Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  Although England were desperate for a goal, Taylor pulled off his main goalscorer and sent on Alan Smith who, he thought, would hold the ball up better and stop it coming straight back at the beleaguered English defence. It was no surprise when Tomas Brolin won the game for Sweden with eight minutes to go. Not even the combined efforts of Andy Sinton, Carlton Palmer and Tony Daley could rescue England. The game finished in the immortal Sun headline SWEDES 2 TURNIPS 1 alongside a picture of the manager’s head skewered on a vegetable like the head of a traitor displayed on a spike on London Bridge. It was a national scandal. There were critical articles in the press from those well-known football experts John Junor and Bernard Ingham. It was all pointless. Gary Lineker was not on the pitch but it was all over.

  Gary Lineker left English football just as the great revolution started. He has made a success of his second career as a broadcaster, so he can afford a certain detachment when it comes to comparing footballers’ wages now with what they were when he was playing. However, having played most of his football when playing conditions were not significantly different from what they were when Clement Attlee was prime minister, Lineker looks with envy on the football pitches of the twenty-first century.

  It’s all relative to your era. Obviously the money and profile is different from Billy Wright’s day and I earned in a year at my peak what a top player today can earn in a week. It doesn’t particularly bother me. The only thing that I am envious about is the quality of the surfaces they get to play on. They are beautiful. We played on terrible pitches. Once you got past September it was a quagmire and the only grass was on the wing but I tried to avoid going on the wing. Then there were the frozen pitches and the snow and in spring the pitches would become unbelievably bumpy. The ball’s better now also because it’s lighter. When I started, we used training balls that collected water and it was like heading a cannon ball. I never headed the ball in training though. I only ever headed it if I thought I could score.

  In 1992 Gary Lineker’s playing future was to be in Japan but, before he left England, he made a start on what would be his new career in the media. During the gap between the end of the European Championships and his departure for Nagoya Grampus Eight seven months later, it seemed as if he was never off the airwaves. He went to the Barcelona Olympics with the BBC and then appeared on Match of the Day as a pundit and could be found hosting a weekly Radio 5 programme, Gary Lineker’s Football Night. One measure of his spreading fame was the title of the 1991 West End stage play by Arthur Smith and Chris England called An Evening with Gary Lineker, set in front of a television on the night of the Turin semi-final. The man who was never booked or sent off was justifiably given the 1990 FIFA Fair Play award (though what FIFA knows about fair play is open to question). Along with the trophy came £25,000, half of which he gave to a Leicester charity treating children with cancer.

  Gary Lineker presenting the BBC’s Match of the Day (© BBC Photo Library).

  Gary Lineker has justifiably reached a place where he is known and liked by nearly the whole country. He reached the top of his career as a player through skill and hard work, acquiring respect with his goals, a respect he has retained through his second career in television. Brian Glanville, who is not given to extolling players without reason, admires Lineker greatly:

  I find Gary Lineker an extremely likeable man who showed you didn’t have to be aggressive, you didn’t have to be ruthless, you didn’t have to be a thug to be an excellent player and succeed at the top of the game and Lineker was an excellent example in that respect. I remember when he was smashed in the mouth by a Paraguayan thug and went off the field with his mouth bleeding and he returned and scored. Afterwards he said of the incident, ‘It was an accident. At least I hope it was.’ He’s an intelligent, shrewd man with a nice sense of humour.

  Patrick Barclay, who has been covering football since the 1970s, feels similarly:

  I knew Lineker all the way through his career. He was the best example of the gentrification of footballers I can think of. He wasn’t born in a stately home and he didn’t have any social advantages. He had three things going for him which were: his skill, the nature of his character and Jon Holmes, his agent.

  The difference between Kevin Keegan in the late 1970s and the early 1980s and Gary Lineker in the 1980s and early 1990s was that Lineker rarely appeared to break sweat on the field or off it. Keegan went on television in Superstars and worked his socks off before and after falling off his bike. Lineker went on television on the show They Think It’s All Over which he partially owned. Keegan’s agent negotiated a fee. Lineker’s agent helped him to bank the profits. Keegan now appears on television occasionally as a pundit. Lineker is the face of BBC Television’s football coverage and that of BT Sport and Al Jazeera. Keegan wanted to stay in the game as a manager with all the stress that entails because he needed the money and he needed to stay in touch with the game. Lineker stays in touch with the game from the comfort of a television studio. He doesn’t need the money.

  Keegan regarded life as a fight to be won. Lineker regarded life as a fight to be avoided but a battle to be won by cleverer means than mere pugilism. Keegan would cover every blade of grass in his unceasing efforts to carry his team to victory. Lineker knew there was absolutely no point in that. His job was to score goals and goals that were scored from six yards were just as valuable as goals scored after a mazy run half the length of the field. Keegan made a television commercial for Brut aftershave ‘slapping it on all over’ with Henry Cooper after a strenuous workout. Lineker sat in the stands at Leicester City advertising Walkers Crisps, the local delicacy, by trapping Paul Gascoigne’s fingers in the packet until the tears famously spurted from his eyes. Keegan was only one of the celebrities who endorsed the Brut brand. By appearing in a Brut commercial he was ranked with other top British sportsmen like the Olympic hurdler David Hemery, the motorcycle world champion Barry Sheene and the showjumper Harvey Smith. Perhaps more importantly, being selected by Brut demonstrated that Keegan was now considered visible enough to be seen on the same level as the American football star Joe Namath, the baseball batter Hank Aaron, the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, the heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali and the tennis player Vitas Gerulaitis. Keegan might have been endorsing Brut but the cosmetics company was just as firmly signalling its own powerful endorsement of a footballer who could sell its products.

  Keegan knew the value of a good agent but he had the admirable Harry Swales not the innovative Jon Holmes. Holmes’s original gamble that Lineker had the special qualities that he was looking for in a client seemed to have paid off as Lineker moved effortlessly from captain of the England football team to life as a professional broadcaster. Yet even as Lineker packed his case, ready for one last hurrah as a player in Japan, a young midfielder was making his debut for Manchester United in a League Cup match against Brighton and Hove Albion. David Beckham was destined to inherit Lineker’s armband and demonstrate that whatever cultural significance Lineker had carefully acquired, it would be as nothing compared to the mania that would surround this young man. Lineker left for Japan in February 1993. That same month, Bobby Moore died.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE AGE OF DAVID BECKHAM

  The Beckham family at a Burberry Fashion Show in 2015 (pictured left to right): Brooklyn Beckham, Cruz Beckham, Victoria Beckham, Romeo Beckham, Harper Beckham, David Beckham and US Vogue editor Anna Wintour (Jeff Vespa / Getty Images).

  On Monday 28 June 1993 a memorial service was held for Bobby Moore in Westminster Abbey, attended by the great and the good. It was a sober and dignified occasion in keeping with the character of the man whose memory was so widely cherished even if the country, and in particular the world of football, had shamefully neglected him for the last fifteen years of his life. A government which included such morally upright citizens as Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken considered Bobby Moore unworthy of a knighthood. The Dean of Westminster in his address noted that Moore’s achievements<
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  stand as a symbol for all that is best in sport: the patient development of an innate ability, a thorough understanding of tactics and teamwork, and a relationship of mutual respect with those against whom he competed. We remember also the kindness and humour which marked his private life, and his loyalty and generosity to his family; the dignity which he maintained in public and in private, and the courage with which he faced death.

  Bobby Charlton put on his glasses to read his tribute, Franz Beckenbauer read from Ecclesiastes. Jimmy Tarbuck chose a metaphor which struck a chord throughout the packed abbey. ‘The Lord,’ he said, ‘has strengthened his team but weakened ours.’ It wasn’t just Bobby Moore who was being remembered that hot summer day by a generation whose time had come and gone. It was their whole way of life – English life as well as footballing life.

  Moore seemed to be the demarcation line between one era and another; the last well-mannered footballer, the last true hero. In death he was no longer the failed businessman, the Sunday Sport reporter or the man who had been asked to leave the Directors’ Box at Upton Park by the foreign owners embarrassed by his presence but for one last moment he was restored to his pinnacle as the golden boy of 1966. Had he lived a few more years he must surely have received that mysteriously delayed knighthood. Now the men of 1966 were raised to mythic status partly by football’s specious heritage industry and partly by the inability of successive England teams to replicate what Moore’s team had achieved. Charlton was knighted in 1994 and Geoff Hurst four years later. George Cohen, Ray Wilson, Nobby Stiles, Roger Hunt and Alan Ball were made MBEs in 2000 to join Banks, Jack Charlton and Peters who had already been officially acknowledged.

  Moore’s death inspired an outstanding piece by Hugh McIlvanney in the Observer which captured perfectly what it was about Bobby Moore that so engaged the country:

  Amid the coarsening of spirit that has been manifest in this country over the past couple of decades, there is a measure of reassurance in finding so much of the nation so deeply affected by the death of Bobby Moore… By being not only the captain but the unmistakable leader of the England team who in 1966 brought the World Cup to the islands that like to be considered the home of football, the incomparable central defender made himself an abiding presence in countless lives… The impact of his death and the remarkably widespread ache of deprivation left by it cannot possibly be explained in terms of accumulated nostalgia… His bearing, the aura of imperious authority that almost defied any honest reporter to avoid the word majestic, grew directly out of his profound understanding of the job he had to do and an unshakable belief that no-one anywhere was better at it… Bobby Moore’s life was tragically short but he learned quite a lot in the time he had, like how to be so much of a man that he turned into a hero.

  In November 1995 Michael Parkinson interviewed the England midfielder David Platt, who told him that in his opinion it was more important to be judged as a person than as a player. Parkinson reflected further:

  He says he came to that conclusion upon the death of Bobby Moore, when he saw how a nation responded to a man who was as modest on the street as he was commanding on the field of play. It is a sure sign of changing mores in our society that once upon a time – and not too long ago – anyone expressing the opinion that heroes on the pitch might also be decent members of society would be accused of stating the bleeding obvious.

  In 2007, the FA unveiled a bronze sculpture of Moore outside the rebuilt Wembley Stadium which displayed an inscription that tried hard, possibly too hard, to capture everything about Bobby Moore that matched the memory of the man and the admirable artistic creation of the sculptor, Philip Jackson.

  Immaculate footballer. Imperial defender. Immortal hero of 1966. First Englishman to raise the World Cup aloft. Favourite son of London’s East End. Finest legend of West Ham United. National Treasure. Master of Wembley. Lord of the game. Captain extraordinary. Gentleman of all time.

  It doesn’t require a doctorate in English to suspect that the English Football Association is not entirely conversant with the subtleties of its own language. The word they were presumably looking for was not ‘imperial’ but ‘imperious’, as McIlvanney so elegantly conveys. On the other hand it is possible that the ghost of the old FA chairman Mr Amos Brook Hirst descended to invoke the spirit of England’s football captain at the head of an army of British redcoats planting the Union Jack to claim territory that would advance the cause of the British Empire. The thesis of this book is that the England football captain reflects the character of his age but, even half a century ago, Moore’s England was not the England of Palmerston and Disraeli.

  Bobby Moore’s statue outside Wembley Stadium (Wikimedia Commons).

  Four years after Moore’s memorial service, all eyes were again on Westminster Abbey as it hosted a service that this time attracted the mesmerised attention of the world rather than just the country. At the end of August 1997 Diana, Princess of Wales, died after a car crash in Paris. Her body was brought back to London for the funeral service in the Abbey before it was buried in the grounds of Althorp, the Spencer family estate in Northamptonshire. The death of Diana provoked an extraordinary public outpouring of grief. Mourners queued in their thousands to sign a book of condolence at St James’s Palace and left flowers outside Kensington Gardens. Some three million people came into central London on the day of her funeral. Whether one views this reaction as mass hysteria or as evidence of the emergence of a new, emotionally unbuttoned form of Englishness, the contrast with the quiet dignity and sobriety of those who attended the funeral service for Bobby Moore is marked. If ever two events provided evidence of the changing nature of English society, it was these two services. It was reported that more than thirty million people watched the Abbey service on television, a figure that outstrips even the twenty-eight million who watched Barry Norman, Eddie Waring and Michael Aspel singing ‘There is Nothin’ Like a Dame’ in The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special of 1977.

  It turned into a historic moment for the recently elected prime minister, Tony Blair. Even if the phrase was Alastair Campbell’s, Blair’s depiction of the dead woman as ‘the People’s Princess’ was greeted joyfully. Armed with an overall majority in the House of Commons of 179 seats, his landslide victory in May 1997 combined with the virtual annihilation of the Conservative party gave him ten years of power. However, the events of 11 September 2001, which led to British forces fighting unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would slowly diminish that initial burst of personal popularity.

  Blair’s Labour seemed in those early days a welcome contrast to the preceding sleaze-ridden Tory administration which had proclaimed its faith in a ‘Back to Basics’ campaign. Although Major himself emerged only as a slightly naïve lightweight it was clear that he was unable to control the unpalatable mess that his government found itself in during the mid-1990s. The Tory party was still the party of Margaret Thatcher, whose attitude to sport in general and football in particular had ranged from the casually indifferent to the decidedly hostile. Blair’s MPs found it politically advisable to claim that they were football supporters whether they were or not. Either way they were generally much more in touch with the real concerns of the voters who had elected them than the conservative MPs they had replaced. To the widespread embarrassment of football supporters throughout the land there had even been an insert on the evening television news during the 1997 election campaign of Blair straining every muscle and a certain amount of credulity as he exchanged headers with Kevin Keegan, who during a previous election campaign had been photographed kissing the cheek of Margaret Thatcher. Football, it appeared, was to be an integral part of the new Labour government’s policy, which certainly separated it from the government of Margaret Thatcher. It evoked in the minds of many true supporters a sense of unease that the popularity of the game was being cynically harnessed to provide a spurious ‘street cred’ for undeserving politicians.

  In the wake of Diana’s death it became clear th
at emotions were to play a big part in Blair’s Britain. The days following the death of Diana were a time when the Queen was told how to behave by tabloid newspapers and the Labour party’s spin doctor (who was at least a genuine supporter of Burnley). Meekly, she broke with royal protocol by leaving her summer residence at Balmoral and returning to London in order to be seen to be grieving with her similarly afflicted subjects. Peter Hennessy observed the hysteria and the demands for the Queen to appear in public with some surprise.

  It went on for several days and it fed on itself. It was a mind-changing moment for the royal family because the country believed that the Queen was hard-hearted, but people grieved differently in her generation. It was as if the British people who had always wanted to grieve in this way had never been allowed to. The stoical generation of which the Queen is the incarnation had a lot of loss in the war and they conducted themselves in the way that the Queen conducted herself. We were, or we used to be, a stoical, understated people. We now behave like whooping Americans on a game show.

  Diana’s death seemed to release the emotions of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom must have watched the Panorama interview a gaunt-looking Diana gave Martin Bashir with their critical faculties in abeyance. After her divorce, Diana’s increasingly desperate cries for attention had mostly been the butt of satirical humour and she suffered by being lumped together with her accident-prone sister-in-law, the Duchess of York, whose pantomime marital difficulties were chronicled with glee by the tabloid press. Weeks before Diana died, the author Leo McKinstry wrote in Turning of the Tide, a book analysing contemporary British society: