The tail that wags the dog. Past romance over present reality. And, as is typical with any English sporting successes, no sooner had we achieved it, than we lost the spark.
The earlier unintentional misalignment between English club football and English national football actually suited the Scots, Welsh and Irish because, by and large, their top players were playing in the English league against better players. Not surprising then that they had good national teams in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Look at them now – the place of British players in top English league teams has been taken by other ‘foreigners’ from around the world. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all slipped down the rankings. Their players find it harder to get into the top teams. They get less exposure to top-level football. They lose strength in depth. Well, the same has happened to English players in our own League. Some of our top teams, particularly Arsenal and Liverpool have played first teams featuring hardly any Englishmen. Some people say ‘So what!’ As I said at the beginning of this essay, I believe it’s wrong to put club before country. If you disagree with that, then you won’t want to see any change. But my whole argument is based on seeing the national game as the pinnacle to which a 5-year-old footballing kid could and should aspire, then creating the conditions for that to be possible.
Every successful English club side was a Team GB
People point out to me that, if I supported one of those clubs that keep winning, I would be quite happy with the status quo. As I don’t and that perpetually winning scenario is hypothetical, I feel free to air my views about this historical problem with English strength in depth.
If, due to the British contingent, the England national team did not have as many quality players to draw on as it might, at least it had enough in 1966 for England to win the World Cup on home soil. And, before 1984, none of the 7 English European Cup winning sides had ever fielded fewer than 7 Englishmen in a starting line up of a final.
In 1984, Liverpool changed that. It was down to 4, and one of those was really Australian. But the club had its reasons for that, as we’ll explore in Part 4. By the time Liverpool lost for the first time in the tragic Heysel encounter in 1985, this was down to 2. In all instances, only on very rare occasions were any of these ‘foreigners’ from outside the British Isles. The next time an English club side won the European Cup, in 1999, there were only 4 Englishmen in the side. By this time, ‘British’ players were deemed foreigners and Manchester United featured players from Denmark, Norway, Holland, Ireland, Wales, Sweden and Trinidad & Tobago. So, even the pipeline for British players was largely gone. Little surprise, then, that their national teams went down the pan. Yet Scotland had been strong enough to rival England in the 60s and 70s, even qualifying for World Cups when England didn’t.
This is not a call for Team GB. That’s a different conversation. And, as we’ve seen with the fiasco around the British football team for the 2012 Olympics, it’s all too political. It’s pathetic that the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish FAs have pulled out of Team GB for the 2012 Olympics on the grounds that they could not gain assurances from FIFA that playing under one flag would not affect their status. What status? Their individual flames are at their lowest since football records began. At 41st in FIFA rankings, Scotland is worse than Gabon, Israel and Peru; at 59th, Northern Island is worse than Burkina Faso, Lithuania and New Zealand; at 84th, Wales is worse than Cyprus, Albania and Mozambique.
I’m just saying that because our English club teams of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s all contained between 3 to 7 players who were actually British, this had a negative effect on the strength and consistency of our national English football team. After 1966, we did not prevail. For too long, there has been a mismatch between the way our English club sides have been made up and the English national team. While this was an unintentional English/British problem, it’s now become a purposely created English/World problem.
Support the English national team or knock it down forever
The FA Premier League, in cahoots with the people who run our top clubs, has deliberately created a misaligned system which puts club before country. So, unless we change this, we’re crazy if we think that the English national team has any chance of competing successfully on the world stage.
The problems lie at the senior end, with the clubs in the FA Premier League being allowed to block the pathways for developing English talent. Today, aided and abetted by anti-English and anti-European satellite TV moguls, the entrenched powers that be at club level are so powerful and determined in their view that a few top clubs shall prevail, come what may, that it’s astonishing that we even maintain the pretence that the national game is the most important of all. Today, the national game is really a sideshow circus perpetuated by our national print media for the latter’s own purposes. Even Wembley, our national football treasure, is barely used for the purpose it was so expensively built and even then, the pitch is not fit for purpose.
In which case, isn’t it about time we admitted that and took it to its logical conclusion – the formation of a global league of the top clubs and to hell with the national game? Or shall we continue pretending? Or shall we consign the last 20 years of celebrity histrionics to the dustbin of experience and try to do something about restoring the national game to the pinnacle of footballing achievement? Do we even know how? Isn’t good football something that we forgot about somewhere in the long distant 1970s when we opted for ‘Kick and Rush’?
markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk
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