Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  One of the problems with general history is that it suffers from the constant exposure of a small selection of events on television. Thus, the history of the 1970s is the story of the guttering candle in the three-day week and the rubbish piling up in the streets during the so-called ‘winter of discontent’, just as the story of the 1980s is the clash between striking miners and the police outside Orgreave Colliery and the sound of the bell on the floor of the Stock Exchange which ushered in the Big Bang of the de-regulated market, barrow-boy City traders and the culture of ‘Greed is good’. E. H. Carr had written in What is History? about the limitations of what becomes an acceptable historical fact, but it has changed again with the ubiquitous and frequently iniquitous history documentary on television. Facts assume a greater significance when they are on television. The same shots are replayed time and again usually because a particular piece of film is free of charge, which is why it is so constantly broadcast. History therefore becomes the history of that which has been filmed, preferably in colour.

  One of the images frequently used to portray life in England in the 1970s and 1980s is that of the football hooligan. Crowd disturbances at matches, youths fighting and racing from other gangs in the streets and the behaviour of Scottish fans on the pitch at Wembley following a home international against England in 1977 all have the same effect of indicating disgust at what seemed the inevitably violent corollary to a game of football. Scotland had beaten England 2–1 with goals from McQueen and Dalglish to the delight of the crowd of 98,000 of whom it was estimated that perhaps 70 per cent were Scottish. Certainly the match became notorious for what happened after the final whistle blew when visiting fans, many of them intoxicated (Gordon McQueen claimed he could smell the whisky walking up the tunnel) invaded the pitch, swung on the crossbar, broke it and then dug up sods of Wembley turf which they took triumphantly back to Scotland. It was perhaps delayed revenge for the theft of the Stone of Scone by Edward I. Scotland now had North Sea oil, a better football team and most of Wembley Stadium.

  Revie had had enough. Fearing the sack from the autocratic Sir Harold Thompson at the FA, who treated him as contemptuously as he had treated Ramsey, Revie flew secretly to the United Arab Emirates and agreed to become that country’s national coach on a four-year contract for a tax-free sum of £340,000. It would be impossible to imagine Ramsey (or indeed most English managers) behaving similarly. Ramsey might have loathed the English Football Association but he was a dyed-in-the-wool patriot. It was a sign of the times that Revie was accompanied on his flight to the Middle East by a reporter from the Daily Mail which, of course, then ran the exclusive story (for the reported fee of £20,000, which was the same as Revie’s annual salary from the FA). Ramsey’s loathing of the press would have precluded such an eventuality. The photograph of Revie in a suit signing his lucrative contract surrounded by the sheikhs in native dress, combined with English resentment at the sudden increase in the cost of petrol, seemed to sum up in a single picture the way in which the world of Western hegemony and Middle Eastern subservience had been turned on its head. Then there was the small matter of the money.

  There was money to be made in football in the 1970s, though nothing like the sums currently on offer in the Premier League, and football was full of managers who had been players in the days of the maximum wage and who were only too familiar with the financial insecurities of careers in management constantly at the mercy of incompetent players, hostile fans and the whims of dictatorial chairmen of weak boards of directors. Brian Clough, who had been born a few streets away from Revie in Middlesbrough eight years after him, was just as obsessed with money as Revie, and in both cases that obsession stemmed less from the greed that would have been recognised by Gordon Gekko than from the impoverished hard times of their early years that would have been recognised by Ena Sharples. The manner in which Revie had fashioned his escape from England had been less than admirable but the manner in which the FA behaved before and after was considerably worse. The outraged Thompson tried to ban him from English football for ten years. That decision was legally overturned but a combination of constant press hostility to Revie – who had been portrayed as betraying his country as surely as Benedict Arnold had betrayed his – and the later onset of motor neurone disease ensured that Revie’s career in English football was effectively over.

  It was predictable that the FA would replace Revie not with the People’s Choice, Brian Clough, who would almost certainly take even less notice of Thompson than Revie and Ramsey had, but by the ‘safe pair of hands’ of Ron Greenwood. Under him, England football at least recovered its equilibrium and its sense of decorum. England did not go to Argentina in 1978 but qualified once again for football’s premier tournament when it moved to Spain in 1982 and expanded from sixteen to twenty-four teams. Under Greenwood the England team found a new star in Bryan Robson and a regular captain in Kevin Keegan. After the dalliances with Alan Ball, Phil Thompson and Mick Mills among others, for the first time since Bobby Moore everyone knew who the England football captain was and everyone admired him for his whole-hearted commitment. He wasn’t Bobby Moore, but he represented the tenor of his times just as Moore had done.

  Keegan was one of a small number of English First Division footballers to make a success of playing for a continental side. The record of top-class English footballers in Europe was patchy at best. John Charles had left Leeds United to become a hero at Juventus in the 1950s but Denis Law and Jimmy Greaves had both failed in Italy at the start of the 1960s. Kevin Keegan, however, had won the European Cup with Liverpool in 1977 and then moved to SV Hamburg, dedicating himself to living in Germany and succeeding to the extent that he twice won the coveted European Footballer of the Year award (1978 and 1979) and was part of a team that won the Bundesliga title in 1978–9. Keegan had skilfully negotiated what is now called a buy-out clause facilitating his move abroad and another easing his way back to the English First Division with Southampton in the summer of 1980.

  He handled his playing career and life as a manager after retirement with enormous adroitness, but you could always see the sweat pouring from the hard-working Keegan’s brow. What endeared him to the country was his memorable appearance in 1976 on the BBC television series Superstars, one of the many programmes originated by Mark McCormack’s television production arm. During one gruelling race Keegan fell off his bicycle at high speed. Despite suffering extensive cuts and painful abrasions, sufficient to make the viewing millions wince, Keegan climbed back on to his bike and cycled his way to eventual victory and into the affections of the nation. ‘Mighty Mouse’ wore his heart on his sleeve – most notoriously in the Liverpool v. Leeds FA Charity Shield at Wembley in 1974, when he was sent off for fighting with Billy Bremner and removed his shirt on the way to an early bath. He always gave his all for his country, though after winning the European Cup with Liverpool in 1977 he decided, like Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins, that the future lay in Europe.

  Keegan left Liverpool just as Bob Paisley’s side began its remarkable domination of the English Football League and the European Cup. He was replaced as Liverpool’s main striker by the Celtic forward Kenny Dalglish who scored the winning goal against Bruges in the European Cup final of 1978 and in 1985 moved seamlessly from player to player-manager. His last season in charge, 1990–91, coincided with the start of Liverpool’s quarter of a century of relative decline. With the help of an outstanding side, Dalglish carried Liverpool to three more European Cups in his first seven seasons with the club, their triumphs interspersed by two victories for Nottingham Forest and one for Aston Villa, giving English clubs a remarkable hold on Europe’s premier trophy for seven years out of eight.

  Even though English clubs, admittedly sprinkled with clever, skilful Scots, were able to impose their will on Europe – thereby creating a renewed respect for English football – Greenwood’s national side seemed unable to arrest the post-Moore and post-Ramsey decline. The latest nadir was a 2–1 defeat by Norway in September
1981 in a qualifying game for the 1982 World Cup in Spain. In truth, the result did not flatter the underrated Norwegians who were not intimidated by an early goal from Bryan Robson or by the presence in the England defence of Phil Neal and Phil Thompson, two regular members of the all-conquering Liverpool side. It wasn’t the result of the match that imprinted itself on the minds of England supporters but the radio commentary of Bjørge Lillelien for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation who, at the moment of maximum excitement after the final whistle had blown, lapsed into a memorable rant:

  We are best in the world! We have beaten England! England, birthplace of giants. Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, Maggie Thatcher we have beaten them all, we have beaten them all. Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher, your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating!

  In view of the Suez fiasco, Eden seems fortunate to be in such distinguished company and, of course, Beaverbrook was Canadian, though he would probably have delighted in plastering the commentary all over the Daily Express. Henry Cooper is oddly included in an otherwise predictable roll call of English public life, though it seems a shame that neither Shakespeare nor Dickens were name checked as Mr Lillelien concentrated largely on political giants, giving due respect to the prime minister of Britain’s first post-war government who, by 1981, had largely been forgotten in his own country.

  The rant was enjoyed enormously in the country that was supposedly the target of the Norwegian commentator’s triumphalism. It has since been parodied frequently, which will ensure its durability, but the very fact that the English took what at first glance was a critical and humiliating diatribe to be a comedy routine that was endlessly enjoyable indicates that something fundamental had shifted about the country’s response to its national football team. It could still be seen as idiotic foreigners behaving in a crass, stupid and ignorant manner but the durability of the rant suggests that is not the case. England were in the process of a long journey from the Land of Hope and Glory days of 1966 to the streets of Charleroi in 2000 and Wayne Rooney swearing at his own fans through the lens of a television camera after a disappointing goalless draw against Algeria in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. There was an increasing acceptance that England was in decline and so was its football team. If you weren’t inclined towards violence which, thankfully, most fans are not, the best possible alternative is comedy and Bjørge Lillelien’s post-match summary never fails to raise a smile that accompanies a shrug of the shoulders.

  Some decline was to be expected. Certainly Great Britain did not occupy the place in the post-war world that it had occupied in 1945. The British Empire was dissolving and so was England’s sporting primacy. The fact that the British had exported the games of football and cricket as well as many other sports all over the world meant that they began international competition with a technical advantage, just as the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century gave the country a head start in what is now known as the ‘global race’. However, it was inevitable that at some point other nations would catch up.

  In cricket, what the West Indies achieved at Lord’s in 1950 and in many a subsequent Test match was what India, Pakistan and eventually Sri Lanka would do in their turn. In football, first Hungary and Germany, then Italy and Brazil and eventually the USA and Norway all humiliated England as coaching methods, new forms of nutrition and general fitness levels conspired to provide those countries with resources as good as or better than those to be found in England. The wonder is not that England eventually surrendered its supposed invincibility but that it had lasted as long as it did and that it had taken other countries so long to recognise England’s vulnerability. Then it became a question of how the England football supporters would adapt to a role in the world among the also-rans which their parents and grandparents would have found intolerable.

  On the one hand fans could simply accept that English players were no good at football, at least not when playing for the national team, and the best thing to do, as Lottie sings in Mack and Mabel, would be to ‘tap your troubles away’. On the other hand, football hooligans could, at the slightest provocation, remind foreigners that England’s footballers might not know how to defend, create or score but their ‘supporters’ were afraid of no one: by drinking industrial quantities of alcohol, causing significant damage to foreign property and – even more satisfying – damage to foreign people, they could show these upstarts that England was still a country to be feared. Of these two alternatives, the tap-dancing option was sadly less palpable than the head-smashing one, though the hooligans represented only a small if particularly visible percentage of England’s supporters.

  There has been a long-standing assumption that British economic problems and Britain’s diminishing prestige in the new world order somehow manifest themselves in the performances of the England football team. There is more of a case to be made for this argument in the 1950s, when short-sightedness in the Conservative government was matched by a similarly blinkered view of the world of football as seen in FA headquarters in Lancaster Gate. When Harold Macmillan was invited to attend the negotiations being held by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg which were eventually enshrined in the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and the creation of the Common Market, his reply to his aide was, ‘Tell them I’m far too busy dealing with Cyprus’. There certainly were problems dealing with Greek Cypriot terrorists of EOKA and the wily Archbishop Makarios, but Britain’s initial scepticism of the European Economic Community was repaid by de Gaulle’s seeming determination in the 1960s never to let Britain into it, despite Macmillan changing his mind after he became prime minister.

  History does not obligingly offer us a defining moment at which we can state with confidence that Britain began its economic or political decline. Likewise, if one looks at the chronology of England’s post-war football results, it becomes apparent that the graph does not point straight downwards from a high point in, say, 1947. The fact is that England never travelled particularly well and the defeat by Hungary in 1953 is invariably referred to simply because it was the first time England had lost at home to a team from outside Great Britain and Ireland. However, England had lost plenty of times abroad before 1953 but for some reasons to do with English insularity those defeats had been swept under the carpet, which is partly why the loss to the USA in Belo Horizonte wasn’t the occasion for national soul-searching in 1950 that it would be today.

  After all, it was very hot when England left the country to play their tour matches after the end of the Football League season so, for a start, the weather was against them. We have already seen how they had to tolerate eating the foreign muck that was served up abroad by people who seemed ignorant of a proper dinner which usually consisted of Brown Windsor soup, shepherd’s pie and jam roly-poly. Then there were the foreign referees who didn’t seem to understand that hard but perfectly fair tackling was allowed but spitting, shirt-pulling and diving were not. Defeats abroad therefore didn’t quite count. Wembley 1966, of course, was a triumph but, as hosts, England did not have to qualify and their stuttering start in the group stages did not suggest that the ultimate triumph awaited them. If Rattín hadn’t got himself sent off and the Argentina team had decided to play football rather than kick everything that moved on the Wembley turf, it would have been no surprise if England had gone out at the quarter-final stage in 1966. Against Portugal in the semi-final, England showed their class and in the final their entirely admirable spirit, stamina and skill earned them a justly famous victory, but it didn’t last.

  The graph of the England football team continues to show alternating peaks and troughs. It certainly seemed like a very low point in October 2000, when Germany beat England 1–0 in a World Cup qualifying game in the last match played at the old Wembley Stadium, and Kevin Keegan resigned as England’s manager (rather appropriately) in the gents toilets immediately afterwards. Yet
only four months previously the scoreline in the European Championships had been the reverse and, less than a year later, in the return match played in Munich, England achieved one of their most notable victories of recent years when they won 5–1. England, the country, hadn’t changed much between the first of those three matches in June 2000 and the last one played in September 2001, yet results had shown a markedly different football team each time. Depending on the point of view you adopted, throughout those months England was basking in the Brown–Blair boom of the pre-Iraq War days or it was still suffering the terminal decline it had been experiencing since VE Day.

  It’s easy to see why the idea of decline might be exaggerated. The 1950s, that decade of blinkered conformism in which Britain’s pre-eminent place in world affairs and at the top of sporting achievement was permanently surrendered, when as a nation we saw the world turn into a more dangerous place than ever before because of the real possibility, or so it was believed, of imminent nuclear annihilation, was also a time of almost unparalleled optimism. The war, with its attendant loss and bereavement, was a rapidly fading memory, the economy was producing almost full employment, rationing had been abandoned, there appeared to be an end in sight to polio, measles, rubella and diphtheria through simple inoculations, the birth rate was rising, and the world that was opening up for these baby boomers seemed to be one of peace, prosperity and endless opportunity. What sort of a decline was that?

  In the days of Gladstone and Disraeli, Britain’s acquisition of foreign lands and their economic resources helped to stimulate and service a growing domestic economy, but the vast majority of British people lived a life below stairs, physically or metaphorically, and the profits of the booming economy did not benefit them significantly. As late as the inter-war years, working and living conditions were so bad for the exploited mill workers in east Lancashire or unemployed coal miners in Jarrow that life was still as nasty, brutish and short for them as it had been when Thomas Hobbes had written Leviathan in the middle of the seventeenth century. In the era of Britain’s irreversible decline over the past fifty years it seems that the suffering population can afford cars, foreign holidays, satellite television, central heating, smartphones and a range of food choices not available in the late nineteenth century to the richest of the minority who ruled the country and who lived in sybaritic comfort provided by the toil and drudgery of others.