For Mrs Thatcher, the banter on the steps of Number 10 now seemed a very painful memory. By a hideous mischance, she too had been in Italy that evening, attending a meeting of the European Council in Venice. And since she was still trying to win her famous budget rebate, her countrymen’s misbehaviour could hardly have been more embarrassing. When she met the press the next day, she was visibly angry. The fans’ behaviour, she said, was ‘disgraceful’, not least because they had betrayed their own players. ‘They are a splendid team and I think most of them stand for all that is best in Britain and I understand that it would have been extremely embarrassing for them – anything that fell below the best of British standards. I can’t speak too strongly about it.’9
During the 1970s and 1980s, when no weekend seemed complete without news of some railway-station riot, there were always those who claimed that hooliganism was blown out of all proportion by reactionary politicians and exploitative journalists. This view was not shared by the correspondents who had seen the fighting in Italy at first hand. As the Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney pointed out, the scenes in Turin were merely the latest in a long line of horrific incidents abroad, including the ‘attempted sacking of Barcelona by a contingent of the Glasgow Rangers infantry’ in 1972, the ‘assault on Rotterdam by Tottenham fans’ in 1974, the rioting by Leeds fans at the European Cup final in Paris in 1975 and an outbreak of hooliganism by England fans in Luxembourg in 1977. Of course other countries’ fans were not perfect; still, McIlvanney thought Britain was unrivalled ‘as the world’s leading exporter of football hooligans’, whose arrival overseas was ‘only marginally more welcome than consignments of the Black Death’. Perhaps it was just as well, then, that the predictions of English glory turned out to be completely misguided, since Greenwood’s side lost their next match and came home after the group stage. ‘We’ll Fight Back’, promised the Mirror. Given what had happened in Turin, it was not the best choice of words.10
What had happened in Turin was not an unfortunate aberration; it was part of a depressing trend. Probably the best-known England match of this period came just over a year later, in September 1981, when they were humiliated 2–1 in Oslo in a World Cup qualifier. It was this result that inspired the local commentator, Bjørge Lillelien, to deliver one of the most famous tirades in sporting history, and certainly the only example of Norwegian television that most people in Britain have ever heard of:
Vi har slått England! England, kjempers fødeland! [We have beaten England! England, birthplace of giants!] Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, vi har slått dem alle sammen, vi har slått dem alle sammen! [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!fn1
Amazingly, this outburst was later chosen by the Norwegian Arts Council to represent their country’s contribution to mankind’s cultural heritage. Still, Greenwood’s men managed to scrape through the group, while Norway finished bottom. So, although nobody remembers it this way, Lord Nelson and Lord Beaverbrook had the last laugh.11
In the public mind, the match in Oslo was that relative rarity, an England game that made the headlines for what happened on the pitch rather than off it. Rather more typical was a trip to Basle three months earlier: another 2–1 defeat, memorable this time for the reaction of the travelling fans. The Mirror’s front page captured the mood:
A STAB IN THE BACK FOR BRITAIN
In the Battle of Basle, a youth stabs a rival in the back and shames his nation.
All around him hooligans wearing the colours of England and carrying Union Jacks were punching and kicking anyone within reach.
The battle started after Switzerland scored twice against England in Saturday’s World Cup qualifying game. The mixture of drink and looming defeat sent the thugs wild.
England’s outraged soccer chiefs are now threatening to ban all fans – good and bad – from following the team.
They fear this could be the only way to stop the Union Jack becoming an emblem of shame in Europe.
Even allowing for exaggeration, the so-called ‘Battle of Basle’ was a genuinely shameful moment for English football. Only 2,000 fans had travelled to Switzerland, yet they caused mayhem, looting a jeweller’s shop and ransacking a pub in the city centre before the game. During the match they not only attacked dumbfounded Swiss supporters but battered a security man with – of all things – a Union Jack flagpole. The Football Association complained that their hosts should have made more stringent preparations, yet this was the first match in Swiss history to which the local police had brought tear gas and dogs. It was clear, though, that the long-serving FA secretary, Ted Croker, was tired of apologizing for his countrymen. ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I don’t care if we have no more support away from home.’12
In the meantime, Fleet Street’s leader writers wrung their hands with exquisite distress. ‘The nation that gave football to the world can now only give it the football hooligan,’ said the Mirror. ‘We leave our mark in Europe not through the skill of our players but by the riots, wreckage, vandalism, arrests and deportations of those who follow them.’ The Union Jack, agreed the Express, had become a ‘flag of shame’, while the Guardian’s Patrick Barclay thought that ‘the events in Turin and Basle … verged on international incidents [which] went beyond football’. He blamed ‘the emergence in recent years of a disagreeable, pseudo-patriotic strand in British society or, to be more precise, English society’.
There was a lot of truth in this. Nobody who had watched England play since 1966, or who had read the tabloids during the long years of strikes and stagflation, could have failed to notice that the disappointments of the age had given rise to a peculiarly joyless kind of patriotism, shot through with surly resentment. Visitors to Wembley invariably found that the atmosphere had become a cross between Hogarth’s Gin Lane and a Bavarian beer hall in the early 1920s, the bleak concrete terraces lined with ‘crop-headed, thick-necked men’ who sang ‘mind-bogglingly obscene’ patriotic songs and gave ‘drunken Nazi salutes’ during the national anthem. As McIlvanney remarked, it was as if ‘the Brits, having been swept into a corner economically and politically, are currently afflicted with a national sense of inadequacy that includes among its cruder manifestations a tendency to kick foreigners in the testicles’.13
But Barclay was right to identify this as a peculiarly English, rather than British, phenomenon. When the World Cup kicked off in Spain in 1982, no fewer than three teams from the United Kingdom had qualified. As was traditional, the Scots crashed out in the first round, while Northern Ireland performed splendidly to defeat the hosts. Yet among thousands of travelling fans from Scotland and Northern Ireland, a mere handful were arrested, usually after drink had been taken. Even in defeat, wrote one reporter, Scotland’s fans ‘danced, dived into ornamental fountains, performed highland flings and gathered around the pipers to sing themselves hoarse’. But ‘there was no trouble’, and in Malaga, where the Scots played their final game, they were so popular that ‘thousands of men, women and children’ came to see them off, ‘waving tartan scarves and lion rampant flags’.14
The contrast with the Scots’ southern counterparts was, from an English perspective, painful to behold. Once again England arrived in Spain with genuine hopes of winning the competition. Once again optimism gave way to inevitable disappointment, as, after a promising start, Greenwood’s men fizzled out with two goalless draws. And once again their fans made themselves thoroughly unpopular. With victory in the Falklands having been secured a few days earlier, many Englishmen arrived wearing T-shirts with the legend ‘World Cup Task Force 82’, and sang ‘Argentina, Argentina, what’s it like to lose a war?’ The people of Bilbao, wrote the Observer’s Robert Low, had ‘looked forward to welcoming the English because of their historic links with us’. But they would ‘not be sorry to see the last of the massed gangs of
yobs swathed in Union Jacks, after the familiar trail of broken bar windows, assaults, abuse and unpaid drink bills’.
The really depressing thing was that, by now, broken windows and late-night brawls had become so routine that most papers barely reported them. Even the relentlessly nationalistic songs provoked remarkably little comment back home. As Low mordantly put it, ‘Jingoism rules OK.’ By the time they left, sodden with drink and scorched by the sun, England’s fans had made themselves no friends at all. And that, of course, was precisely how they liked it.15
‘Football matters,’ wrote Lincoln Allison in his book Condition of England (1981). ‘It is part of the fabric of English life in many different ways. It affects the hopes, dreams and the sense of personal identity of the millions who follow it and gamble on it and the hundreds of thousands who play it or watch it “live”.’ There were millions, of course, who hated football, or were simply indifferent to it. Yet for those who loved the national game, it often provided a public narrative far more meaningful than anything that happened at Westminster. It was the supreme expression of the ‘identity, the loyalty and solidarity’ of countless working-class communities, from Aberdeen and Arbroath to Bolton and Blackburn. And in the eyes of the press, football acted as a mirror, reflecting society as it coped with political and cultural change. When a united Great Britain team thrashed the Rest of Europe in 1947, it was a reminder that British was best. When England won the World Cup in 1966, the celebrations became part of the rose-tinted legend of the Swinging Sixties. And so, when hooligans ran riot in Basle and Turin, it was hardly surprising that so many people saw it as a damning reflection of the state of the nation.16
Football, as Allison pointed out, was a living link with the Victorian past, dominated by teams playing ‘in the same competition, to the same rules, on the same grounds and in the same colours as they did three generations ago’. So perhaps it was fitting that, with so many Victorian institutions crumbling beneath the juggernaut of economic change, the Victorian game was in such a wretched condition. In the late 1940s, the high point of the game’s popularity as a national spectacle, the Football League had sold more than 40 million tickets a season. Yet, by 1982, the total had fallen below 20 million for the first time in living memory, reaching a nadir of just 16½ million four years later. Once, football had been the ‘working man’s ballet’, but now the working man had better things to do on a Saturday. Affluence and mobility had eaten away at the old loyalties; as the Guardian remarked in April 1980, ‘television provides rival attractions, and the private car gives people opportunities to pursue other interests which were undreamt of by our grandfathers’. Indeed, at the turn of the 1980s it was hard to open a newspaper without coming across an obituary for football as a national pastime. In the future, predicted the paper’s David Lacey, ‘soccer will inevitably become less of a mass entertainment and more of an occasional diversion’.17
Football was not alone in struggling to hold on to its traditional adherents. Rugby clubs, cricket counties, even pubs and churches faced similar challenges; for every football chairman agonizing over his empty stands, there were plenty of vicars contemplating rows of deserted pews. But what made football’s decline so compelling was that it was accelerated by fears of hooliganism. Later, some fans, reacting against the alleged corporate corruption of the Premier League, tried to rehabilitate the 1970s and 1980s as a lost golden age of the industrial working-class game, with an honesty and vibrancy that have now been lost. But this is absolutely not how it appeared at the time.18
Take, for example, what happened on the first Saturday in September 1980, only a few weeks after England’s disgrace in Turin. In many respects it was a typical Saturday in the football calendar. Even the disturbances at Chelsea’s match against West Ham, where forty-two fans were arrested, were really just par for the course. Yet they were driven off the back pages by events at Second Division Oldham, who were hosting Sheffield Wednesday. Enraged by a contentious sending-off, the visiting fans ‘tore lumps of concrete out of the terraces to use as ammunition’, clambered over the fences and invaded the pitch, causing a half-hour delay until the police restored order. What was really shocking, though, was that when Wednesday’s manager, the former World Cup winner Jack Charlton, went on to the pitch to remonstrate with his fans, they attacked him, too. When he walked off the field, he wept.
‘The last time a Charlton eye shed a tear in public’, observed David Lacey, ‘was during England’s moment of triumph at the end of the 1966 World Cup final’. That happy hour seemed so distant that it might as well have happened in the reign of Queen Victoria. Back in 1966, Charlton had been renowned as one of the hardest men in English football, yet now he had been reduced to tears by his own fans. ‘All these rats make me sick,’ he explained afterwards. ‘When I cried at Oldham I did not cry just for football – I cried for all the innocent people who are not connected with the game. I cried for the mothers and fathers who took their children out of the ground. Supporters who will be lost to the game.’19
Eleven days later, West Ham were in Madrid to play in the European Cup Winners’ Cup. The club had done its utmost to deter potential troublemakers from travelling. Members of the official supporters’ club had been asked to submit photos and passport details when they applied for tickets, and the captain, Billy Bonds, had signed a letter to every ticket-holder begging them to behave. But it was the same old story: fighting on the terraces, baton charges by the police, ‘waves of fleeing spectators … scrambling across the distant terraces’. The West Ham fans, as was traditional, insisted that they were completely blameless and had been provoked by the police. But the British press corps told a different story. ‘It is beyond reason’, thought The Times’s correspondent, ‘that a human being can travel so far, supposedly in support of his club, and before the echo of the first whistle of a potentially memorable evening has died away start to urinate from a balcony on to the crowd below.’ As punishment, West Ham were ordered to play the return leg behind closed doors. But as Bonds remarked, it was only a matter of time before the European football authorities decided, ‘That’s it, we’ve had enough,’ and banned English clubs for good. As it turned out, it took them less than five years.20
Most fans were not hooligans. As the novelist Nick Hornby later recalled, football crowds in the early 1980s included ‘actors and publicity girls and teachers and accountants and doctors and nurses, as well as salt-of-the-earth working-class men in caps and loud-mouthed thugs’. But as Hornby’s book Fever Pitch (1992) makes very clear, hooliganism was a reality, not an invented panic. Violence was more common, he thinks, in the early 1970s (‘that is to say, there was fighting more or less every week’), but by the 1980s it had become ‘less predictable and much nastier’, with police regularly confiscating ‘knives and machetes and other weapons I did not recognise, things with spikes coming out of them’. It was too easy to dismiss hooliganism as a ‘moral panic’, agreed the historian James Walvin in Football and the Decline of Britain (1986), written after the Heysel disaster. ‘The problem of hooliganism among fans is a real one; the behaviour of certain sections of fans has changed, has become more violent, more abusive (and more racist).’21
Anyone who thinks hooliganism was invented by the tabloids to frighten the middle classes ought to read the coverage in liberal newspapers such as the Guardian and the Observer. Here, for example, is the opening of a feature by the Guardian’s Robert Armstrong in December 1979:
Violence threatens in many forms at a football match. Bricks, bottles, belts, darts, coins, combs, knives and boots are some of the better-known objects that can be transformed into a lethal weapon and used to maim or even kill. Serious injury can also befall the innocent bystander caught up in a police charge or swept against the crush barriers or trampled underfoot when the crowd surges forward to get a better view of the goal …
Many supporters, especially those over 35, have drawn their own conclusion: avoid a broken head by staying at home and watchin
g Grandstand. Others will only turn up if they can lay their hands on stand tickets. A few adopt the strategy of avoiding the terraces behind the goals – the time-honoured rendezvous of the young Turks the press love to hate. Violence can, of course, take place outside or well away from the ground on the day of a match and no one can be sure of avoiding the random incident.
As Armstrong observed, the clubs always denied that hooligans were ‘true supporters’. But all the evidence showed that ‘the aggressors are drawn from those hard-core supporters who never miss a match, home or away’. It was a myth, therefore, that violence was an alien intrusion that had inexplicably seeped into football’s bloodstream. By the early 1980s violence was an indelible part of the game.
Armstrong thought football was suffering from the same disease that had blighted British industry since the Second World War: a catastrophic lack of capital investment, which had left many stadiums little better than overcrowded slums, their crumbling terraces left open to the elements, their fans fenced in like animals in a zoo. And in stark contrast to modern writers who romanticize the lost world of scarves, rattles and Inter-City football specials, he saw nothing romantic in the squalid surroundings and Stone Age violence of Saturday afternoons. Even the transport facilities, he pointed out, were often abysmal. Since supporters smashed up the carriages and tore out the toilets, British Rail had taken to corralling them in dilapidated trains without any facilities at all. ‘The sight of overweight 16-year-olds tanking up on canned lager on a British Rail Away-day’, he wrote, ‘should convince club chairmen that there is nothing sacred about a day out at a game of football.’22
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