For all the strength and diversity of the English First Division, the players who were selected for the national team in the early 1970s made for an England side that, unlike their immediate predecessors, turned out to be less than the sum of their combined talents. Alf Ramsey, who had painstakingly assembled a World Cup-winning squad from the unprepossessing parts he had inherited from Walter Winterbottom, tinkered frantically with the engine but it never roared into life again as it had done in the 1960s.
It took the FA six months to sack Ramsey after the Poland game in 1973. By contrast, Steve McClaren went the morning after a defeat at Wembley by Croatia ensured that England would not qualify for the finals of the European Championships of 2008. It was not courtesy or pastoral counselling that accounted for the delay in 1973; that was simply the way things were done back then. It was certainly not because that failure to qualify for the 1974 World Cup was considered by anyone in English football – players, press, supporters or management – as anything other than disastrous and humiliating. It took weeks for England supporters to get over the shock and the wounds opened up again as soon as the tournament started. Poland did well, finishing third, which made some England supporters think that, had their team qualified, they might have won it. This view rests on the rather large assumption that England would have been able to deal with the remarkable Holland team, who were clearly the best side in the tournament, with every outfield player comfortable on the ball and capable of playing in any position.
England had suffered footballing shocks before, but no previous setback had the impact of their failure to defeat Poland at Wembley in 1973, which effectively kept England out of world football for the next nine years. When they returned to the world stage in 1982 the team would exit from the competition undefeated but virtually goalless. In 1966, footballing triumph had led the country to believe that it was a world superpower again as it had not been since 1945, and that Harold Wilson’s promises of a new Britain were being realised. What hurt so much in 1973 was that the England football team now seemed to symbolise nothing so much as national decline. For people uninterested in sport it can certainly appear as if linking football, the country’s most popular sport, with the state of the nation is an entirely pointless exercise. Yet sport, as many emerging nations would be quick to point out, does more for national prestige than almost any other activity. A strong economy takes years to grow and in a global economy it is to a large extent dependent on forces outside the control of the people charged with reinvigorating it. Medals in the Olympic Games, a strong performance in the World Cup, England regaining the Ashes, the England rugby union team beating the All Blacks, a British tennis player or golfer at the top of the world rankings, an Englishman winning the F1 world championship, these successes resonate and they make their countrymen proud and happy.
In the mid-1970s, however, the performances of the England football team became a cause of national anguish, mostly because the Football Association, which had unceremoniously dispensed with the services of Alf Ramsey, chose the wrong man to take his place. At first glance the FA’s choice was understandable. Don Revie had been the manager of a successful if much-disliked Leeds United for a dozen years, but during the 1973–4 season they underwent something of a change of style. Brian Clough, his nemesis, had called Revie’s claim to have created a Leeds United ‘family’ one that ‘had more in keeping with the Mafia than Mothercare’. Instead of kicking everything that moved, Leeds decided to play the opposition at football. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, going undefeated for the first twenty-nine games of the season (a record that stood until the Arsenal ‘Invincibles’ thirty years later) and winning the First Division by a distance. The FA tempted Revie to take the England job with the offer of a salary considerably higher than the one they had grudgingly paid Ramsey.
The country thought the England team was being reinvented in the image of the new decade after Ramsey’s 1950s appearance and vowels as strangulated as those of Ted Heath, the prime minister who had emerged from a working-class home in Kent. Revie tried to turn England matches at Wembley into the football equivalent of the Last Night of the Proms by replacing the dirge of the national anthem with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, just as, thirty years later, the England and Wales Cricket Board had the bright idea of disguising the vulnerability of England’s top order to an early collapse by introducing community singing of ‘Jerusalem’. Initially, it appeared to be successful as England comfortably scored three times without reply against Czechoslovakia in Revie’s first game in charge.
Revie had negotiated for himself an annual salary of £20,000, nearly three times the miserly £7,200 the FA had been paying Ramsey at the start of 1974. The manager of England’s only World Cup-winning side retired on an occupational pension of £1,200 p.a. Revie extended the FA’s largesse to the players, whose match fees were considerably increased. He also supervised a commercial deal with the sportswear company Admiral who made the shirts worn by Leeds United and who now became the official England kit supplier. Ramsey had not wanted money to sully the purity of the England shirt and would have regarded these innovations as anathema. He would also have denigrated Revie’s initial attempts to woo the media. Ramsey, as we have seen, loathed the media and made no concessions towards them but, of course, when the time came when he could have used their support they were not to be seen. Ramsey felt there was no point begging the media to like him. If he won football matches he knew they would like him and if he lost them he knew the press would call for his head no matter how much they liked him so it was a waste of effort to seek their favours. Revie courted the media because he wanted to lose the unlovable tag which he felt the press had unfairly hung round his neck at Elland Road and which demeaned the great side he had built at Leeds. These were all admirable ambitions, but Ramsey was proved right in the end. As soon as England started to stumble on the field, the press launched a predictable onslaught on the new ‘track-suit manager’ whom they had previously hailed as the right man for a new era on his appointment.
At Leeds, one of Revie’s strengths was the continuity of personnel in his first team, season after season. The side that made Leeds great was Sprake, Reaney, Cooper, Bremner, Charlton, Hunter, Lorimer, Clarke, Jones, Giles and Gray. The utility player Paul Madeley filled in wherever there was a vacancy. Eventually David Harvey replaced Gary Sprake, Gordon McQueen took over when Jack Charlton retired and Joe Jordan led the line in place of Mick Jones, but the core of that team remained unchanged for more than six years. When Revie took over England he tried to re-create the concept of the family which Brian Clough had dismissed so witheringly. However, most of the Leeds players had been with Revie all their professional lives and had grown up with the carpet bowls and the bingo, had appreciated their wives’ birthdays being remembered and the children’s parties at Christmas. For Mick Channon or Ray Clemence or Alan Ball, however, these testimonies to Revie’s caring nature were what happened at Leeds and made no impact on them. They were seasoned internationals and felt these attempts to foster unity to be rather beneath them. They certainly resented the 10 p.m. curfew which the Leeds players had always accepted without demur.
Revie also tried to introduce a sense of modern technocratic professionalism into the players’ lives by presenting them with dossiers containing detailed information on each of the players they would be facing in the next international match. Brian Clough once more displayed his scorn for Revie’s tactics. ‘Dossiers!’ he mocked. ‘Footballers don’t read dossiers! Footballers forget to bring their passports when they go on foreign trips. Footballers lose the keys to their hotel rooms!’ He wasn’t completely wrong. There is a difference between showing the players that the manager and coaching staff understand the nature of their opponents and have prepared training routines accordingly and overwhelming players with irrelevant information and making them so aware of their opponents’ strengths that they forget their own.
In addition, the continuity which served Lee
ds United so well for so long disappeared when Revie took charge of the national side. Part of the problem was that instead of choosing eleven from a first team squad of fourteen or fifteen, Revie himself was overwhelmed by the vast resources now available to him. Unlike Ramsey, who experimented reluctantly and preferred to stay with a tried and tested group whom he liked and respected, Revie could not make up his mind and stick to it. In his twenty-nine games in charge he picked fifty-two different players. His choices of captain reflected this state of uncertainty. Over the course of his three-year tenure Revie switched the armband around from Emlyn Hughes to Alan Ball to Gerry Francis, to Kevin Keegan and Mick Channon. Under Ramsey the captain was Bobby Moore and everyone knew it. When Revie left England nobody was quite sure who the official England captain was any more. It left everyone feeling somewhat unsettled.
Kevin Keegan is watched by manager Don Revie during an England training session, 7 February 1977 (Popperfoto / Getty Images).
Revie was certainly unlucky with injuries. Two of his key players, Roy McFarland at centre-back and Colin Bell, who was ready to assume the role played by Bobby Charlton under Ramsey, had their careers significantly interrupted by serious injury. It is doubtful though, even with those two constantly fit and available, that Revie’s England would have approached the authority that Ramsey’s team at its best conveyed. Admittedly, Ramsey did not have to qualify for the World Cup in 1966 when England were the hosts and in 1970 when they were the holders and when he did have to do so in 1973 he failed, but his successor seemed to be as out of his depth in the new Europe as Ramsey had been against West Germany in 1972 and Poland in 1973. Just as the United Kingdom was joining the Common Market and officially becoming part of the European Economic Community, England seemed to be increasingly puzzled by European football.
Tom Stoppard’s memorable 1977 television play Professional Foul is centred on an international colloquium on philosophy being held in Prague to which a number of English academics have been invited, chief among whom is Professor Anderson (played by Peter Barkworth) who holds the Chair of Ethics at Cambridge University. Anderson is delighted to be there as the colloquium coincides with an England World Cup qualifying match against Czechoslovakia for which Anderson has acquired a ticket. The football is a subplot to Stoppard’s main purpose, which is to dramatise Charter 77 and the iniquities imposed on academic freedom by petty Czech tyrannies. Anderson initially refuses to smuggle a controversial Ph.D. thesis out of the country because he feels it would be unethical and discourteous to his hosts, but he changes his mind when he is confronted by the reality of daily life in Prague under the Communist regime. He is staying in the same hotel as the England players and in the lift he warns two of them of a Czech move from a free-kick which, he has observed, has brought them many goals. The players laugh and ignore him. Later, after missing the game because of the main plot, he listens to a report of the action telephoned into the sports desk in London by a broadsheet journalist which, to his horror, contains a Czech goal scored from a free-kick given for a professional foul and scored in exactly the manner he had warned about. England have clearly lost badly. As Anderson quietly leaves the room the journalist is enunciating slowly, ‘Like… tragic… opera, things… got… worse… after… the… interval.’ In this one speech Stoppard has precisely evoked the climate surrounding the England football team under Revie.
Despite beating Czechoslovakia 3–0 at home in the first of the qualifying games for the 1976 European Championships England lost the return match 2–1 and finished second in a group in which only the first-placed team advanced to the knock-out stage. Until UEFA revised the format in 1980 this was how the tournament was played so Revie didn’t even reach the quarter-final as Ramsey had done in 1972. Everything now hinged on qualification for the World Cup finals due to take place in Argentina in 1978. Whatever the tensions between England and Argentina had been since 1966, Revie’s job was to focus on finishing ahead of Italy, Finland and Luxembourg. In the event, qualification hinged on the game in Rome, which Revie badly miscalculated. He made six changes from the previous match against Finland and included Brian Greenhoff and Trevor Cherry, with a rare cap for Stan Bowles who had been outstanding for Queens Park Rangers when they were pipped at the post for the League Championship by Liverpool at the end of the previous season. None of them were established internationals and, in a match of such importance, their lack of experience cost England dear as Italy ran out comfortable 2–0 winners. Bowles, Keegan and Channon made no impact on the impregnable Italian back three of Cuccureddu and the formidable Facchetti and Gentile. Even though England won the return match at Wembley twelve months later by the identical 2–0 scoreline, Italy qualified for Argentina on goal difference.
For the second World Cup in a row, England would not even be one of the sixteen teams who competed in the finals, and it certainly didn’t help that Scotland reached the finals in both 1974 and 1978. In the summer of 1973 the West Indies played three Test matches in England, winning two of them by overwhelming margins and drawing the other. The final Test at Lord’s, interrupted for the first time by the need to clear a cricket ground following a bomb warning, was won by an innings and 225 runs as England capitulated before a triumphant crowd, seemingly composed entirely of West Indian immigrants or those of West Indian descent. It was a confirmation that the impact of immigration was starting to become widely visible. The following winter of 1974–5, England lost the Ashes in Australia as the fearsome fast-bowling combination of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson battered England into submission. The press became increasingly vituperative about England’s sporting failures as the old restraints that had moderated press reaction in previous years were discarded. England’s increasingly desperate and ineffective performances on the sports field now seemed more and more symbolic of the successive crises gripping the country.
The quadrupling of oil prices from $3 to nearly $12 a barrel combined with an oil embargo in an immediate response to the West’s perceived support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 had an immediate impact on all Western economies causing both recession and inflation known by the composite term of ‘stagflation’. The National Union of Mineworkers, who held a unique position in the British psyche, exploited the power given to them by OPEC by instituting a ban on overtime and so began the power cuts that caused the electorate to lose patience with the government. For Heath and his government this flexing of union muscles was simply too blatant to be ignored.
In early 1974 Edward Heath called a snap election as he tried to face down the unions who had destroyed his prices and incomes policy and forced a three-day week on a scandalised public. The guttering candles that burned in homes deprived of electricity in the winter of 1973–4 seemed like appropriate successors to the Union Jack as symbols of a nation in decline. Heath’s election slogan asked the question ‘Who governs Britain?’ He was to receive a chastening answer. The result of the election held on 28 February was that the Tories acquired the largest share of the votes but Labour picked up twenty seats to finish at 301 while the Conservative party lost thirty-seven to finish at 297. Heath spent a frantic weekend trying unavailingly to persuade Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe that the Liberals should join a Tory-led coalition, so on the Monday evening a surprised but delighted Harold Wilson returned to Downing Street at the head of a minority government. He was soon faced with runaway inflation as union disputes were resolved at the cost of high wage settlements with no consequent increase in productivity.
The composition of the new parliament made for an unstable government and within eight months the country was asked to go to the polls again. This time a slightly more convincing answer was given as a 2 per cent swing and a gain of a further eighteen seats gave Labour a tiny overall majority of three seats with which they were determined to govern. For the next five years they did, with the increasingly familiar sight of ill and incapacitated Labour MPs being pushed in wheelchairs, some of them attached to a hospital drip, through the lobby
in order to vote as the Conservative Chief Whip refused to pair in accordance with long-standing tradition.
With the exception of their extremely vibrant and varied output of popular music, the 1970s have – not unfairly – had a bad press. The decade seems in retrospect to have been drab and depressing, one in which the colours brown and beige predominated in clothes and in interior design, symbolising the general atmosphere in the country. The almost even split in the House of Commons reflected a country that was similarly divided. The Thatcherites of the 1980s would deliberately distance themselves from the One Nation Tories of the 1970–4 government, while splits in the Labour party which started in the 1970s made the party unelectable for nearly twenty years. The humiliation of taking a begging bowl to the International Monetary Fund and the fear that the world order had been upended by Arabs in native dress shopping in Harrods should not disguise the fact that anyone who was in constant employment in the 1970s was likely to benefit from rising living standards. There was a constant fear about the fragility of the pound which had been devalued in November 1967 from $2.80 to $2.40 and continued to fall until, briefly, it almost reached parity with the dollar in the 1980s. Yet increasing numbers of British people continued to travel abroad: from 1 January each year ITV was filled with commercials extolling the virtues of package holidays in foreign resorts where you could be sure of sunshine – even if you couldn’t be sure that your hotel had been built before you arrived there.
Four Lions Page 23