If they kick me or one of the others, well I just nut them. I call it me ‘flick’. It’s a joke among us at Arsenal … it means being brought up in Holloway where it’s tough and you learn from the pram to nut people who pick on you.
– Charlie George, Daily Express, March 1972
President Ford … is nothing to do with motor cars but apparently has a good record in baseball. Seems rather like asking Don Revie to become Prime Minister. Might not be such a bad idea at that! He’d certainly make a better impression than Wilson or Heath.
– Kenneth Williams’s diary, 10 August 1974
Wednesday, 17 October 1973: a cool, damp evening in north-west London as the players of England and Poland lined up in the tunnel for their decisive World Cup qualifier. In an era when few football matches were shown on television, it was a testament to the importance of the game that not only were the BBC broadcasting it live to millions of nail-chewing English fans, but a global audience potentially reaching 200 million people was expected to tune in. Wembley had been sold out for weeks, and as the players’ studs clattered in the stadium tunnel they could already hear the mighty roar of the crowd, the needy, surging chants of ‘England, England’. The camera panned across the gum-chewing faces as the line of blue tracksuits began the long march out into the arena, their features taut with tension: Martin Peters, the captain and hero of 1966; Peter Shilton, the impossibly athletic young goalkeeper; Roy McFarland, the cultured centre back who had replaced Bobby Moore as leader of the back line; the dynamic combination of Allan Clarke, Mick Channon and Martin Chivers in attack, a riot of sideburns and goals. In the corner of the screen, a grey-haired man in a fawn raincoat slipped past almost unnoticed, impassive and self-contained. Some said Sir Alf Ramsey, the mastermind behind England’s World Cup victory seven years before, was behind the times. But Ramsey needed only this victory to take his country to the World Cup finals in West Germany.
As England dominated the early minutes, urged on by the roar of 100,000 fans, Ramsey sat motionless on the team bench, his face barely betraying a flicker of emotion as Mick Channon smacked the ball against the Polish post, or as Tony Currie thundered in a shot that seemed destined for the net until the Polish goalkeeper, Jan Tomaszewski, pawed it aside. On television beforehand, the outspoken Brian Clough – who had sensationally resigned only days before from Derby County – had told viewers that Tomaszewski was a ‘clown’. But Ramsey, who had managed England for eleven years and knew better than to underestimate unknown foreign opponents, was not laughing. Nor were Ramsey’s players as the Polish goalkeeper pulled off save after save, shrugging aside the congratulations of his defenders as though it were merely another day at the office. The pressure continued – by the end, England would have 26 corners to Poland’s 2 – and still no goal came. Channon had a shot cleared off the line, a header clawed away; Clarke headed over; Colin Bell cracked in a shot that somehow, diving from nowhere, Tomaszewski touched wide. ‘The night wore its jagged path away,’ wrote the veteran football correspondent Geoffrey Green, one of a dying breed of highly literate sportswriters, ‘amidst a wall of sound rising in layers from the 100,000 crowd while nervous cigarettes darted like fireflies in the night.’
There was just half an hour left when, at last, a goal came. Poland were packed into their own half, England pressing yet again, when Currie lost the ball on the right and it was swept on towards Gadocha on the Poles’ left wing. ‘Hunter’s got to make that,’ the BBC’s commentator Barry Davies said, a hint of urgency in his voice as the Leeds defender moved to intercept – and then, suddenly: ‘He’s lost it! Gadocha is inside McFarland, Hughes trying to get back goal-side’ – and as red Polish shirts flooded towards England’s goal – ‘Domarski coming up square, number ten’ – and at that moment the Polish forward hit a low, scuffed shot that slipped through Shilton’s despairing fingers, and in the blink of an eye England were behind. ‘And it’s there!’ yelled Davies, his voice shrill with horror. ‘Hunter had to make that challenge, and he didn’t succeed!’ On the pitch, the white-shirted players stared at the ground in disbelief. On the bench, Ramsey sat impassive, his face carved from stone. He made no move to change tactics, to bring on fresh legs, to gee up his players. He just sat there, calmly and quietly, as he always had.
England drew level six minutes later, Clarke coolly converting a penalty after Martin Peters had been pushed in the penalty area. But although shots continued to rain down on Tomaszewski’s goal, the clock was ticking remorselessly down. Hunter had a fabulous chance when the ball broke to him on the edge of the Polish area, but again Tomaszewski was there to palm the ball away. With just two minutes left, Ramsey made his move, bringing on Derby’s Kevin Hector for the misfiring Chivers. But it was surely too late. ‘We move into injury and stoppage time,’ exclaimed Davies above the din of the crowd. England threw in one last corner; Tomaszewski flailed desperately; the ball ricocheted towards the net, came back off a Polish defender, and at the back post Hector stretched – and poked it wide. And then, seconds later, the referee blew his whistle, and it was all over. As red shirts streamed towards the Polish bench in celebration, a photographer captured Norman Hunter, his face crumpled with disappointment, his eyes turned to the ground, his shoulders slumped in despair. ‘We all sat in the dressing room afterwards and not a word was said,’ Tony Currie recalled afterwards. ‘Everyone was in shock.’1
Even in an autumn of inflation, bombings and strikes, there were few more compelling symbols of national decline than England’s failure against Poland. Just seven years after the golden victory that had supposedly capped the youthful optimism of Harold Wilson’s swinging Britain, England had failed even to reach the final stage of sport’s most lucrative tournament. When Alf Garnett contemplated the disaster a few weeks later on Till Death Us Do Part, he was still trembling with anger at the base ingratitude of Britain’s wartime allies. The World Cup, he spat bitterly, would be ‘a laughing stock without England’. The press, meanwhile, was unforgiving. ‘WE’VE HAD IT!’ screamed the back page of the Sun, pointing the finger squarely at the manager. On television, Brian Clough held up a nail and quipped that he would like to hammer it into Ramsey’s coffin. ‘For Sir Alf I can find no excuse,’ wrote Geoffrey Green in The Times; for ‘as the minutes unwound, seemingly faster and faster, there he sat with his substitutes on the sidelines … immobile while his men on the field drained themselves of their last ounce of energy’, like some sporting equivalent of the politicians who had fiddled as Britain’s economic reputation went up in smoke. And like so many commentators in the decades to come, Green diagnosed a chronic failure of the English game, crippled by ‘fear of defeat’, a ‘stagnant defence’ and a fatal addiction to ‘head-ball’, and typified by ‘the hoisting of high lobs into a penalty area’ that resembled ‘Piccadilly during the evening rush hour’. As the Daily Telegraph grimly put it, England had been ‘relegated to a place among soccer’s second-class powers’.2
The axe fell on Sir Alf Ramsey in April 1974. He had never been popular with senior officials in the Football Association, who treated him as little more than a hired servant, mocked his half-suppressed Dagenham vowels, and resented his popularity with the sporting public. ‘He always referred to me, even to my face, as Ramsey, which I found insulting,’ Sir Alf said later of Sir Harold Thompson, the notoriously autocratic Oxford chemist who dominated the FA’s international committee. Despite his knighthood, Ramsey had been paid just £7,200 a year, less than some Third Division managers. That his pay-off was a derisory £8,000, with an annual pension of £1,200, was an indictment of the FA’s snobbery and indifference. Even within the wider game, the conqueror of 1966 was seen as a remote, outdated figure; the only job offer immediately after his dismissal came from a boys’ team in Leek, Staffordshire, which admitted it could afford neither pay nor expenses. By the 1980s, Ramsey had been condemned to the sporting equivalent of internal exile, spending his days in obscurity in suburban Ipswich, far from the football pitch or the television studio. It was a sad end to a career that had once epitomized the optimism of the affluent society, and that had seemed to run in parallel with Harold Wilson’s rise to national fame. ‘He should have resigned at the top,’ the Labour leader’s aide Bernard Donoughue remarked when they heard the news of Ramsey’s dismissal. ‘We all find that difficult to do,’ Wilson said quietly.3
At a time when the headlines were dominated by reports of economic decline, social fragmentation and moral collapse, and when Britain seemed to be sinking beneath the tides of historical change, sport could often seem like the most trivial of distractions. Yet as the government itself put it when announcing new funding for elite athletes in 1975, ‘success in international competition has an important part to play in national morale’. What it had recognized, and what would become even clearer in later years, was that almost nothing expressed a sense of national identity and common endeavour better than international sporting achievements. Thanks to television, not even the most stubborn sports-hater could ignore the annual ritual of the FA Cup Final, with its two-channel, all-day coverage, or the Derby, or the Five Nations, or the Boat Race, events that were woven into the nation’s cultural fabric as deeply as Coronation Street and Morecambe and Wise. It was sport that helped to sell the Mirror and the Sun, sport that occupied the imaginations of millions of schoolboys, and sport that dominated conversation in pubs across the land.
Paradoxically, sporting attendances were in free fall, with crowds for football, county cricket and rugby league in deep decline since their heyday in the late 1940s – a result, above all, of the decline of Britain’s collective working-class culture and the vast expansion of other leisure opportunities. But while television certainly had a deleterious effect on some sports – county cricket being an obvious example – it transformed others such as showjumping, snooker and darts, which proved unexpectedly successful on the small screen. And public interest, certainly in terms of television coverage and newsprint, remained enormous. The winners of the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award, such as Jackie Stewart (1973), Virginia Wade (1977) and Sebastian Coe (1979), were immediately familiar and beloved figures; more controversial characters such as George Best, Geoffrey Boycott and Daley Thompson gave the tabloids plenty of material; and, thanks to television, overseas stars such as Pelé and Muhammad Ali loomed large in the popular consciousness. By some measures, indeed, this was a golden age for sport. Many of the leading lights came from outside England: in Billy Bremner, Danny McGrain and Kenny Dalglish, Scotland had footballers that their neighbours could only envy, while the Edinburgh swimmer David Wilkie not only won gold but broke the 200-metres world record at the Montreal Olympics. And in Wales, Carwyn James’s gloriously flamboyant rugby side not only set standards that have never been bettered, but became the supreme expression of Welsh pride in an era of growing national self-consciousness. Thanks to Barry John, Gareth Edwards, Phil Bennett and J. P. R. Williams, the red-shirted warriors could plausibly claim to be the pre-eminent British sporting team of the decade – although the footballers of Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, who won back-to-back European Cups between 1976 and 1980, might have disagreed.4
By now football had definitively displaced cricket as Britain’s national sport, its place entrenched in the television schedules by Match of the Day and The Big Match and in the newsagents by Football Monthly, Shoot and Match. Although it had originally been the game of the working-class North and Midlands, its popularity had long since filtered through class and regional barriers. Within political circles, Harold Wilson was a keen Huddersfield Town fan, Anthony Crosland never missed a Saturday edition of Match of the Day, and Edward Heath had supported Arsenal since boyhood, later recording his pride that their manager Arsène Wenger based his transfer policy on ‘my own principles of wide international co-operation’. He missed Arsenal’s victory in the FA Cup final of 1971, which secured their first domestic Double, because he was sailing Morning Cloud in the Seine Bay race – but he did secure Wembley tickets for his father and stepmother to watch Charlie George’s Double-winning rocket at first hand. ‘Unlike Harold Wilson five years earlier, when England won the World Cup,’ Heath rather tartly remarked in his memoirs, ‘I saw no justification for claiming the credit.’5
In 1966, Wilson’s keenness to associate himself with Ramsey’s World Cup-winning side had reached ludicrous proportions. Before the World Cup final, he had even asked the BBC if he could appear at half-time to deliver his expert analysis, and after the game he milked the applause at the post-match banquet. Four years later, Wilson took the World Cup in Mexico so seriously that it became a genuine consideration in his election planning: during a Cabinet strategy meeting, he even told his ministers that he ‘was now trying to find out at what time of day the match was played, because he thought that was a determining factor’. As Roy Jenkins later put it, Wilson had ‘a theory of almost mystical symbiosis between the fortunes of the Labour Party and the England football eleven’. And when England’s collapse against West Germany was followed a few days later by Labour’s election disappointment, Wilson’s theory seemed to be confirmed. The parallels were irresistible: the champions of 1966, apparently comfortably ahead, basking in sunny over-confidence, brought down at the last by the underestimated rivals they had beaten four years before. And just as many fans thought that England would have won if only their goalkeeper Gordon Banks had been fit, or if only Ramsey had not taken off Bobby Charlton, so many Labour supporters thought that Wilson would still be in Number 10 if only the election had been held a week earlier, or if only the economic picture had not been distorted by freakishly bad trade figures. In fact, the biggest factor was probably the revolt of the housewives, who cared more about rising prices than goal-line scrambles. But England’s defeat, like Wilson’s, had deeper roots than many supporters realized at the time – as became clear in the miserable years that followed.6
Not even a Prime Minister with Heath’s abysmal presentation skills would have wanted to associate himself with the England team during the early 1970s. Loyal to a fault, Sir Alf Ramsey preferred to rely on the players who had served him in the past rather than introduce new blood, and refused to alter his cautious, compact tactics. When England ran out in April 1972 for the first leg of their European Championship quarter-final against (yet again) West Germany, eight of Ramsey’s team had played in Mexico and five were survivors from 1966. Expectation turned to disaster, however, when the visitors recorded a comfortable 3–1 victory – a scoreline that actually flattered England. And perhaps more than any other sporting moment of the decade, it was this swaggering German victory on the sacred Wembley turf that summed up Britain’s wider economic and political decline. In football as in economic management and labour relations, it seemed, the old country had fallen behind its Continental rivals. The West Germans had reinvented their game since 1966, wrote Brian Glanville in the Sunday Times, adopting ‘a wonderfully flexible formation’ with ‘a high level of technique … flair and imagination’. But England had ‘never taken that leap for-ward’ – a diagnosis that might have been borrowed from an article comparing the two countries’ public transport systems, car industries or trade unions. The English players had been outclassed, agreed the Observer, their ‘cautious, joyless football’ years behind the times. ‘As is so often the case,’ wrote Peter Wilson in the Mirror, ‘we have been content to dwell in the past and rest complacently on past triumphs until events – and other nations – overtake and surpass us.’7
What really summed up the negative, introverted flavour of English football, however, was the second leg, played in West Berlin two weeks later. This time, Ramsey packed his team with defensive ball-winners and watched with grim satisfaction as they ground out a nil–nil draw. Played in driving rain, interrupted twenty-seven times by violent English fouls, the game seemed indelibly stamped with the spirit of national life in the strike-torn spring of 1972. Afterwards Ramsey’s players dismissed their opponents as ‘cry-babies’, but most observers were appalled by England’s brutal negativity. For the German media, England had betrayed their national reputation for fair play, while the British press was even more damning. England had played ‘cynically and, at times, viciously’, wrote a sorrowful Peter Batt in the Sun, while the Telegraph’s Donald Saunders recorded his admiration for the Germans’ self-control in taking ‘so much illegal punishment without retaliation’. ‘I felt embarrassed and ashamed by the Englishmen’s violent ugly methods,’ wrote Alan Hoby in the Sunday Express. And to Ramsey’s critics the game captured everything that was wrong with his approach to football. If England ‘should suddenly “come good” ’, the result would be ‘disastrous … because it would once again assert Ramsey’s values as the ideal’, argued Foul!, the first football fanzine, produced at the end of 1972 by two Cambridge students. ‘The whole underlying philosophy of Ramseyism must go when its founder does: the sooner the better.’8
But the rot went much deeper than the insecurities of Sir Alf Ramsey, as the Centenary FA Cup Final, scheduled between England’s two games against West Germany, proved only too well. Taking place exactly a hundred years after the Wanderers had beaten the Royal Engineers, it was supposed to be a celebration of English football, with representatives of past winners set to parade around Wembley and the Queen on hand to present the trophy. On paper, the match seemed a mouth-watering clash pitting the previous year’s Double-winners, Arsenal, against Don Revie’s Leeds United, the most consistently successful team in the land. In reality, it began with a bad foul after just five seconds, was marred by violent tackles throughout, and was a thoroughly drab and miserable occasion. Yet it could hardly have come as a surprise to anyone who regularly watched the national game. Despite the allure of the BBC’s highlights show Match of the Day, the everyday reality was often negative, crude, over-aggressive football. In 1962, Alf Ramsey’s supposedly dour Ipswich Town had won the First Division by scoring 93 goals in 42 games. Yet in 1972 Brian Clough’s supposedly attacking Derby County won the title with just 69 goals. And Derby’s triumph was symptomatic of a game in which goals were ever more scarce. Between 1964 and 1974, as managers adopted increasingly defensive tactics, the average number of goals scored in Division One fell by 30 per cent. ‘In England,’ the former Manchester City striker Rodney Marsh told an American audience in 1979, ‘soccer is a grey game played by grey people on grey days.’9
English football in the 1970s was not all doom and gloom. For one thing, it was intensely, unpredictably competitive: between 1970 and 1981, seven different clubs won the league title, while ten different clubs won the FA Cup. That Sunderland, Southampton and West Ham won the Cup from the Second Division speaks volumes about the relative egalitarianism of English football in an age before gigantic television revenues. Meanwhile, English clubs were extraordinarily successful in Europe, their power and physicality proving too much for Continental opponents. Between 1968 and 1973, English teams won the UEFA Cup (or the Fairs Cup, as it was originally known) six years in a row, while between 1977 and 1984 they brought home the European Cup seven times in eight years. Scottish clubs were less successful: Celtic reached the European Cup final in 1970, losing to Feyenoord, while Rangers won the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1972. But as many Scottish fans were quick to point out, most of their best players plied their trade south of the border: indeed, without the contributions of Billy Bremner, Peter Lorimer, Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness, John Robertson and Archie Gemmill, Leeds, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest would never have enjoyed such outstanding success.
For the young men who made their living playing football, the rewards were greater than ever. Thanks to Jimmy Hill and the Professional Footballers’ Association, the maximum wage had been outlawed in 1961, and since then footballers’ wages had steadily risen to match their celebrity status. When Hunter Davies spent the 1971–2 season with Tottenham Hotspur, he estimated that an established first-team player earned about £10,000 a year (perhaps £100,000 in today’s money). Tottenham, however, were a notably rich and glamorous club, and most footballers earned rather less. The journalist Duncan Hamilton, who followed Nottingham Forest during their Clough years, reckoned that a typical footballer in the late 1970s earned £135 a week, almost double the average working man’s wage. It was not enough to catapult them into the ranks of the super-rich, but it did mean that footballers enjoyed comforts their working-class parents could barely have imagined. And when the Tottenham players filled in Davies’s questionnaires, the results were highly illuminating. Many already had business interests outside the game, owning pubs and garages, and they drove expensive cars: Martin Peters a Jaguar, Martin Chivers a Zodiac, Mike England a Capri, Joe Kinnear an MGB GT. They lived in large new mock-Georgian houses in Surrey and Hertfordshire, took their holidays in Majorca, Malta and Portugal, and spent their free time playing middle-class games like golf and tennis. Asked how they voted, eight said Conservative and only three Labour, with six not interested. Footballers were clearly proud of their newfound wealth and status, and in magazines like Shoot they were held up as exemplars of the new world of working-class affluence. So youthful readers were treated to photo-spreads of Mick Mills in tight tartan shorts mowing his suburban lawn, Geoff Hurst posing in a floral shirt ‘on the terrace of his luxurious home in Chigwell, Essex’, Jimmy Greenhoff cleaning ‘the family’s gleaming four-door Rover saloon’, or an extravagantly permed Kevin Keegan showing off his ‘country retreat’ in North Wales. At times these articles seemed more interested in the appliances than their owners: a shot of Keegan mowing the lawn, for example, boasted a caption – ‘Keeping my lawn in trim is dead easy, thanks to my high-speed motor mower’ – that might have been an advertising man’s dream. Beneath the consumerist pornography, however, old attitudes died hard: a picture of Keegan embracing his future wife carried the caption: ‘A special hug for girlfriend Jean, who’s made curtains and helped decorate the place. She’s also cooked some smashing meals.’10
No club captured the tension between old and new better than the winners of the Centenary Cup Final and champions of 1969 and 1974, Leeds United. Once an obscure Second Division side, the team of Bremner, Lorimer, Giles and Hunter dominated English football like no other team in the early 1970s. Almost every season ended with them in pursuit of honours, yet they suffered from incredible bad luck, exacerbated, some said, by their over-competitiveness and insecurity. Between 1965 and 1975, Leeds were First Division runners-up five times, lost three FA Cup finals and two semi-finals, and lost a Fairs Cup final, a Cup Winners’ Cup final and a European Cup final. Sometimes they were the victims of incompetent or crooked refereeing: in the 1972 Cup Winners’ Cup final, for example, the Greek referee turned down several obvious penalties and was later alleged to have taken money from Leeds’s opponents, AC Milan, while the referee in the 1975 European Cup final turned down yet another clear penalty and disallowed a perfectly good goal. But Leeds were also the victims of their own success. In the late spring of 1970, they were heavily favoured to secure an unprecedented treble of League, Cup and European Cup, yet were forced to play an exhausting nine games in twenty-two days and lost all three. Like Sisyphus, wrote Geoffrey Green, they had ‘pushed three boulders almost to the top of three mountains, and are now left to see them all back in the dark of the valley’. A year later, two points clear with four games left, they controversially lost at home to West Bromwich Albion after the referee allowed a blatantly offside goal, and promptly collapsed in the title race. And in 1972, having already won the Cup, their shattered players were forced to play their final league game just two days later. Victory would have secured the Double; once again, they managed to lose to Wolves, again in controversial circumstances. ‘In this case injustice was not only done but seen to be done by everyone in a 53,000 gathering except the referee and the linesman,’ Green wrote. ‘Leeds are clearly not the darlings of the gods.’11
Since the fates so clearly had it in for Leeds’s players, they might have been expected to benefit from a tide of public sympathy. Yet most football supporters outside Yorkshire loathed them. Even in an age of brutal tackling and posturing hard-men, Don Revie’s side were regarded as ruthlessly unsporting, their sheer will to win often taking them over the boundaries recognized by fellow professionals. ‘Don Revie’s so-called family had more in keeping with the Mafia than Mothercare,’ his rival Brian Clough once remarked. The veteran forward Jimmy Greaves recalled that he had ‘the bruises on my memory’ to remind him that playing Leeds was like trying to cross a minefield, and in the summer of 1973 the Football Association threatened them with a suspended £3,000 fine for ‘persistent misconduct on the field of play’. Clough even claimed that Leeds should be relegated as a punishment for being the ‘dirtiest club in Britain’, a remark that would return to haunt him when he briefly succeeded Revie at Elland Road a year later. And although Revie’s players cleaned up their act and played with greater freedom in their 1973–4 title-winning campaign, they never captured the neutrals’ hearts. Even Revie admitted that his early success had been based on ‘a rather defensive, physical style which made us probably the hardest team to beat in the League … Once we got a goal I would light a cigar, sit back on the trainers’ bench and enjoy the rest of the game, secure in the knowledge that it would need a minor miracle for the other side to equalise.’ Perhaps, he went on, ‘we did not exactly endear ourselves to the soccer purists … but I had to be realistic’.12
Revie called it realism; others, however, saw it as a kind of neurotic insecurity, rooted in the Leeds manager’s introverted psyche. In his classic book The Football Man (1968), Arthur Hopcraft described Revie as ‘a big, flat-fronted man with an outdoors face as though he lives permanently in a keen wind’. It was a face that seemed to be wearing a permanent frown, as if Revie were constantly contemplating his own misfortune. When television pictures caught the Leeds manager glowering from the dugout in his supposedly lucky blue suit and sheepskin jacket, he looked like a man out of time, crippled by self-doubt, unable to shake off the fear of defeat. His superstitions were legendary. Not only did he pray on his knees every night, he arranged for a minister from Knaresborough to visit the players every week, carried a little statue of St John of the Cross in his blue suit pocket, took a rabbit’s foot into the dugout, and made exactly the same walk to a nearby set of traffic lights before every home game, convinced that this would guarantee good luck. On the other hand, he regarded all feathered creatures as unlucky, banishing the club’s peacock emblem from his players’ shirts. Even as manager of England in the mid-1970s, he took football’s spiritual side – such as it was – painfully seriously. ‘I believe it will help you if you pray every night before you go to sleep,’ he told his charges during an early meeting, ‘and ask God to help you become better players.’13
Revie’s fear of failure was rooted in the difficult circumstances of his boyhood. To the young footballers plying their trade in the mid-1970s, with their expensive cars parked outside their neat suburban homes, the Hungry Thirties seemed like ancient history. For Revie, however, they had left a mark that would never fade. Born in 1927 and brought up in a little terraced house in working-class Middlesbrough, he vividly remembered the privations of the Depression, when his father, a joiner, had spent years out of work. Middlesbrough in the 1930s was not a particularly happy place to grow up: J. B. Priestley memorably called it ‘a dismal town, even with beer and football’, the twin obsessions of many local men. And Revie’s childhood was hardly the warm working-class upbringing of nostalgic stereotypes. When he was 12, his mother died of cancer, and four years later he moved to Leicester as an apprentice footballer. There he was known as a reserved, serious lad who never drank, never smoked and worked tirelessly to better himself. As a teenager, he had effectively missed out on family life; as a manager decades later, he was obsessed with turning Leeds into a surrogate family, where his players could feel loved. The players ‘were his children … and their children his grandchildren’, one friend said later. ‘Junior players are taught carefully about bank accounts, table manners and sex,’ reported Arthur Hopcraft. ‘There are regular homilies about keeping their hair short and their clothes smart and not getting caught up with loose girls.’ Many other managers did the same thing; none, however, did it more passionately than Revie. He even called himself ‘the head of the family’, inadvertently earning the nickname ‘The Godfather’.14
In his cultural conservatism, his fear of poverty, his respect for family values and his obsession with providing for his ‘children’, Revie reflected the values of a generation who could never quite bring themselves to trust in the abundance of the affluent society. Determined to re-create the family life he had never had, he invited his wife’s mother, uncles and aunts to live in their large house, Three Chimneys, in middle-class north Leeds, while his son Duncan was sent to boarding school at Repton, something that would have seemed impossible when Revie was growing up. At the time, his obsession with money earned him the nickname ‘Don Readies’, while wags pointed out that his name was an anagram of the phrase envie d’or, the love of gold. Even when Revie was a player, friends had remarked on his financial ambition: the sign of success, he allegedly told one teammate, was ‘how much you have got in the bank’. In the late 1970s, old enemies condemned him as greedy. But the key factor was surely not avarice but anxiety. Like many people who had known genuine poverty, Revie never felt satisfied, even once he had become a relatively rich man. And in many ways, despite his obvious conservatism, he was a pioneer. In the early 1970s his innovations at Leeds, from the players’ choreographed salute to their personalized tracksuits and numbered sock-tags, were derided as mercenary gimmicks. Thirty years later, however, it was clear that they were simply ahead of their time.15
By an uncanny coincidence, Revie’s fiercest rival and successor as Leeds manager was another Middlesbrough boy, born a few streets away in a nondescript council house in 1935, who had also played for Sunderland and England. Brian Clough’s confidant Duncan Hamilton recorded that he ‘hated Revie’, and their animosity lit up television screens and tabloid back pages throughout the first half of the 1970s. Yet although they were often seen as direct opposites – Clough the flamboyant manager of upstart Derby, Revie the grim mastermind behind ruthless Leeds – they had a great deal in common. Clough was just eight years younger than Revie, although his rebellious temperament, such a stark contrast with the older man’s conservatism, made the gap seem much wider. Like Revie, he had grown up in poverty. Like Revie, he was constantly agitating for pay rises. Like Revie, he was ultimately accused of crossing the line between financial shrewdness and outright corruption. Clough ‘was obsessed with money’, Duncan Hamilton wrote, ‘as if he feared he might wake up one morning and find himself a pauper again … He would read out to me the salaries of other people – players, managers, pop and film stars, politicians – if he came across them in a newspaper.’ This was not ‘purely greed’, Hamilton thought, but ‘a form of self-protection’. For as Clough once told him, ‘the only people who aren’t obsessed with money are those who have got more than enough of it’. These were the values not only of football managers born in the 1920s and 1930s, but of millions of newly affluent Britons who had broken out of working-class poverty in the decades after the war. They were values that helped to drive the new conservatism from the mid-1970s onwards, but they also inspired much of the trade union militancy of the period: the desperate desire to fight off the encroaching forces of inflation and unemployment, to cling on to the hard-won indicators of status, in a never-ending struggle against social and economic insecurity.16
In many ways, Clough’s public persona, like Revie’s, was a way of banishing the anxieties rooted in their shared background. The difference was that Clough’s personality – boastful, bombastic, witty and loquacious – was far better suited to the populist cultural climate of the 1970s, which is why he became such a star on television. At the time, many chose to overlook his more conservative opinions: his highly autocratic approach to management, his obsession with players’ discipline, even his contempt for long hair, sportswomen and foreigners. What shone through was his sheer rebelliousness, from his outspoken attack on Juventus after they fraudulently knocked Derby out of Europe in 1973 (‘cheating fucking Italian bastards’) to his impulsive resignation later that year – a mistake, he later admitted, provoked by Derby’s efforts to stop him hurling opinions around on television.17
In this respect, Clough was the managerial equivalent of that other football folk hero of the early 1970s, Manchester United’s Northern Irish winger George Best, loved as much for his impish misbehaviour as for his good looks and stunning skill. Best, however, was clearly past his prime, having spectacularly failed to handle his sudden ascent to stardom. In 1968, Arthur Hopcraft had acutely observed that he was ‘not fundamentally ostentatious; he is merely young, popular and rich by lower-middle-class standards’. It was only because footballers had until recently been paid like ‘factory helots’, Hopcraft thought, ‘that Best and his contemporaries look so excessively and immodestly affluent’. But when he revised his book three years later, his verdict had changed. Best’s name, he wrote in the updated edition, was now synonymous with ‘contempt for authority and heedless petulance’. His problem was not money; it was a terrible combination of celebrity, alcoholism and sheer self-indulgence, through which Best had ‘come to represent almost every extreme in the modern footballer’s lifestyle’.18
Although Best lived in a house worth £30,000 and made at least £25,000 a year, stratospheric earnings even by professional sportsmen’s standards, his effectiveness and application were in rapid decline. In January 1972, after he had disappeared from Manchester United’s training ground for an entire week, he was dropped from the team for the first time anyone could remember. The fact that the news made the front page of The Times spoke volumes about Best’s celebrity status; a few days later, when the club ordered him to move back into digs with his boyhood landlady, the story again made the front page. With grim inevitability the decline continued. In May 1972, dropped by Northern Ireland after missing training (front-page news again), Best fled to Marbella and sold the story of his ‘retirement’ to the Mirror for £5,000, which he promptly invested in brandy-and-cokes for himself and his cronies. Although he subsequently returned to Old Trafford, he was manifestly out of control, and on New Year’s Day 1974 he played his final game for Manchester United. When he turned up for the next game, said the club’s manager Tommy Docherty, ‘he was standing there pissed out of his mind and with a young lady’. That was the end: told he was no longer wanted, Best remained in the players’ lounge, drinking tea and watching the horseracing on television. At the end of the season, United were relegated. England’s most famous club would recover, but for the man once known as the Fifth Beatle, an embodiment of the youth and swagger of the 1960s, there remained only the sad decline into drunkenness, disease and degradation.19
The extraordinarily public nature of Best’s collapse would have been inconceivable a few years before, when the game was still governed by the maximum wage and footballers were not yet treated like teenage pop idols. But while Best’s talent and fame set him apart from his contemporaries, his was not an especially unusual story. Footballers had always drunk heavily, reflecting broader working-class habits. What was different in the early 1970s was not just the obsessive interest of the media, but the opportunities open to footballers thanks to their vastly increased spending power. To young men brought up in a world of increasing affluence, irreverence and individualism, the cautious, deferential values of Alf Ramsey and Don Revie seemed laughably old-fashioned. Attempting to motivate the talented but inconsistent Rodney Marsh before an England game in 1973, Ramsey warned him that he had ‘to work harder’, and that ‘if you don’t, I’m going to pull you off at half-time’. ‘Christ,’ Marsh replied under his breath. ‘At Manchester City all we get at half-time is a cup of tea and an orange.’ It was a story he told and retold in later years with deepening relish, but as the critic D. J. Taylor remarks, it marked a wide ‘symbolic divide’ between the serious-minded, intensely patriotic Ramsey ‘and a new breed of mavericks more interested in soccer’s rewards than some of its obligations’. It is almost impossible to imagine any of the players of the 1950s and 1960s speaking to Ramsey in such a way. But then it is also impossible to imagine them earning £15,000 a year in wages and another £15,000 in boot endorsements, deodorant adverts and personal appearance fees, as Marsh did in the early 1970s, or driving a Lotus Europa whose number plate appropriately contained the letters E, G and O.20
Best and Marsh were typical examples of a new breed of football stars in the early 1970s, self-styled entertainers who seemed more interested in making money and modelling clothes than in knuckling down, playing for their country and winning trophies. It is a myth that they were persistently overlooked by the England management: Sheffield United’s playmaker Tony Currie, for example, won seventeen caps, played in the dramatic draw with Poland in October 1973, and might have won more caps had he not been crippled by injuries. But the careers of other talented players – not just Marsh, but Stan Bowles, Peter Osgood, Alan Hudson, Charlie George and Frank Worthington – were conspicuous for their sense of waste and disappointment. In an era when young men were much less likely to take orders from their seniors, they were unable to cope with the temptations of affluence and the pressures of celebrity. Alan Hudson, for example, broke into the England team in March 1975, played superbly against West Germany, and then pressed the self-destruct button by drinking heavily after an Under-23 game in Hungary, defying a direct warning from the England manager. But Hudson’s intake of vodka, brandy and beer was just as illustrative of football’s new affluence as was Frank Worthington’s Jason King-style outfit when he arrived for his first trip abroad with England: a lime-green velvet jacket, a red silk shirt, leather trousers and high-heeled cowboy boots. When Ramsey caught sight of him, he turned pale with shock. His assistant Harold Shepherdson insisted that the young man walking towards them could not possibly be Worthington, because no young England player would ever turn up in such garish attire. But Shepherdson had been born during the First World War. Like many of his generation, he no longer understood how affluent young men thought and behaved.21
During the 1960s, Manchester United had been the most glamorous sporting institution in the country, its romantic appeal strengthened by the terrible Munich air disaster and the heart-warming story of Sir Matt Busby’s long march from the brink of death to capture the European Cup. By the summer of 1974, however, Britain’s best-supported club found itself in desperate straits. Since Busby’s retirement, United had already sacked two promising young managers, and although the voluble Scot Tommy Docherty promised to restore the club’s fortunes, George Best’s outrageous misbehaviour had left a devastating hole in the team’s morale. With two games of the season left, United teetered on the brink of the unthinkable: relegation to the Second Division. And as luck would have it, their last home game, on 27 April, was against their high-flying neighbours, Manchester City – their attack now led by the Scottish striker Denis Law, formerly the embodiment of United’s attacking flair during the Busby years.
That it was Law who effectively condemned United to relegation, his back-heeled finish trickling into the net with only minutes remaining, seemed almost predictable. But it was what happened next that crowned Old Trafford’s day of shame. ‘Immediately the crowd were on the pitch,’ wrote Tom Freeman in The Times, ‘not from the Stretford End, where the United supporters were tightly packed, but from the more thinly populated opposite end. Seconds later they were joined by the crowds flooding on from the Stretford End.’ With the players dashing for the safety of the tunnel, the game was halted; then, a few minutes later, after the pitch had been cleared, it restarted. But within moments the referee stopped it again, ‘with the crowds once more surging onto the field, fights breaking out all over the terraces, and one goal partly obscured by smoke from a fire’.
Then came what Freeman described as ‘the saddest moment’ of the debacle, as the amplified voice of Sir Matt Busby echoed across the pitch, begging the invaders to disperse. ‘For the sake of the club,’ he said desperately, but they took no notice. ‘Here was a man who had made Manchester United one of the greatest club sides in the world, and who had led them to a series of unprecedented triumphs’, Freeman wrote sadly. ‘Now, his team already doomed to second division football, he was faced with the additional ignominy of appealing to thousands of hooligans to avoid the disgrace of having the match abandoned and the ground closed for a long period next season.’ But it was no good; in the end, the match was abandoned. ‘Most of us left Old Trafford’, Freeman concluded, ‘with a feeling of despair, not only for the future of Manchester United, but the future of football itself. For let us face it. The abandonment at Old Trafford was just another example of the way the mobs can influence the outcome of matches these days.’22
One of the most depressing things about what had happened at Old Trafford was that nobody was surprised. Unlike many clubs, Manchester United commanded a considerable travelling following, nicknamed the ‘Red Army’ or ‘Stretford Enders’, including hundreds of young working-class fans from small towns and suburbs whose own local teams could not compete with United’s prestige. ‘They are mainly unskilled or unemployed and migrant young workers, social misfits, and plain soccer fanatics,’ two academics wrote rather dismissively in the early 1970s, noting that they were ‘as proud of the image they have foisted on the rest of youth as being “the best fighters in the land” as they are of following a famous team’. By this point the Red Army already had an unenviable reputation for causing trouble, especially when they visited the capital. When United played Arsenal in the spring of 1972, a thousand fans with red scarves marched north from Kings Cross and ‘broke windows, smashed up cars, threw rocks and swore at passers-by’. By nightfall, the academics wrote, ‘the Stretford End had not only “taken” the North Bank, but the whole of this part of North London’, an achievement that won them yet more admiration from disaffected youngsters on London’s estates.23
As the team’s fortunes deteriorated, so did the behaviour of its fans. By May 1974 the Mirror had placed the Stretford Enders at the top of its ‘League of Violence’, naming United as ‘the team whose visit is most dreaded’. After the pitch invasion that greeted the team’s relegation, the club erected a massive steel fence across the Stretford End; unfortunately, this only added to the ‘prestige’ of United’s hooligans. The fence had made the Stretford End ‘a kind of academy of violence, where promising young fans can study the arts of intimidation’, reported the Observer in December 1974. ‘It resembles the sort of cage, formidable and expensive, that is put up by a zoo to contain the animals it needs but slightly fears. Its effect has been to make the Stretford terraces even more exclusive and to turn the occupants into an elite.’24
The comparison with a zoo was not unfair: the fans themselves used to chant ‘We Hate Humans’. And a year later, as Tommy Docherty’s revitalized side took the Second Division by storm, so the Stretford Enders conducted a campaign of terror across provincial England and Wales. In September, hundreds of extra policemen had to be drafted in to keep the peace when United visited Cardiff. In January 1975, enraged supporters smashed shop windows and overturned cars after their team’s defeat to Norwich; in April, they caused yet more trouble during a game away at Notts County. And after Manchester United won promotion to the First Division, the fans celebrated in predictable style. In their very first match, away at Wolverhampton, fourteen people were stabbed, local businesses suffered thousands of pounds’ worth of damage, and eighty-six United supporters were arrested after an afternoon of mayhem. ‘We have seen nothing quite like it,’ a West Midlands police spokesman said sadly. ‘It must have been bottling up inside them all through the long, hot summer.’25
Football grounds were far from pleasant places to be in the 1970s. ‘They are hideously uncomfortable,’ wrote Arthur Hopcraft. ‘The steps are as greasy as a school playground lavatory in the rain. The air is rancid with beer and onions and belching and worse. The language is a gross purple of obscenity.’ When the crowd surged after a shot, he noted, ‘a man or boy, and sometimes a girl, can be lifted off the ground in the crush … and dangled about for minutes on end, perhaps never getting back to within four or five steps of the spot from which the monster made its bite’. In these conditions, it was a miracle that more people were not badly injured or killed. But disaster was always lurking in the shadows. At Ibrox in January 1971, sixty-six Rangers fans, many of them children, were crushed to death when barriers collapsed after the Old Firm derby. At the time there were plenty of fine words from FA officials and Cabinet ministers about the need for more safety measures. But as the decade progressed, with clubs’ revenue threatened by inflation and falling attendances, it became clear that this was just talk. Most grounds were grim, dilapidated places, the paint peeling, the stands rusting, the terraces stained with urine, rainwater and even the blood of those supporters caught up in the game’s growing culture of violence. When Reginald Maudling told clubs that they had a ‘right and duty’ to keep troublemakers out of their grounds, it was symptomatic of the general defeatism that the Arsenal secretary claimed it would be ‘quite impracticable’ to do so. ‘Football wasn’t just out of kilter with fashion,’ the journalist Duncan Hamilton wrote later. ‘It was regarded as faintly repellent, like a sour smell,’ a crude, primitive pastime played by long-haired yobs and watched by the dregs of society, a game whose supporters were more likely to end up with a knife between the ribs than to see a genuinely exciting sporting occasion.26
In later years, football hooliganism was sometimes associated, quite wrongly, with Thatcherism. In fact, it had first become a major public concern during the 1960s, the last years of buoyant growth and full employment. Even before the 1966 World Cup there were fears of crowd trouble, with stories describing Saturday afternoons ‘somewhere between the storming of the Bastille and a civil rights march in Alabama’, and accounts of court cases in which skinny youths from Liverpool or Manchester pleaded guilty to possession of flick-knives or kicking policemen. Violence was particularly common at games in London, partly because the capital had eleven league clubs, but also because its transport links made it easy for visiting fans to attend games but hard for the authorities to police them. And by the end of the 1960s many of the familiar ingredients of football hooliganism were already present, including the phenomenon of end-taking, which involved visiting fans fighting for control of the ends usually reserved for the keenest home supporters. In January 1970, for example, sixty-one people ended up in hospital, fourteen of them with serious injuries, when Leeds fans ‘took’ Stoke City, and a few months later the FA advised clubs to install small fenced ‘pens’ to control visiting fans.27
Perhaps the decisive moment in public perceptions of football violence came in September 1969. Returning from Derby, where their team had been thrashed 5–0, five hundred Tottenham fans ran amok on their special train, smashing up fixtures and fittings, hurling furniture out of the windows and repeatedly pulling on the emergency cord, which automatically triggered the brake and risked causing a crash. By the time the train had reached Bedfordshire, the driver had had enough. Passing through the village of Flitwick, he slowed the train to a halt and refused to move until the fans were kicked off. Scores of local police rushed to the scene and managed to force the fans out of the carriages, but then they somehow lost control. The next thing anybody knew, hundreds of fans were off on what a reporter called ‘a stone-throwing spree, terrorizing villages, smashing windows, and attacking cars’, as though the Visigoths had descended on rural Bedfordshire. As luck would have it, many residents were at a wine-and-cheese party in Flitwick’s village hall; alarmed by the noise, they rushed out to find themselves in a re-enactment of the sack of Rome. Some took refuge in the local pub while the battle raged outside; others tried to defend their homes, not unlike Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Straw Dogs. Although the police finally regained control, the evening sent a powerful message that ‘hooliganism was quite capable of moving into anyone’s back garden’. The government immediately announced new measures to fight disorder, and one newspaper even ran the headline ‘Home Office Acts To End Football Hooliganism’. But hooliganism was far from beaten, and the Battle of Flitwick was just a taste of the horrors to come.28
In the 1970s and 1980s, football hooliganism became a staple topic of Sunday supplement journalism and second-rate sociological studies. Some writers, treating football fans like some bizarre Amazonian tribe, devised elaborate anthropological classifications, tracing the hooligan’s ‘career development’ from 11-year-old ‘Novice’ to adolescent ‘Rowdy’ and hard-case ‘Nutter’. In fact, even during the worst years of hooliganism the common stereotypes were misleading: most fans were not hooligans, while most violence was disorganized, drunken and largely symbolic. And yet, behind all the sociological waffle about rituals and subcultures, hundreds of people were seriously hurt and some lost their lives. The disasters at Heysel and Hillsborough in the 1980s were often blamed on police and officials, but they would never have happened without the climate of fear and violence created by hooliganism. Indeed, the surprising thing is that more people were not killed, especially given the kinds of weapons being taken to games. On Arsenal’s North Bank, some fans carried a terrifying array of hardware, ‘from meat-cleavers and sharpened combs to knuckle-dusters studded with broken razor blades’. And during Hunter Davies’s season with Tottenham, one game was nearly abandoned when steel staples were fired at a visiting goalkeeper from a catapult.29
Indeed, these weapons were not just for show. On Saturday, 24 August 1974, English football recorded its first murder, when 18-year-old Kevin Olsson was stabbed to death during Blackpool’s clash with Bolton. At the same game, two Bolton fans – neither the killer – were arrested for carrying knives, while another was fined for carrying a 4-foot sharpened wooden stake. In Manchester, another fan was arrested for wielding a carving knife during a fight at Piccadilly station. Yet there was no shortage of commentators who insisted that hooligans should be pitied rather than punished. ‘The malaise is not in the adolescent, whose male aggression is innate and biologically healthy, but in our urban society which fails to provide a socially advantageous outlet for a natural force,’ one John Cole of Oxford wrote to The Times. Hooligans would be forced to misbehave, he explained, until society met ‘their innate biological needs for a gang, a territory and a goal that they can achieve’. Not unpredictably, he was an Anglican vicar.30
For observers on the political right, football hooliganism, like other social ills, was ultimately a product of the permissive society, its perpetrators mollycoddled by liberal parents, progressive teachers and profligate politicians. Football violence, Norman Tebbit once said, was a result of ‘the era and attitudes of post-war funk’. But this explanation had serious problems. Since most hooligans were unskilled or unemployed manual workers – labourers, bouncers, bricklayers, factory workers and so on – they were precisely those people least likely to have grown up with liberal, indulgent parents, while their own values were decidedly non-permissive. What was more, hooliganism had a very long history. ‘Across the centuries,’ wrote the historian Geoffrey Pearson in 1983, ‘we have seen the same rituals of territorial dominance, trials of strength, gang fights, mockery towards elders and authorities, and antagonism towards “outsiders” as typical focuses for youthful energy and aggressive mischief.’ The ‘modern football rowdy’, he thought, was simply ‘a reincarnation of the unruly apprentice, or the late Victorian “Hooligan” ’, or even the ‘hostile factions at the theatres and hippodromes in Byzantine Rome and Constantinople’. Even in the supposedly staid and orderly 1950s, football violence was not unknown. ‘Trains, carrying rampaging young fans, would end their journeys with windows broken, upholstery smashed, lavatory fittings broken, the carriages running with beer and crunching underfoot with broken glass like gravel,’ wrote Arthur Hopcraft – a vision of Harold Macmillan’s Britain very different from the cosy caricatures becoming popular two decades later.31
On the left and in academic circles, a popular explanation was that football hooliganism was a moral panic fuelled by the press, who had ‘invented hooliganism as a “social problem” ’ by drawing attention to ‘relatively minor acts of rowdyism’. It is certainly true that from about 1967 onwards, the popular newspapers, fighting desperately for circulation in an increasingly competitive market, adopted a much more sensationalist attitude to football violence, with the Sun and Mirror leading the way in banner headlines and military metaphors. ‘Thugs’ and ‘louts’ were regularly ‘marching to war’, ‘on the warpath’ or ‘preparing for battle’, while potentially troublesome matches were previewed with almost gleeful pessimism. Before one game in November 1967, for example, the Mirror reported that ‘Oldham’s young fans have already been told to stand by for major trouble from Stockport supporters when the clubs meet’ – which inevitably meant that fans arrived at the game spoiling for a fight. And by September 1974 the Mail, like the Mirror, was running a ‘Thugs’ League’, which was supposed to shame clubs into cleaning up their act but probably had the opposite effect. ‘Chelsea, London’s soccer violence champions for two years running, are in line to land the hat-trick,’ one report began, noting that they ‘share the lead with West Ham in Scotland Yard’s league of violence’. On occasions the press even reported hooligan clashes as though they, not the action on the pitch, were the real sporting story: when Manchester United visited Cardiff in September 1974, previews of ‘Cardiff v United’ referred to the violence, not the football. Papers even had their favourite villains, with the hated Stretford Enders at the foot of the list. When fighting broke out at the West Ham–Manchester United game in October 1975, the press cast West Ham’s hooligans as ‘avenging angels’ dealing out a hard lesson. ‘The Day The Terrace Terrors Were Hunted Like Animals and Hammered!’ roared the Sun’s triumphant headline.32
Blaming the press for ‘inventing’ hooliganism, though, is not very convincing. As the historian Richard Holt points out, interviews with hooligans provided no evidence that they had learned ‘how to behave from the papers’. And the common academic claim that ‘alarmist’ columnists ‘distorted the scale and seriousness of the incidents’ seems downright deluded given how many people were seriously hurt at football matches. The anthropologist Desmond Morris even insisted that hooliganism was nothing more than ‘ritual rudeness’ with ‘little or no bloodletting’, which would have come as scant consolation to the families of those injured, blinded or killed, or to the innocent passers-by caught up in the fighting. And the other fashionable explanations of the 1970s and 1980s are equally unsatisfying. Left-wing commentators often liked to quote the FA secretary Ted Croker’s remark that the troublemakers were not football’s hooligans, but Mrs Thatcher’s hooligans, the implication being that their violence flowed from working-class unemployment and inner-city decline. But this is clearly nonsense. Many hooligans came from small towns and suburbs, not big cities, while violence first became a major social problem during an era of almost full employment. Even in the Thatcher years, many hooligans came from the booming South-east of England and had steady jobs: a Thames Television survey of 140 members of West Ham’s ‘Inter City Firm’ found four chefs, three electricians, three clothes-makers, six motor mechanics, two solicitors’ clerks, a landscape gardener and an insurance underwriter – people for whom violence was hardly some kind of protest against modern economic conditions.
Hooligans themselves often reacted with horror and contempt when they came across academic arguments that their actions were a form of insurgency against bourgeois ideology. ‘All we are going for is a good game of football; a good punch up and a good kick up,’ one bemused fan told an interviewer from the BBC’s Panorama. And after watching a panel of self-styled experts on a television show in the early 1970s, one young Arsenal fan put it very nicely. ‘Well, there was this geezer sitting there who thought he knew all about it, but he didn’t know nothing if you ask me,’ he said (and it would be fun to know which academic expert he had in mind). ‘He was going on about soccer hooligans and how they carry on down the ends, and he says, well, it’s all because they don’t like the middle classes taking over the game.’ But the Arsenal fan was having none of it. ‘Anybody who ever been down the North Bank’ll tell you they don’t give a sod for all the students and all the other wankers and pooftas that turn up,’ he said. ‘They never go down the end anyway, they’re too scared. All the North Bank care about is their team and the other end and that’s all there is to it.’33
The obvious explanation for the surge in football hooliganism in the early 1970s is very simple. As the heirs to a long tradition of adolescent gangs, tribal aggression and general mischief-making, football crowds had always had the potential for violence. Until the 1960s, however, this potential was contained by the fact that there were very few away fans and, crucially, that football crowds contained thousands of older men, including the fathers and grandfathers of the youngsters present. Fans went to games in family, neighbourhood or factory groups, standing beside people they knew, with youthful high jinks effectively controlled by married men who had no desire to get involved in a mass punch-up. Interviewed in the 1980s, fans who remembered those days often pointed out that while there was plenty of banter and bad language, teenagers who stepped out of line were given ‘a bloody good hiding’ by their fathers. But once working-class supporters began to share in the fruits of affluence, the composition of the crowds changed. Married men stayed at home, tinkering with their cars, taking their wives shopping, or going out for drives and day-trips, instead of automatically going to the match. Between the early 1950s and the early 1980s, football attendances fell by half, mirroring similar declines in pubs, churches, music halls and cinemas. Remaining older fans moved to the seats, leaving the cheaper terraces – the ‘ends’ – to young, unskilled manual workers who had nobody to supervise them. And as more fans travelled to away games, the process of segregation became self-reinforcing. Older men stayed away from areas where there might be trouble; young men took over and began to enjoy the violence for its own sake, a ritualized display of masculine aggression that began to eat into the game like a cancer. It was not poverty that opened the door to hooliganism; it was affluence.34
By 1975 it was obvious to all but a handful of sociologists that football hooliganism was out of control. Copying the Stretford Enders, other fans were now treating away games as an opportunity to run amok in railway stations, town centres and motorway service stations. Even the Cup Final was no longer sacred: after West Ham’s victory over Fulham, celebrating fans invaded the pitch and tried to taunt their disappointed rivals into a fight. But worse was to come a few months later, when the 1975–6 season opened amid scenes of medieval savagery. The opening day alone saw Manchester United fans clashing with police in Wolverhampton, Nottingham Forest and Plymouth Argyle fans fighting on the pitch (undeterred by Brian Clough, who ran on to restrain them), and Sheffield United fans rampaging down the Southend seafront. But it was the last Saturday of August that marked the nadir. When Chelsea went three goals down in their Second Division game at Luton, enraged fans invaded the pitch, attacking players and officials, punching the Luton goalkeeper to the ground, and leaving one steward with a broken nose and another nursing stab wounds. After the final whistle, they ran wild in the streets, vandalizing cars and shops; on the journey home to St Pancras, they burned out one railway carriage, threw seats and toilet fittings out onto the track, and forced the guard to lock himself in to protect the mail. On the same day, fifty Manchester United fans were arrested after fighting broke out in Stoke, sixty Rangers fans were arrested outside Ibrox, and dozens of Liverpool supporters – giving the lie to their tiresome claim that they were only ever the victims of football disorder, never the perpetrators – set fire to the train carrying them home from Leicester, causing £70,000 worth of damage.35
‘To travel to and from matches’, lamented The Times two days later, ‘is to run the gauntlet with these packs of marauding fiends as they terrorize the community at large.’ Some observers called for drastic measures, emulating Brentford’s chairman, who had carried out a citizen’s arrest on one troublemaker during one of his team’s home matches. British Rail scrapped their ‘football specials’ and withdrew their cheap long-distance tickets for Saturday travel, the Police Superintendents’ Association suggested that fans under the age of 16 be banned from ‘X-rated’ games unless they were accompanied by an adult, and a judge told a dock full of QPR hooligans that he wished he could put them in the stocks. Meanwhile the government, as usual, announced its determination to beat the ‘pathological thugs’; and, as usual, the disorder continued. In September, London’s Tube and bus drivers even staged an unofficial strike merely to avoid carrying Manchester United fans to their game at QPR. And by the end of the following season, nobody was surprised by the violent pitch invasion that greeted Tottenham’s relegation to the Second Division, the ‘screaming young mob, several thousand strong, swarming like bees’ into the main stand, the press room and the directors’ box. By now, the movement towards caging fans like wild animals was irresistible. Officials had been talking of installing steel fences for years, but hesitated because of safety, cost and image concerns. Manchester United, though, had been ordered to install fences in the summer of 1974, and where they led others followed.36
As a purely domestic problem, hooliganism was bad enough. But what was even more disturbing was that it was beginning to spill over into Europe. The potential for trouble had been obvious since 1967, when thousands of good-natured Celtic fans had descended on Lisbon for the European Cup final. As it happened, the match was a joyous occasion (although the Portuguese police were taken aback by the Scottish supporters’ pitch invasion), but what it showed was that thousands of working-class fans now had the money and the means to follow their teams abroad. Five years later, when Rangers won their first European trophy against Dynamo Moscow in Barcelona, the scenes were rather less festive. Three times drunken fans invaded the field, and at the final whistle a pitched battle broke out between the Rangers supporters, wielding bottles and pieces of wood torn from the stadium, and the baton-wielding Spanish police, with 150 people being injured and one killed. The Rangers fans claimed they had been provoked; the president of UEFA, however, described them as ‘savages’, and the Lord Provost of Glasgow called them a disgrace to the city.37
But Scottish supporters certainly did not have a monopoly on violence overseas. When Tottenham arrived in Rotterdam for the second leg of their UEFA Cup final against Feyenoord in May 1974, some of the city’s residents claimed they had seen nothing like it since the German occupation. The afternoon before the match, twenty-one English fans were arrested for looting a clothing shop and an off-licence, and even before kick-off the Tottenham chairman made a public appeal for supporters to behave. But it did no good. As soon as Feyenoord scored, the English fans ‘erupted in hideous battle’, ripping out their wooden seats and throwing them onto the field. The ensuing riot went on for some twenty minutes, quelled only by the intervention of more than 100 Dutch policemen, while over the public address system Tottenham’s manager Bill Nicholson vainly appealed for calm. Afterwards, the scene was like some medieval battlefield; reports estimated that 200 people had been hurt, fifty were treated for wounds, several were in hospital with serious injuries, and one policeman was in a critical condition after being beaten with an iron bar. ‘We were ashamed of our fans,’ said Mike England, the Spurs captain, calling them ‘disgraceful and disgusting’. The entire nation, said The Times, ‘cannot but feel a sense of shame that the Dutch hosts were given such a bad example of British youth. It calls for something more than an apology.’ The paper suggested that a group of Tottenham supporters might like to ‘go over to Rotterdam to help clear up some of the mess at the stadium’. But of course that never happened.38
And so the awful saga went on. A year later, when Leeds controversially lost the European Cup final in Paris, their fans greeted each Bayern Munich goal with a hail of missiles. Before the game, German supporters had been attacked in the streets and a supermarket looted; now, as metal seats cascaded onto the field, a French policeman and a ball-boy were knocked unconscious, a photographer had his arm broken, and a German cameraman was blinded in one eye. The final whistle was the cue for more carnage; one of the troublemakers turned out to be a junior official at the British Embassy, who was sent home for throwing a moped through a chemist’s window. In the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that UEFA banned Leeds from European competition for four years. It was ‘the end of a decade of glory and greatness’, said the Sun sententiously.39
But this was by no means the end of the cycle of violence. Disorder had now become an inevitable part of the fabric of the game, no longer making the headlines unless it was particularly brutal. When Liverpool reached the European Cup final in Rome in 1977, for example, it was as though the Vandals had returned to the Eternal City. ‘Noisy, aggressive, arrogant and drunk, swarming all day through the streets of the city centre, the Liverpool fans stopped cars, molested girls, commandeered the Trevi Fountain and the Piazza di Spagna, swept through the city with bottles of wine or beer glued to their lips, defecated in the gardens, urinated in the streets,’ reported La Repubblica. But the British press barely seemed to notice, and the disorder had no major consequences. In an age when attendances were falling and the middle classes remained wary of the self-styled people’s game, there was little scope for the kind of radical modernization that eliminated hooliganism twenty years later.40
No doubt very few of the French and Dutch shopkeepers who suffered at the hands of British hooligans would have agreed that they represented a radical subculture, a healthy challenge to the bourgeois order, or the latest flowering of a hilariously mischievous Hogarthian tradition. Instead, they represented perhaps the darkest blot on the national escutcheon in a decade when Britain’s image abroad had rarely been worse, and yet another symbol of the growing coarseness, disorder and violence that many felt had overtaken everyday national life. To horrified observers both at home and abroad, it was as though some corruption had infected the very soul of the national game – a disease from which, it turned out, not even England’s football figurehead was immune.
When Sir Alf Ramsey was sacked as manager of England in April 1974, The Times predicted that his replacement would be found among the younger managers ‘of the modern track suit set’. But on the fourth day of July the front pages broke the astonishing news that Don Revie – unquestionably the most qualified manager in the land – had been lured from Leeds by a record salary of £20,000 a year, more than twice Ramsey’s earnings. In a statement, Revie characteristically remarked that he had ‘tried to build the club into a family, and there must be sadness when anybody leaves a family’. The allure of managing his country, though, was impossible to resist, and like Edward Heath, Revie presented himself as a dynamic new broom, bringing the bracing smack of modernity after years of stagnation. In typical fashion, the first thing he did as England’s manager was to negotiate improved bonuses for the players. Next, he announced that the rousing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ would replace ‘God Save the Queen’ as the team’s anthem, a populist touch designed to inspire the gloomy Wembley crowd. And in his first match against Czechoslovakia in October 1974 – football’s equivalent of Heath’s ‘quiet revolution’ – the fans duly responded, roaring out the words from their printed song-sheets as Revie’s boys recorded a 3–0 victory.41
Revie’s innovations did not end there. Reporters were wooed with drinks and sandwiches, a padded trainers’ bench was installed at Wembley, and the FA arranged a groundbreaking new kit deal with Admiral, which later, quite unfairly, became a symbol of Revie’s obsession with money. Yet within just a few months the clouds had begun to gather. Revie had set out to turn England into a club side, re-creating the family atmosphere that had worked so well at Leeds. But the enforced sessions of bingo and carpet bowls, as well as the ten o’clock curfew and detailed dossiers on forthcoming opponents, went down badly with established players used to more permissive regimes. Crucially, he could not decide on a settled side, partly because of his restless insistence on tinkering with the line-up, but also because key players such as Roy McFarland, Colin Bell and Gerry Francis suffered horrendous luck with injuries. In just twenty-nine games Revie used no fewer than fifty-two different players, some of whom – Phil Boyer, Tony Towers, Ian Gillard, Steve Whitworth – were decidedly obscure. He could not even decide on a captain, switching almost at random between Emlyn Hughes, Alan Ball, Gerry Francis, Kevin Keegan and Mick Channon. Yet the truth was that his indecision was largely forced on him. He dispensed with Ball, for example, only after the player’s club, Arsenal, had already dropped him as punishment for insubordination – a sadly typical story of the mid-1970s.42
By the autumn of 1976 Revie’s dream of modernization, like those of Wilson and Heath before him, was turning sour. With England’s participation in the next World Cup hanging on a good result against Italy in Rome, he horrified commentators by making six changes to his team, including playing the defenders Brian Greenhoff and Trevor Cherry in central midfield. They promptly lost 2–0, making qualification highly unlikely. Revie’s players were ‘the worst England side I have ever seen,’ said the Italian captain Giacinto Facchetti, noting that ‘most surprising of all for a team for England, they seemed to have little heart for the battle’. As was becoming traditional on these occasions, the tabloids took the opportunity to lament the decline of the national game: the debacle was a ‘failure of English football as a whole’, said the Mirror, explaining that ‘we have men who can run and chase, battle and work … but the Italians have men who can PLAY’. It was an impression confirmed by England’s next game in February 1977, a friendly against Holland, who won even more comfortably than the 2–0 score suggested. More debacles followed: in May, England lost at home to Wales; in June, they lost at home to Scotland. With the pressure building, Revie seemed almost paralysed with indecision. ‘You sensed his frustration,’ Channon recalled. ‘He would sweat through nerves. I don’t think he could trust anyone … he thought everybody was going to do him.’43
As Henry Kissinger once remarked of Richard Nixon – whom Revie increasingly resembled – even the paranoid do have enemies. Like Ramsey before him, the England manager had incurred the displeasure of the acerbic FA chairman Sir Harold Thompson, who regarded him as little more than a jumped-up lackey. ‘When I get to know you better, Revie, I shall call you Don,’ Thompson once remarked at a dinner. ‘And when I get to know you better, Thompson, I shall call you Sir Harold,’ Revie replied, a rare flash of wit that was neither forgotten nor forgiven. Even before the defeats to Wales and Scotland, his head was on the block. On 30 May 1977, the day before England played Wales, Bernard Donoughue, a keen amateur footballer, had drinks with Ted Croker, the secretary of the Football Association. ‘They are clearly thinking of sacking Don Revie,’ Donoughue recorded afterwards. But Revie was no fool. A few weeks later, on tour with England in South America, he told Dick Wragg, the head of the FA international committee, that the job was bringing ‘heartache’ to his wife, and that he was certain he was about to be sacked. If the FA paid up the last two years on his contract, Revie said, he would quietly walk away. Stunned, Wragg insisted that there were no plans to sack him, while Ted Croker promised that he would be allowed to see out his contract. But Revie had long since lost faith in his employers. Unknown to them, he had made other plans.44
‘Revie Quits Over “Aggro” ’, screamed an enormous headline on the front page of the Daily Mail on 12 July, unveiling the most sensational sporting exclusive of the decade. Inside, Revie announced that he was resigning as England’s manager, a decision he had not yet shared with his employers at the FA. ‘I sat down with Elsie one night and we agreed that the job was no longer worth the aggravation,’ he explained. ‘It was bringing too much heartache to those nearest to us … Nearly everyone in the country seems to want me out. So I am giving them what they want. I know people will accuse me of running away and it does sicken me that I cannot finish the job by taking England to the World Cup finals in Argentina next year. But the situation has become impossible.’
That Revie had chosen to reveal his decision through the Daily Mail, which paid a rumoured £20,000 for the exclusive, was shocking enough. But it was as nothing compared with the news that broke the following day. Revie was not walking away to join Manchester United, as some had suspected. Instead, he had already signed a gigantic £340,000 tax-free four-year contract to manage the United Arab Emirates. What was worse, he had negotiated the deal weeks before. Supposed to be watching Italy and Finland play in Helsinki, he had actually flown to Dubai, accompanied by the Mail’s Jeff Powell, to agree the new contract. The symbolism was unmistakable: just four years after the OPEC oil shock, the grainy photographs of the England manager, smiling awkwardly in his powder-blue suit beside the sheikhs in their dishdashas, hammered home the stunning reality of Arab wealth and British humiliation. Perhaps only if the Prime Minister had packed his bags, scribbled out his resignation and flown off to run the Saudi economy would the shock have been greater. ‘It is impossible to escape the irony’, said The Times, ‘of the man who encouraged crowds to sing Land of Hope and Glory turning to seek his deserts in the desert.’45
As it happened, The Times was one of the few papers to show any sympathy for Revie. His task had been made impossible by a ‘mediocre’ crop of players and incredibly bad luck with injuries, wrote Gerald Sinstadt, while his apparent indecision ‘in reality reflected the paucity of really outstanding individuals’. At a time of ‘mounting disenchantment among critics, paid and unpaid’, Revie had been offered ‘a job which would guarantee in four years security for life. Which of us can say that, in that position, we would have made a different decision?’ For a man who had known poverty on the streets of Middlesbrough and was obsessed with providing for his wife and children, the chance to become extremely rich almost overnight was simply too good to resist. The sheikhs’ offer was ‘an unbelievable opportunity to secure my family’s future’, Revie told the Mail, adding that the British ‘tax structure, let alone the salaries available, makes it impossible to earn this kind of money at home’. These were not necessarily base or sordid motives. In any case, the FA were merely reaping what they had sown. Barely three years before, they had discarded Sir Alf Ramsey, the man who had won the World Cup, with the haughty cruelty of aristocrats dismissing a disgraced parlourmaid. They could hardly complain when his successor drew the obvious lesson.46
What Revie did not expect, however, was a chorus of execration based on the notion that he had ‘betrayed’ his country for ‘a handful of shekels’, as the tabloids insisted on putting it. ‘Don Revie’s decision doesn’t surprise me in the slightest,’ said his old enemy Alan Hardaker, the secretary of the Football League. ‘I only hope he can quickly learn to call out bingo numbers in Arabic.’ His defection was ‘a pathetic capitulation to Mammon’, wrote the Daily Express’s David Miller, while Revie’s old rival Bob Stokoe, once the manager of Sunderland, claimed that he ‘should have been castrated for the way he left England’. Above all, Sir Harold Thompson was furious at having been humiliated by a man so far beneath him that he did not even merit being addressed by his Christian name. On 28 July, the FA formally charged Revie with bringing the game into disrepute.
The case dragged on until December 1978 but was grotesquely biased, with Thompson, who had already savaged Revie in the press, serving simultaneously as witness, judge and prosecuting counsel. His de-cision – a ten-year suspension from English football – was predictably absurd, and Revie’s solicitors promptly applied for justice to the High Court, the case being settled by Mr Justice Cantley in December 1979. But although Cantley had no choice but to throw out Thompson’s verdict, he missed no opportunity to besmirch Revie’s reputation. Ludicrously, he insisted that Thompson had showed himself an ‘honourable man’ (a view that even the FA’s Ted Croker thought was ‘very wrong’) while Revie had ‘presented to the public a sensational and notorious example of disloyalty, breach of duty, discourtesy and selfishness’. It was a verdict that chimed with the views of many tabloid commentators, but Revie’s friends thought it spectacularly unfair. Cantley’s opinion was ‘one of the craziest things I have ever read’, said Lord Harewood, the president of Leeds United and former president of the FA, who had testified on Revie’s behalf. ‘If he really thought that Sir Harold had behaved admirably and Don hadn’t, then he is a very, very poor judge of character … He plainly disbelieved every word I said, but I don’t give a bugger what he thought.’47
By this time, however, Revie’s reputation had suffered a blow from which it never recovered. In September 1977, two months after he had walked out to join the UAE, the Mirror alleged that he had been fixing matches for years. It was not the first time there had been rumours of underhand dealings: in 1972, the Sunday People had claimed that Revie had offered three Wolves players £1,000 each to ‘take it easy’ in their title decider against Leeds. At the time, neither the FA nor the police had found any evidence of corruption, but the Mirror now claimed that Revie had used Mike O’Grady, a former Leeds player on Wolves’ books, as a go-between. And there was more: the Wolves match, the Mirror insisted, was merely part of a broader pattern. ‘Don Revie planned and schemed and offered bribes, leaving as little as possible to chance,’ wrote the paper’s chief reporter, Richard Stott. ‘He relied on the loyalty of those he took into his confidence not to talk, and it nearly worked.’
Bob Stokoe claimed that in 1962 Revie (‘an evil man’) had asked him to forfeit a Second Division game when he was managing Bury. ‘He offered me £500 to take it easy,’ Stokoe said. ‘There were no witnesses. I said no. And when I said no, he asked me if he could approach my players. I said under no circumstances.’ And there were other shocking revelations. The former Manchester City manager Malcolm Allison claimed that Revie ‘used to leave three hundred or four hundred quid in the referees’ room, in an envelope’, while Alan Ball claimed that during the 1960s Revie had sent him weekly £100 bribes, hoping to persuade him to move from Blackpool to Leeds. Most damaging of all, Revie’s former goalkeeper Gary Sprake claimed that he had been a go-between in match-fixing operations against Wolves and Nottingham Forest. Since Sprake had been paid £15,000 by the Mirror and later retracted his story after being ostracized by his old teammates, some dismissed his allegations. But years later, Sprake not only retracted his retraction, but made fresh accusations, claiming that in 1965 Revie had tried to get him to ‘tap up’ two fellow Welsh players before a crucial match with Birmingham on the last day of the season.
Revie’s former players were unsurprisingly furious at the allegations that their beloved mentor had been cheating throughout his managerial career. When the Sunday People claimed that Revie had used his captain Billy Bremner as a go-between, Bremner sued and won £100,000. The winger Peter Lorimer, who remained devoted to Revie, insisted that ‘if the boss tried to fix anything, we never saw it’, and pointed out that the Wolves match at the centre of the storm had ended with a beaten Leeds missing out on the championship. As Revie’s son Duncan later remarked, it was ‘ludicrous’ to imagine that Leeds triumphed by cheating, ‘because they won for at least ten years’. The irony is that if Revie did cheat, he was not very good at it. After all, Leeds were notorious for narrowly missing out on glory, and the quality of his team was such that he hardly needed to fix games anyway. When the police and the FA investigated the Mirror’s story, neither found a case to answer, while Mike O’Grady claimed he had been misquoted and not one referee came forward to corroborate Malcolm Allison’s bribery claims.
The truth is that, in the absence of hard evidence, it is simply impossible to know whether Revie was genuinely corrupt, or whether the stories were concocted by his enemies amid the hysteria that greeted his defection to the UAE. Only two things are clear. One is that Revie, cheat or no cheat, was a superb manager who built a magnificent team, suffered from extraordinarily bad luck and was unfairly pilloried for leaving a job from which he was probably going to be sacked anyway. The other is that plenty of people at the time did think he was corrupt. Malcolm Allison was not the only man in football convinced that Revie was ‘crooked’. In September 1977, even before the Mirror’s allegations, Bernard Donoughue recorded having ‘dinner with Ted Croker of the FA, who told me some alarming corruption stories about Don Revie, England team manager’. A month later, at a Downing Street lunch for the Prime Minister of Spain, Donoughue found himself sitting beside the former Manchester United manager Sir Matt Busby. ‘More terrible stories about Don Revie’, he noted afterwards. Of course this hardly proves the allegations – and yet it is surely revealing that both Croker and Busby believed them.48
No doubt many people would shudder at the thought of Don Revie as a symbol of British sport in the 1970s. It was, after all, a decade of heroes as well as villains: the figure skaters John Curry and Robin Cousins; the middle-distance arch-rivals Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe; the tennis star Virginia Wade, whose Wimbledon victory in 1977 was the perfect curtain-raiser for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. But the fact is that, thanks largely to football hooliganism, sport was increasingly seen in terms of failure and corruption. This was, after all, a decade in which two of the country’s most celebrated footballers, Billy Bremner and Kevin Keegan, were expelled from the Charity Shield match for fighting, and in which Manchester United sacked Tommy Docherty for an adulterous affair with the club physiotherapist’s wife. It was also a decade of sensationally incompetent Olympic performances, the nadir coming in 1976, when Britain won a grand total of thirteen medals, finishing behind the likes of Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. In track and field, Britain won just one medal (a bronze), while David Jenkins, who went to Montreal as the world’s number one 400-metre runner, contrived to finish seventh. His was merely one among many failures that made the 1970s, by and large, a decade of sporting disappointment. ‘When a fifteen is selected to represent England at Rugby football, we are defeated by all and sundry,’ lamented Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Foxley-Morris in 1975. ‘When an eleven is selected to play cricket against Australia, it is not just beaten but humiliatingly thrashed … On the playing fields of the world, we appear to have become the perennial losers, the predictable holders of all the wooden spoons.’49
Even cricket, the game of village greens and summer shadows, of pristine whites and gracious losers, seemed to have succumbed to the prevailing malaise. For the first time in fifty years, England lost Test matches at home to India and away to New Zealand, while a string of defeats to the West Indies and Australia included the calamitous 4–1 Ashes fiasco in 1974–5, generally regarded as a low point in the national team’s fortunes. By this point, England had been deprived of arguably their best batsman, Geoff Boycott, who had gone into self-imposed exile in 1974, supposedly because he had lost his appetite for Test cricket, but more plausibly because he was aggrieved not to have been made captain. The selectors had their reasons, though, because Boycott was not only the most controversial cricketer in the country, but one of the most divisive sportsmen in any discipline, notorious for his single-minded self-centredness and dour, defensive presence at the crease. A coal miner’s son with fierce opinions and an extremely healthy ego, he had been appointed captain of Yorkshire in 1971 but was fiercely hated by many of his fellow players. Committee members and former players regularly called for his head, and five years later a dressing-room poll found that more than nine out of ten players wanted him to be sacked. It was somehow symptomatic of Boycott’s career – as well as the general flavour of cricket in the 1970s – that the club committee waited until just after his mother had died of cancer to dismiss him; it was also characteristic that he immediately went on the Parkinson show to denounce them as ‘small-minded people’, who ‘could have allowed my mother to be buried in peace’ but ‘could not wait’.50
The Boycott saga was only one of a number of controversies that dominated the sporting pages in the 1970s. In previous decades, sport had offered a sense of escapism and reassurance in hard times, allowing people to take refuge from the rigours of unemployment and austerity in their appreciation of Jack Hobbs, Denis Compton, Billy Wright and Stanley Matthews. To be sure, sport in the 1970s offered plenty of pleasures – the sight of Gareth Edwards in full flow, of Kenny Dalglish banging in the goals, of Jackie Stewart closing in on the chequered flag, of Mary Peters nearing the finish line, even of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks locked in bone-shuddering combat. Yet all too often it seemed to be infected by the same aggression, materialism and self-interest that had seeped into so many other corners of national life. Major events were often starkly politicized: the 1972 Five Nations championship was abandoned after Scotland and Wales refused to travel to Dublin for fear of IRA reprisals, the Olympic Games later that year were blighted by the murder of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian gunmen, and enormous controversy surrounded the so-called private cricket tours of South Africa organized by the promoter Derrick Robins, who attracted top-class English players such as Brian Close, Bob Willis and Tony Greig. In this context, not even the most politically indifferent spectator could keep up the illusion that sport was pure escapism, immune to the pressures of the modern world. When the Olympic organizers at Munich decided to continue with the Games after the murders of the Israeli athletes, The Times thought the decision was thoroughly ‘distasteful’. ‘What taste can be satisfied’, it asked, ‘with the significance of competitive sports when a tragedy at once personal, shameful and symbolic, has occurred?’51
The show went on, of course. But there was more suffering, more disappointment, more disgrace to come. And if there was one moment that summed up the disillusionment of British sport – and of so much beyond that – it came on 4 June 1977, when England and Scotland, the world’s oldest international football teams, met at Wembley to decide the Home Nations Championship. The atmosphere in the famous old stadium, now visibly crumbling and dilapidated, was very different from the buoyant enthusiasm that had greeted England’s World Cup triumph eleven years before. The atmosphere, one reporter wrote, ‘was overwhelmingly influenced by Scotland, and Scotch. It was at once powerful and obscene, and gave no comfort to England who might have been on Scottish soil.’ Only weeks earlier, the Scottish National Party – driven by bitter frustration with the major national parties and excitement at the potential benefits of North Sea oil – had made sweeping gains in the council elections. Now, as goals by Gordon McQueen and Kenny Dalglish confirmed the visitors’ superiority over Revie’s constipated England, Wembley seemed awash with Celtic triumphalism. That the quality of the football was generally poor – it was yet another match crippled by defensive tactics and endless fouls – bothered the visitors not at all. Even before the final whistle, said The Times, ‘thousands of Scots were struggling to be first onto the pitch’.
Several months earlier, the Football Association had announced plans to install 8-foot-high metal fences around the Wembley perimeter, hoping to deter the pitch invasions that had spoiled so many major sporting occasions. But in a story that spoke volumes about British efficiency in the mid-1970s, the plan had been delayed. And as the final whistle blew that hot June afternoon, thousands of visiting supporters streamed drunkenly onto the pitch, and as one Scottish writer later put it, ‘began clawing at it with the relish of battle-high warriors picking over the booty on the bodies of the dead enemy on some ancient battlefield’. With their long hair lank and greasy with sweat under their tartan caps, their T-shirts sodden with beer, their flared jeans ripped and grass-stained, they looked like some invading barbarian horde. As they ripped and tore at the turf, as they clambered onto the goal-frames until the posts finally gave way and the goals symbolically collapsed beneath the jeering mob, the Corinthian spirit seemed a long way away. For the nation that had given organized sport and fair play to the world, it was a supremely humiliating moment. ‘There is only one consolation,’ said the Daily Mirror afterwards. ‘It won’t happen again. By the next time the Scottish hordes descend on Wembley the crowd will be caged in. In the long history of battles between the two countries the Wembley fences will be the football equivalent of Hadrian’s Wall.’ It was an ominous prediction, for, as events were to prove, metal fences brought terrible dangers of their own. But as reporters looked down from the press box and surveyed the scarred and battered sporting turf, the shattered goalposts, the field littered with beer cans and broken bottles, there seemed no alternative. As one of them quietly remarked, it had been ‘another afternoon of British rubbish’.52