One of the arguments oft floated for the demise of the British royal family is that somewhere along the way it lost the magic.
Personally, I’m not sure how much ‘magic’ existed in the first place but decades of media intrusion, the argument goes, has sated the appetite of a ravenous public devouring every last minutiae of royal life, in the process progressively besmirching the fairy tale dream of princesses living in hill-top castles marrying handsome princes on white chargers. The point has much merit but, in the case of the royals, is lost on me because I never had them on a pedestal in the first place. I never had a problem imagining HRH Liz slinging back the dubonet and gin watching Corro on the box and chowing down on a spam and Branston cob while Phillip wrapped his decaying chops round a Ginsters Chicken Tikka pie laughing open-mouthed at Charles and Camilla’s karaoke version of Wind Beneath my Wings.
Whilst not wishing to sound in any way like a pulpit preacher, I must nevertheless offer the thought – you know, football’s a bit like that too.
Modern innovation in the way the game is played, managed, coached, reported, televised and watched in the UK is to be applauded until our palms are red raw. But like the royal brand, football at the height of its current popularity, is nurturing a salivating beast of a public for whom the game must constantly dole out bloody chunks of red meat to keep its backers-come-knockers at bay. Saturation satellite coverage, 24-hour news punditry and media access are stripping away the layers of the unknown until eventually, we’ll know everything there is to know and disappear up on our own offsides.
So it’s hardly surprising that if you stick back on some of those layers you can rediscover a comforting womb of football nostalgia, an era when you knew less but enjoyed more.
Nowhere is this more glaringly highlighted than in the current series of The Big Match Revisited on ITV 4. As the title handily suggests it’s a slightly edited, re-running of ITV’s The Big Match, (the channel’s Sunday version of Match of the Day), which at the time was presented by the late Brian Moore and was regionalised depending on where in ITV-land you happened to live in the 70s and 80s. The current series is aired during the daytime on Thursdays with quick repeats and offers matches from exactly 30 years ago. No sooner has the LWT logo disappeared and the cheesy Big Match theme tune faded away than the viewer is transported back in time. This is nostalgia culture and TV at its best – football’s own Life on Mars.
First of all you must imagine yourself back in the era. It’s 1979. Thatch is about to become PM and Blair Peach is dying in police custody. Neave and Mountbatten are killed by terrorist bombs but Terry and June seemed unaffected by the Winter of Discontent. Zimbabwe is still Rhodesia and some gringo on TV wants a Texan Bar as his last request.
Fascinatingly, it doesn’t seem to matter which teams are playing, what the score is, or how dull/exciting the matches covered actually are. If you think you’re watching for the football, think again. It’s the peripheral aspects of the big match day out circa 1979 that bewitch. Specific memories of matches will always be replayed in the average fan’s mind and kept alive long past their sell-by date because of the joy of a hard-fought victory or the pain of a last-minute defeat but there are bits of football ephemera languishing in the archive which are too easily forgotten and are therefore joyous to rediscover – Ralph Coates’ comb over, porky refs with flappy white collars, turgid and sand-strewn pitches, divots the size of dustbin lids, bobble hats and duffle coats, Hugh Johns, little white railings, adverts for William and Glyn’s Bank, sheepskin jackets, A-Z alphabet boards with the half-time scores, Gerald Sinstadt, goalkeepers in peaked caps, Kenneth Wolstenholme and subterranean dugouts above which you can just see the manager’s heads at pitch level..
But why is it so obsessively appealing? Perhaps it’s just because the football was more enjoyable because it was slower with space and time on the ball. Or perhaps it’s simply that, from the security of our sanitised, Dettoxed and health and safety-conscious present, we may know the far-away past contained untold dangers and unacceptable risks, but we were simply unaware. Its simplicity is its appeal. For those of us now in our mid-40s we can relish the sights and sounds of our youth. We know back then we were then naive and gauche, but so was the game. Nevertheless, this was our youth and this is the football of our youth.
1979 was a year which overarched changing tastes and the new and the old briefly shared centre stage. Disco was in its death throes after Punk had grasped youth culture by the balls. Joy Division’s Transmission shares the charts with the Dooleys’ Wanted – Danny Blanchflower managed Chelsea with Ray Wilkins as its captain. London Calling, said The Clash, Bright Eyes said Art Garfunkel – Mark Lawrenson shoots, Pat Jennings saves.
Brian Moore’s presentation and commentary is comfortingly carpet slippers and genuinely knowledgeable and enthusiastic. When the NVQ-level graphics have faded Brian greets you from a studio straight out of Space 1999 sat at a desk on top of which is his script, an occasional telephone and a microphone sticking out of an MDF desk, which appears to change length throughout the series. Further graphics showing the teams look like acetates on an overhead projector and the half-time symbol is a scoreline accompanied by the iconic 45-minute clock showing that 45 minutes is up, which we’d suspected since the players had left the pitch. Finally, in the middle of the clock is the centrepiece of the ITV World of Sport ‘S’.
There’s a distinct lack of hyperbole in the commentary. West Ham take a 4-0 lead after 37 minutes at home to a struggling Newcastle and there’s no mention of a rout or walkover. Each goal is greeted by a roar from the crowd which quickly dies to polite applause and clapping. Moore picks up on the quiet Saturday afternoon atmosphere leaving gaps between passes where modern-day commentators would have told you about Terry Hibbit’s hairdresser or Trevor Brooking’s Barking roots.
Kenneth Wolstenholme leaves vast tranches of silence even in the edited highlights of the relegation battle between Middlesbrough and Birmingham, to the point that I’m not actually sure he’s still awake. “. . . . . . . . . . . . . . to Buckley, it’s a goal!” sums up his description of Birmingham’s neat passing move, involving four or five players, which leads to their only goal of the game.
“Full marks to both teams for striving to give us top class entertainment,” concludes former RAF bomber pilot Wolstenholme DFC & Bar, sounding like he’s just come back from a sortie over Dresden.
Wolves V Shrewsbury is played on a Molineux pitch on which Scottish Longhorn cattle would have refused to graze whilst back at Upton Park there’s precious little spare turf around the pitch perimeter. There’s maybe just three foot of grass outside the touchlines with the crowd able to lean over and stop the ball at any point. Trevor Brooking is almost sitting in the lap of two aged and portly St John’s ambulance men as he attempts to take anything more than a one-step run up at a West Ham corner. The Newcastle players are near enough at throw-ins and corners to be glassed, spat on and verbally abused but they weren’t – that’s not what men in flat caps and youngsters wearing bobble hats and parkas with furry hoods evidently found amusing or clever in those days.
“We all agree . . . Trevor Brooking is magic”, chant the Upton Park faithful in respectful, expletive-free admiration.
That’s not to say, however, that all was rosy in the Cholmondley Warner crowd. Football violence existed and crowd segregation had already been introduced after early 1970s incidents. Grounds featured throughout the series show a mix of cutesy white railings at the sides and inward leaning fences at either end against which vast swathes of fans pitch and roll like a human wave. In 10 years time it would all have to change but it would take human tragedy to bring it about.
“Welcome back to Upton Park”, says Brian at the start of the second half, “. . . .where West Ham’s 4-0 lead gives them a good chance of all three points today.”
It might be churlish to pick him up on this but it seems obvious with hindsight that, given the scoreline and the parlous state of Newcastle’s porous defence, that three points are not only well and truly under lock and key but that West Ham may chalk up double figures any minute now. The Hammers knock in a fifth but Brian still applies the brakes to any over zealousness. There’s no implied criticism of Newcastle nor hyperbole surrounding West Ham’s midfield genius. 30 years later and we’d be listening to an agenda of extremes concluding in the essential rhetorical question: “Will the Newcastle manager Bill McGarry still have a job tomorrow morning?” But Brian’s post match enquiries of McGarry never once touched on whether or not he had the ‘backing of his board’. Touchingly and refreshingly, they talk about the quality of the football and McGarry praises West Ham’s flowing style of play, calling them the best side in the second division that year.
The letters section is a throw-back to a bygone age. Writers have their addresses read out in full, including house numbers! A man from Wealdstone wants to see QPR’s League Cup Final victory over West Brom (and rightly so... – Ed), while Janet Smart from Gillingham wants to praise Lawrie MacMenemy for being a model professional in the way he conducted himself after losing the League Cup Final.
Then in the week following the final between Southampton and Forest, Leslie Wilson of Sleepers Farm Road near Grays, wants to know what Alan Ball was doing fiddling with the front of his shorts as the Saints players left the pitch before collecting their losers medals. “Well”, says Brian, a wry smile creeping across his avuncular face, “Alan told us he’d picked up a piece of Wembley turf and tucked it down the front of his shorts as a souvenir”. “Indeed”, Brian continues, “it seems Alan picked up two bits of turf and he told us the other was for Terry Curran who thought he would forget to pick up a souvenir!” This no doubt came as a bitter disappointment to Ms Wilson of Grays who momentarily thought men with squeaky voices really could actually be well endowed. This is priceless stuff and I implore you to watch it. It’s only recently, with the introduction of people like Adrian Chiles, that mainstream TV football presentation has recovered such a sense of humour and love of the obscure and offbeat.
Back to The Big Match Revisited, a Liverpool V Man United cup tie at Maine Road offers us a rare insight and a treat, Brian tells us, as cameras have been allowed into the tunnel through which the teams will pass any second now. Such innovations are cheap to the 2009 football youngster who’s grown accustomed to seeing players throw boots and kick water butts inside changing rooms. But in those days this was indeed a treat, even though it was stripping away the magic. As the players come down the tunnel Ray Clemence and Garry Bailey look as if they’re comparing nail varnish and about to swap addresses rather than enter the gladiatorial arena. All the players laugh and share jokes, no-one’s in the zone, no-one’s staring at his opposite number and no-one’s chanting hypnotically “This is my time, I am a winner, I can do this!!!!!” Only Graeme Souness walks down alone (no change there then) but in these particularly hirsuit times the Liverpool team do seriously resemble a sketch from the Fast Show. Only with the appearance of Ray Kennedy down the tunnel are we soberly reminded of the joys of the present and the potential cruelty of the future.
Occasionally, we dip down into the pit of Division 2 to maintain the regionalised feel of the programme. Leyton Orient versus Brighton brings together an absolute hotchpotch of players from different eras. Martin Chivers plays alongside Mark Lawrenson for Alan Mullery’s Brighton against Ralph Coates in the twilight of his career at Orient. Brian Moore reminds us at the beginning of the team’s various kits so that those of us watching in black and white can know who is who. Orient manager Jimmy Bloomfield and his assistants sit in their dugout with a tartan car rug covering their collective knees looking like three old ladies on a charabanc to Blackpool
Shirts bore no names and no advertising and the shorts truly lived up to their name.
Brylcreemed managers are interviewed against a backdrop of oak-panelled corridors in the bowels of what appear to be working men’s clubs with not a hint of a sponsors logo-splattered backdrop and no loitering PR advisors. The interviews with players and managers are respectful, if at times a little in awe.
The rules of engagement between media and sport were different. Nowadays we need more, we demand to know more. We need every last spit and cough of pre and post match analysis to feed our obsession. But in doing so we strip away every last vestige of football’s magic. Let whatever lived down the front of the late Alan Ball’s shorts remain mysterious and magical, if only for the sake of Mrs Ball. We really don’t need to know.
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