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 Even within the wider game, the conqueror of 1966 was seen as a remote, outdated figure; the only job offer immediately after his dismissal came from a boys’ team in Leek, Staffordshire, which admitted it could afford neither pay nor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
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