No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  After that, British interest transferred to the 1980 Winter Olympics. That year, in Lake Placid, USA, a couple of young newcomers from Nottingham gained a respectable fourth place in the ice-skating competition. They were Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, an insurance-book clerk and a police officer who retained their day jobs so that they could compete as amateurs in the next Winter Olympics in Yugoslavia in February 1984. There they performed a routine lasting four minutes twenty-eight seconds to an abridged version of Ravel’s Bolero, with an estimated 24m Britons watching on television. The routine was eighteen seconds longer than Olympic rules permitted, but they circumvented that problem by performing the first eighteen seconds on their knees, having established that the performance did not officially begin until their skates touched the ice. They achieved 12 out of a possible 18 perfect scores of 6.0, the highest score in the history of the sport. By April 1984, the late Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) had a tune in the British Top 10: not the full seventeen-minute Bolero, but the shortened version sold in the shops as ‘Torvill and Dean’s Bolero’. In Nottingham, there is now a Torvill Drive and a Dean Close, and the public area in front of the city’s National Ice Centre is called Bolero Square.

  The fame they achieved by being the best in the world was soon eclipsed by another British athlete who achieved lifelong notoriety at a Winter Olympics by being the worst competitor. Britain had never produced a world-class ski-jumper. Eddie Edwards, a twenty-four-year-old plasterer from Cheltenham, was not world class either; he did not even look like a champion, with his thick glasses, protruding chin and general air of ineptitude; there was no one to train or sponsor him, nor any suitable ski slope on which to train. At one international event, the Italian team gave him a helmet to replace the one he had fastened on with string. However, he refused to give up and, in recognition of his dogged persistence, the British Federation told him that he could go to the Winter Olympics in Calgary in 1988 as Britain’s first and only Olympic ski-jumper, if he could jump seventy metres. He achieved 69.5, but they decided to enter him anyway. When the news reached him, he was living in a spare room in a mental hospital in Finland, where he had gone to train.12 In Calgary, Eddie ‘the Eagle’ secured a well-deserved 86th place out of 86 and was the only competitor singled out for a mention in the closing speech of the Olympics, when the crowd of thousands took up the chant ‘Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!’ He was so famous that when Ronald Reagan’s press spokesman Marlin Fitzwalter called his first press conference in four months, and was asked why there had been such a long silence, he replied that they had been waiting for Eddie the Eagle to get a medal.13 The Olympic authorities did not get the joke and amended the rules so that no competitor of his standard would ever be allowed to bring the sport into ridicule again.

  There were moments when the England cricket team appeared to be competing for an Eddie the Eagle award, particularly during the notorious ‘summer of four captains’ in 1988. The English had good reason to dread playing host to the West Indies, who had beaten them humiliatingly 5–0 in the 1984 test series. When Mike Gatting led the team back to the Caribbean in 1986, he was hit on the nose by a bouncer from the fast bowler Malcolm Marshall. The ball bounced from his nose on to the stumps and was returned to Marshall with added bits of bone and cartilage. After 1988’s First Test in Nottingham ended disappointingly in a draw, the Sun published a raunchy story about Mike Gatting and a hotel barmaid, the truth of which he denied. The selectors, however, seemed glad of an excuse to rid themselves of a captain who had already annoyed them in different ways. He was replaced by John Emburey, who was five years older and had never captained England. He led the team to defeat by 134 runs in the Second Test, and in the third by an innings and 156 runs. On that dismal occasion, no English batsman managed to score as many as 35 in either innings. Emburey was then dropped in favour of Chris Cowdrey, who had also never captained England before, and never would again, but he was the son of one of the greatest batsmen of the 1950s, and the chairman of the selectors, Peter May, was his godfather. England lost by ten wickets. Cowdrey injured his foot in a county match and dropped out of the series. The honour of completing England’s dismal ‘summer of four captains’ went to the veteran opening batsman Graham Gooch, who presided over an eight-wicket defeat.

  But not all was ignominy. The treat of the decade for English cricket fans was the legendary 1981 Ashes, or ‘Botham’s Ashes’. Ian Botham was the new cricket superstar, who had made his test debut in 1977 when he was twenty-one. He was one of the great all-rounders, a world-class bowler who was also formidable as a batsman. The test series that bears his name did not begin well. Despite his sporting prowess, Botham was not a good captain and the quality of his performance on the field suffered while he held the captaincy. As the First Test against the visiting Australians opened at Trent Bridge in June 1981, the Daily Telegraph recorded ruefully that he was ‘not the bowler . . . that he was two years ago’.14 His batting also declined. The Australians won with four wickets in hand, and the Second Test, which was a draw, was such poor entertainment that the players were assaulted by enraged spectators. England had gone twelve matches without a victory, equalling their longest-ever run of failure.15

  Botham resigned the captaincy on 8 July and the old stager Mike Brearley was recalled to see England through the Third Test, at Headingley, where the same dismal story continued. The Australians declared at 401, troubled only by Botham’s improved bowling, which accounted for six wickets. England were then all out for 174, again with only Botham showing any spirit at the crease by scoring 50. The English were subjected to the humiliation of being sent in to bat again at 3.53 p.m. on the third day and at 3.55 p.m. lost their first wicket, when Gooch was caught for a duck, having lasted just four balls in two innings. By the end of the day, England had scored 6 runs, 2 from no balls. In the morning, the bookies offered odds of 500–1 to anyone stupid enough to put money on an English victory.16 At 2.13 p.m. the next afternoon, the Australian bowler Dennis Lillee notched up a new record for England-Australia matches by taking his 142nd wicket. England had lost 5 men for 105, and needed 122 runs just to prevent themselves going down to an innings defeat, when Botham came in as seventh man. Suddenly there began one of those stories usually only found in boys’ comics. While other English wickets fell, one after another, no one, not even the ferocious Lillee, could stop Botham scoring runs and, after all the other English wickets had fallen, he was not out for 149. No English player had ever previously scored a century and taken even as many as 5 wickets in an innings against Australia. The visitors now had 339 minutes in which to score 130. They did not make it. The fast bowler, Bob Willis, took 8 Australian wickets for just 43 runs, the England wicket-keeper, Bob Taylor, achieved a world record by catching his 1,271st victim behind the stumps and Australia were all out for 111. England not only won the test, but went from there to win the series 3–1. When the Australian captain Kim Hughes was asked what had been the chief difference between the sides since the Second Test, he replied instantly: ‘Simple – Ian Botham.’ Mike Brearley concurred: ‘What Kim says is fair. Take Botham out of our side and it would make us look ordinary.’17

  The 1980s was possibly the worst decade English football ever endured, not for what happened on the pitch, but for the events in the stands that permanently changed the game. In 1982, England qualified for the World Cup in Spain, after an absence of twelve years, and got through to the second round, which was also as far as Northern Ireland progressed, while Scotland went out in the qualifying round. Four years later, in Mexico, England reached the quarter-final, while the other two were knocked out in the opening round; and in 1990, England achieved fourth place, losing to West Germany in the semi-final, the best outcome since 1966. The incident that stuck hardest in the memories of English fans took place in Mexico. As the English squad set off for the 1986 World Cup, they could see their way clearly through the early rounds, up against weaker teams. The first major problem was the quarter-final against Argentina. The Arge
ntine team had suffered an unforeseen humiliation in Spain in 1982. They had gone there thinking the World Cup was theirs. They had won on home ground in 1978 and had a new star player in Diego Maradona, then twenty-one years old, who promised to be the greatest footballer since Pele. However, they had not even reached the semi-finals when Maradona was sent off for kicking a Brazilian player in the testicles, and they were beaten 3–1. The Argentines were not likely to go out so easily in 1986. Their match against England, on 22 June 1986, was never going to be a simple sporting contest. Cheerleaders for both sides were hyping it up as if it were a rerun of the Falklands War. ‘Argies here we come’ was the headline in one British tabloid, while its nearest Argentinian equivalent, Cronica, ran a headline that translated as ‘We’re coming to get you, pirates!’18 The two governments became anxious about the possibility of serious trouble, and agreed to advise their respective team managers to warn the players not to inflame the situation. On the whole they did as asked. ‘Look, mate, I play football. About politics, I know nothing,’ Maradona insisted. In the sell-out crowd of 114,580 in the Azteca Stadium there was, surprisingly, just one fist fight, after an Argentinian ripped up a Union Jack. The real controversy was on the pitch.

  Five minutes into the second half, a defender, Steve Hodge, succeeded in taking the ball off an attacking Argentinian player, just aside of the penalty area, but miscued it, sending it high in the air back into the penalty area, when the English goalkeeper, Peter Shilton, and Maradona both jumped for it. A confused second later, the ball was in the net and Maradona was running off to celebrate with his team-mates, while an outraged Shilton signalled a foul. The linesman and referee allowed the goal. Maradona followed it later with a superb run that began beyond the halfway line, went past three defenders and outsmarted Shilton. As the game drew to a close, Gary Lineker scored what the English regarded as the equalizer, but the official score was 2–1, England were out and Argentina went on to win the World Cup. Afterwards, Bobby Robson paid an unqualified tribute to Maradona’s second ‘miracle’ goal. ‘It’s wonderful when the world can produce great players of his calibre,’19 he said. But even without having seen the film or stills photographs, he was sure that the first should have been disallowed because ‘Maradona handled the ball into the goal’.20 And that was, indeed, what had happened, as the photographic evidence proved. When the English players saw Maradona in the dressing room, they thought he might acknowledge that the goal was at least dubious, but he was having none of it. Challenged in public, he made what is probably the most famous remark ever uttered by a footballer. His actual words, recorded by one of the more reliable and dispassionate news agencies covering the event, were: ‘That goal was scored a little bit by the hand of God and another bit by Maradona’s head.’21

  Years later, Maradona admitted that the now infamous goal should never have been allowed; but if his behaviour at the time seems unsporting, it should be judged against what it meant to the Argentinians to be up against England four years after the war in the South Atlantic.’ Maradona said later:

  Before the match, we said football had nothing to do with the Malvinas war but we knew a lot of Argentinian kids had died there, shot down like birds. This was revenge. Bollocks was it just another match! It was more than winning a game, and it was more than knocking England out of the World Cup. We blamed the English players for everything that had happened, for all the suffering of the Argentine people.22

  Off the pitch, three tragedies changed the nature of English football as a spectator sport. The first was on 11 May 1985, as 11,000 spectators watched Bradford City play at home against Lincoln City. The wooden stadium in Bradford’s Valley Parade ground had been built in 1908. West Yorkshire County Council had written to the football club twice in 1984 warning that ‘the timber construction is a fire hazard, and in particular there is a build-up of combustible materials in the voids beneath the seats. A carelessly discarded cigarette would give rise to a fire risk.’23 Just before half-time, a match or a cigarette stubbed out in a polythene cup fell through the wooden slats on to the accumulated rubbish. Within about four minutes, the roof and stands were ablaze. Pictures broadcast live on television showed fans frantically scrambling to escape and a policeman running on to the pitch with his hair on fire. A shocking 56 people died and 255 were injured.

  It should have been plain that this was a ghastly accident for which the club was at fault, and that the spectators were the victims, but the government’s instinctive reaction was to assume that, somehow, football hooligans were responsible. The century-old link between football and casual violence was reckoned to have worsened during the 1970s, when English football fans developed an international reputation for bad behaviour. By 1985, after the miners and other ‘enemies within’ had been dealt with, football hooligans became a national obsession, the number one receptacle of public disapproval.

  Thus, when Thatcher and Leon Brittan, the home secretary, met to discuss the Bradford tragedy, they decided that any inquiry should take heed of rumours – unfounded rumours, but never mind – that the fire had been started by spectators throwing smoke bombs. Brittan appointed a High Court judge, Sir Oliver Popplewell, to investigate the fire. Controversially, the remit of his investigation also included trouble that had broken out on the same day during a match in Birmingham, where a fifteen-year-old boy had been killed and 125 people had been arrested. It was alleged by one of the more eminent spectators, Lord Mishcon, that when one of the Birmingham supporters, a young Asian, was arrested, about fifty Leeds fans made the Nazi salute and shouted ‘Seig Heil’.24 When Brittan announced his decision to the House of Commons, his Labour shadow, Gerald Kaufman, said that lumping the two incidents together was ‘deeply offensive to the bereaved and deeply offensive to the victims’. Brittan argued that it would be ‘wholly artificial’ to treat crowd behaviour and safety standards as separate issues.25 The Popplewell inquiry produced no evidence of bad behaviour in the Bradford tragedy. His report tried to dispel the beliefs that hooliganism was something new, that it was restricted to football matches or that it was specifically English, all without effect.

  However, there was an aspect of Popplewell’s findings that received enormous publicity. It identified what seems to have been a new phenomenon that football hooligans were not all drawn from the rough end of the working class. These ‘new hooligans’, as Popplewell called them, ‘often hold down good jobs during the week, dress stylishly and detach themselves from those fans with club scarves who travel on official coaches or trains. They plan their violence as a recreation in itself to which football is secondary or a mere background.’26 They were actually more organized than Popplewell realized, forming gangs with names like the Inter City Firm (ICF), which followed West Ham, so named because its members – who dressed smartly to avoid the attention of the police – travelled to away matches on the Inter City service. Then there were the ‘Service Crew’ attached to Leeds, the ‘Gooners’ from Arsenal, the Millwall ‘Bushwhackers’, the Leicester ‘Baby Squad’ and the Chelsea ‘Headhunters’. A member of the ICF, interviewed by Thames Television in August 1985, explained: ‘I think I fight, like, so I can make a name for meself and that, you know, hope people respect me for what I did.’27

  This phenomenon was neatly captured in a drama shown on BBC2 in February 1989. Written by Al Hunter and directed by Alan Clarke, The Firm was one of the best television films of the decade. It starred Gary Oldman as an estate agent named Bex, who leads one gang of hooligans in pitched street battles against another. One critic wrote:

  Bex is a new breed thug, of the kind now earnestly identified by sociologists (‘Why don’t we just tell him we like hitting people,’ he jeers, when one such appears on TV). He is thirty, earns good money, has a family and a neat new house. He and his ‘firm’ dress smartly, drive BMWs and travel first class to their bloody battle grounds. To his gang he is ‘a visionary’. He does it all, he tells his wife, ‘because I need the buzz’.28

  By mischief o
r coincidence, the film was broadcast the day after Colin Moynihan, the sports minister, appeared on BBC1’s Going Live!, optimistically explaining how ID cards would bring hooliganism under control. The one and only conclusion that Mrs Thatcher had drawn from the Popplewell report was that all football clubs should issue ID cards, so that troublemakers could be banned from matches, along with anyone who had not had the foresight to order a ticket in advance. Luton Town Football Club, chaired by an abrasive right-wing Conservative MP named David Evans, admitted no visitors at all; from August 1986, all home matches were played before an exclusive audience of registered Luton supporters living within twenty-five miles of the town.

  It was to no avail that Judge Popplewell emphasized that most people who went to football matches deplored the violence and wanted only to enjoy the game. By the time his report was published, the horror at Bradford had been overshadowed by the worst incidence of English football hooliganism in living memory, when Liverpool met the Italian club, Juventus, for the European Cup final at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium on 29 May 1985. About an hour before kick-off, Liverpool fans, who were already in belligerent mood, reputedly saw a banner at the far end of the stadium saying ‘Red Animals’, which sent them into a frenzy. They smashed through the inadequate barriers and laid into the Italians with fists, pieces of concrete and planks of wood, driving them back against a wall. Some of the victims had already been trampled to death before the wall gave way. Others were buried or trampled or crushed as it collapsed. When the police intervened, they were attacked. The Juventus players did not want to come on to the pitch, but were persuaded that cancelling the game would make the violence worse. It ended only as the teams appeared, an hour late and flanked by riot police. There were thirty-nine Italians and Belgians dead, and hundreds injured.