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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Set against a backdrop of economic recession, rampant hooliganism and suspect fashion, Go To War tells the story of how triumph and tragedy shaped English football during the 1980s. It was a decade in which some fans died watching the game they loved, and at times, the 'slum sport' seemed set to implode. Yet, remarkably, the game was on the cusp of morphing into the behemoth it has become today. Throughout this explosive book, author Jon Spurling delves into the stories behind the successes and strife at clubs including Liverpool, Aston Villa and Arsenal, investigates the trials and tribulations of the England team and explores how 'small-town boys' from Luton, Watford and Wimbledon made their mark. The decade also heralded the arrival of artificial pitches and fanzines, and Spurling introduces us to the new breed of high-profile executives, like Irving Scholar and Martin Edwards, who soon got busy changing the face of football. Thirty years in the making, Go To War draws heavily on interviews conducted with '80s icons including Terry Butcher, Graeme Sharp and Ray Wilkins, managerial legends like Howard Kendall and Bobby Robson and FA Cup heroes Ricky Villa and Norman Whiteside. Like its precursor, the bestselling Get It On: How the '70s Rocked Football, Go To War provides a unique insight into a pivotal footballing decade.
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To my dad – the most splendid of fellows. 19/03/1931 – 18/06/2024 Xvi
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Mel Smith (as a sociologist): Well, my team and I have really concerned ourselves fundamentally with a statistical analysis of soccer violence as a whole, in tandem with and related to a psycho-chemical and, broadly speaking, a behavioural analysis of over a thousand individual soccer hooligans. And we’ve come to the inevitable conclusion that the one course of action that the authorities must take is to cut off their goolies. Griff Rhys Jones (as the interviewer): (laughs awkwardly) I’m sorry? Smith: Cut their goolies off.
Not the Nine O’clock News sketch, 1981
‘I was on tour with West Ham in the Far East and switched on the television to see footage of the Heysel disaster. We didn’t need subtitles to tell us that things couldn’t carry on like this anymore.’
Tony Cottee
‘Much of what happened in the Premier League era – the TV exposure, the commercialisation – had its roots in the ’80s. But few if any could have foreseen that, because football was at war with itself.’
Jimmy Hillviii
Contents
Foreword by Mike Ingham
History in the making can only truly be judged retrospectively.
When you are living through turbulent times, it can be hard to stand back and imagine what impact these events will have on the future. When you read this book, it helps you recognise how many seeds were being sown four decades ago for the modern-day game. Just as the new technology of the 1980s went on to pave the way and shape today’s popular music, so it was in football.
It was a decade of two halves. The first dominated by English clubs in Europe, the second spent in self-inflicted isolation.
Our national sport will always be a mirror image of society and after the glam rock ‘Get It On’ era, the ’80s, by way of contrast, heralded more anger and disenchantment. There was no greater symbol of that than the Beastie Boys on the terraces. The ticking time-bomb finally exploded, and in this book you are shudderingly transported back to the carnage of Luton v. Millwall and Birmingham v. Leeds, both matches leading to the watershed horror of Heysel.
That fateful night in Brussels was my first European Cup final as a commentator. I ended up becoming a war correspondent, and xiieven today the flashbacks to the game remain painful. I commend Jon for revisiting a story that I believe continues to be an ‘elephant in the room’ for English football.
The hugely different tragedies of Bradford and Hillsborough defined a decade of misery for the game when arguably the most significant personalities turned out to be Justice Oliver Popplewell and Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor, whose recommendations brought about so much long-overdue change.
Away from the despair, there were still authentic footballing icons who entertained not only on the pitch but also on these pages. What sets this book apart is the author’s foresight in securing interviews many years ago, with several national treasures sadly no longer with us, like Howard Kendall, Ray Wilkins and Trevor Francis.
This was an age when the cult of personality was also being extended to the boardroom and there are hilarious anecdotes and memories of shrinking violets like Doug Ellis, Peter Swales and Robert Maxwell. It is also so heartwarming to read and remember how coveted, still, were the two major cup competitions, which are nowadays in danger of being devalued. Wembley 1987 is still the greatest day in Coventry City’s history.
So, there is light and shade in this book, something that my colleague and mentor the late Peter Jones always impressed on me as a commentator. Peter and my predecessor as a correspondent Bryon Butler were the two most mellifluous voices in radio sport and the ’80s would be their last decade on the airwaves. Paradoxically, this tormented time represented the last hurrah for football on the wireless before video did it’s best to kill the radio star. It was a time when to find out a cup draw you listened to your transistor and sports reports still always led with the classified results. It’s amazing to reflect now that when Martin Hayes scored his celebrated Saturday xiiiafternoon winner for Arsenal at Middlesbrough on the way to their ‘Fever Pitch’ title in 1989, you could only listen live and not view.
Go To War steers you to the crossroads when a threatened breakaway by the so called ‘Big Five’ turned out to be a precursor of Sky TV and the Premier League. This book leads you to the brink of Super Sunday, breaking news and the Brit Pop generation. It looks back with a deep, caring sense of historical perspective.
Mike InghamAugust 2024xiv
Introduction
GoToWaris a book about 1980s football and its prime movers and shakers, including some of the leading players and managers. But to show what kind of an era it was, it also encompasses heavy hitting Conservative Party politicians like Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a new breed of club executives like media mogul Robert Maxwell, whose media profile was on an upward trajectory, and Lord Justice Taylor, whose findings in 1989 and subsequent report in 1990 would irrevocably change the face of English football. It also focuses on some cult heroes and hitherto hidden figures, including inflatable banana-wielding supporters, FA Cup giant killers and those fans and journalists who were present and correct at the decade’s most defining matches. Like it’s prequel, GetItOn:Howthe’70sRockedFootball, it doesn’t focus specifically on results and seasons and who went up and down. It’s about the game itself, and also the politics, the popular culture and the events of the era. The different strands are interconnected, because not only was football shaped by what swirled around it, the national game in the ’80s defined the timbre of the era. Some of the tales, including Malcolm Allison’s ill-fated second spell at Manchester City and British xviplayers’ experiences in the North American Soccer League (NASL), straddle both decades. The far-reaching effects of the Taylor report wouldn’t be felt until the ’90s. Decades don’t adhere to definitive beginnings and ends.
A word or two about the title – GoToWar. As well as being a phrase from the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song ‘Two Tribes’, which describes the conflict between the Soviets and the Americans during the Cold War in the ’80s, the title neatly sums up the prevailing mood surrounding the sport during this era. Viewing football as a serious law and order problem, the government declared war on the game. Tribes of football supporters declared war on one another, both at home and abroad, inside dilapidated and decaying stadia, and England played at the ’82 and ’86 World Cups with the Falklands War all too prevalent in the players’ minds. Mirroring the combative atmosphere on the terraces, teams also played in a far more direct and abrasive style then too. ‘We were skilled, but we were also tough, because you had to be. It was our bread and butter,’ Terry Butcher told me.
It was a decade over which the Bradford fire, the Heysel Stadium disaster and the Hillsborough tragedy still loom large. Football fans died watching the sport they loved, and at times football seemed to be stuck in a doom loop. Famously in 1985, a Timesarticle described football as ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums, and increasingly watched by slum people, who deter decent folk from turning up.’ But English football somehow survived and then morphed into the behemoth it has now become.
Many moons ago, I visited England World Cup winner Jack Charlton at his home in the north-east to interview him and outlined my plans to write a series of books on English football history. Big Jack nodded, told me to ‘bloody well get on with it’ – which xviiI didn’t actually do for a long time – and asked me if I planned to write a book on ’80s football. When I told him that I did, Jack shook his head disapprovingly and opined: ‘You should call the book TheFookin’BasketCase then, son.’ Jack’s wife Pat was none too impressed with his idea, and whilst I have ultimately rejected Jack’s literary advice, he wasn’t exactly wrong in his assessment of what is often regarded as English football’s decadushorribilis.
Growing up in the ’80s in a ‘football neutral’ house in Hertfordshire, my dad, who sadly faded away as I put the finishing touches to this book, voiced his concern as he watched his son’s obsession with the sport grow. He took me to my first few matches but didn’t much care for the swearing, the toxic chanting, Duran Duran blasting his ear drums when their songs were played over the tinny stadium Tannoy, and ‘those bloody awful leaking toilets’ – which he still remembered with a shudder forty years later. In many ways, Dad’s opinion on ’80s football chimed perfectly with that of many in Middle England. It wasn’t that he didn’t like football per se, more that he was saddened by what it had become. He’d not been to games since he went to wartime matches at Carrow Road in the early ’40s. Much had changed since then. Dad despaired at the awful behaviour on the trains and the aggressive tribalism of match goers, which so often descended into violence, although he did quite like the wagon wheels at half-time with, as he put it, his ‘gnat’s-pee’ tea, and Southampton defender Mark Dennis’s amazing mullet. When he saw the Sportsnightfootage of the riot at Kenilworth Road in 1985, he looked solemnly at me and said: ‘Football won’t be around too much longer the way things are going.’ After the Heysel disaster a few months later, he suggested that the sport be suspended for a season so that it could get its house in order. His face, and that of my mum’s, when I told him that I was going xviiito watch a match a few days after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 spoke a thousand words. With hindsight, it’s hard to blame them for their viewpoint. It wasn’t big or clever to be a football fan in those days. Most of my parents’ friends tutted and changed the subject immediately whenever I started talking ‘shop’.
It often surprises me when fans of my age look back wistfully to an era when going to football could sometimes be such a dangerous, life-threatening experience. Grounds weren’t welcoming places for women or children. Football was anything but inclusive. Facilities were almost non-existent. The atmosphere was often menacing. But ’80s nostalgia exists nonetheless. ‘It was proper football back then,’ some suggest. ‘Men were men. They got on with the game in those days,’ others say. The terms ‘sportswashing’ and ‘Video Action Replay’ (VAR) didn’t exist. Players earned more realistic wages, and football could still broadly be described as the working man’s game. Ticket prices were within reach for most fans. There was a raw and unvarnished feel to football then. At times, it felt like a form of ‘dark tourism’. That edgy allure is almost entirely lacking in the gleaming, all-seater stadia of the Sky TV era, where the match-day experience is packaged and choreographed to within an inch of its life. Football in the ’80s was undoubtedly viscerally ‘real’, and its very lack of ubiquity was – to some – part of its appeal. After all, anyone can claim to be a fan these days.
I believe that ’80s football is long overdue a degree of revisionism. There is a danger that, as the pre-1992 era fades to grey, it is reduced to a selection of YouTube clips and oft-repeated tales handed down via the after-dinner speaking circuit. It’s far more nuanced than those increasingly grainy clips and cliched bonmotssuggest. The mullets, ludicrously tight shorts, artificial pitches, yawning gaps on the terraces and often rudimentary style of football lend xixit a distinctly ‘otherworldly’ feel, but beneath the surface, the ’80s teemed with compelling stories of triumph and despair, creation and invention, and political manoeuvrings, both in boardrooms and Parliament. Before 1985, English teams enjoyed a golden era in European competitions, a period of dominance that abruptly ended with the European ban after the Heysel disaster. Plummeting attendances then acted as a catalyst for executives like Martin Edwards at Manchester United, David Dein at Arsenal and Irving Scholar at Tottenham to shape and sculpt English football’s future. If the ’80s were the decade the ’70s could have been (stadium disasters could easily have happened in the previous decade, either at home or abroad), then it was also the period that sowed the seeds for the Sky revolution in the ’90s. Like a magnet, it attracted many of the iron filings of broader cultural changes at that time; multiculturalism, declinism, deindustrialisation, urban decay, postcolonialism, Thatcherism and the Boy George-coined expression ‘playboyeurism’.
Although the game in that era has (often rightly) been given a good kicking during the ensuing decades, football was ultimately a sport worth saving, and there are nuggets of joy to be mined from the ’80s seam. The FA Cup retained its kitschy likeability, continuing to produce heroes, whether they were giant killers, Wembley winners or small-town boys from the shires making their mark. Poring over old Shoot!profiles is always fun, even though they often confirm what we already knew: that most players were obsessed with watching Dallas, eating steak and drinking lager top. England’s kit for the ’82 World Cup – with its red and blue epaulettes on a white shirt – remains an all-time classic. Several fans from the era, including erudite fanzine writers and anti-racist campaigners, prove that the image of ’80s supporters being a bunch of warring knuckle-scrapers xxis patently wrong. Many footballers and managers from the era possess a wonderful sledgehammer wit and a bleak sense of humour. They’re harder to pin down than their ’70s counterparts were. Some have homes in Spain or regularly pop over to Dubai for golfing holidays. Others have become spokesmen for worthy causes like cardiac health, racial equality, and fighting dementia. Once they open up, though, their tales and experiences are fascinating.
Enjoy the book.
JonSpurlingAugust2024
1
The Mighty Mouse and the Malvinas
‘The nation that gave football to the world can now only give it the football hooligan.’
Daily Mirror, May 1981
Stadio Comunale, Turin – June 1980. There’s a rumpus behind him, but England goalkeeper Ray Clemence is doing his best to concentrate on the game, his country’s first in a tournament finals since 1970. Jan Ceulemans has just equalised for Belgium against Ron Greenwood’s men in a Group A European Championships clash. Following several loud bangs, Clemence’s eyes begin to stream. In medical vernacular, a lachrymatory agent has stimulated the nerves of the lacrimal glands in his eyes. In layman’s speak, Clemence is standing downwind of tear gas, which is now billowing across the terraces and the pitch. Turin’s zealous riot police have fired grenades at the mass of England supporters hurling beer bottles and warring with locals, who are celebrating Ceulemans’ goal.
A yellow fog envelops the terrace and referee Heinz Aldinger blows his whistle to bring the match to a temporary halt. England 2players gather in the centre circle and watch the fighting behind Clemence’s goal with weary resignation. The fact that a strain of the ‘English disease’ – hooliganism – has now taken root in Italy is hardly surprising. England’s top brass are furious. Normally reasoned and measured, Greenwood fumes: ‘These bastards let you down. I wish they could all be put in a boat and dropped in the ocean.’ Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in Venice for a Common Market summit, adds: ‘The behaviour of some supporters in Turin was disgraceful. This is a dark day for Britain.’
The tournament – notable for poor attendances and forgettable matches – will be all but airbrushed from football history, but it sets a troubling blueprint for English football in the ’80s.
• • •
Six days before England’s footballers took on the Belgians in Turin, they were guests of honour at a Downing Street cocktail party. As she mingled with the squad, sipping champagne and nibbling on canapes, Margaret Thatcher was charm personified. Taking an unlikely shine to Southampton’s long-haired, Status-Quo-loving central defender Dave Watson, whose state-of-the-art stereo, with its microscopic black and white TV, was a source of endless fascination for his teammates, Thatcher grabbed Watson’s hand and took him on a magical-mystery tour of the portraits of former Prime Ministers. ‘I really enjoyed it,’ Watson said. So, it seemed, did the Prime Minister, who’d been in the job for just over a year. Channelling her inner Boudicca inside No. 10, the Iron Lady, clad in a floral dress and pearl necklace, stood on a chair and informed the players: ‘We’ll love you whether you win or lose.’ Beaming at the cameras outside No. 10, she radiated national pride whilst fielding questions 3about the England team and the recent hostage crisis at the Iranian Embassy in London, during which the SAS stormed the embassy and killed the terrorists. ‘The SAS are the finest and the bravest this country has,’ she beamed. Segueing smoothly towards the suited and booted players around her, she expressed hope that ‘in Italy, the England football team and their supporters will also show the best of Britain’. A successful showing by the team would also enable her to bask in the reflective glory.
In her memoirs The Downing Street Years, Thatcher makes one single fleeting reference to football (on the Heysel disaster) in around 900 pages of dense text. Charles Moore’s three-part, 3,000- page exploration of her life and times doesn’t mention football once. It’s remarkable, given the extent to which Thatcher and Thatcherism became completely entwined with the national sport in the ’80s; by the end of the decade, they even began to reshape it. Back in 1970, Chancellor Roy Jenkins wrote that Prime Minister Harold Wilson believed ‘a mystical symbiosis’ existed between football and politics. Yet Thatcher’s relationship with football, and footballers, was never as symbiotic as it was on that slightly surreal June afternoon at Downing Street. As usual, she was well briefed. ‘You’ll be heading it soon,’ Ron Greenwood told her when a football, signed by the squad, was held in front of her for the photoshoot. ‘Oh no,’ she corrected him. ‘That’s Trevor Brooking’s job.’ Brooking’s stooping header had just won Second Division West Ham the FA Cup final. She’d met Emlyn Hughes before, telling him that she always watched the FA Cup final and the England v. Scotland home international. ‘A follower, perhaps, but not exactly a football fan,’ Hughes reckoned. ‘When she went to games, she always looked out of place.’ Before the squad departed, there was just time for the most experienced members of the squad, Hughes and Kevin Keegan, to simultaneously plant a 4kiss on Thatcher’s cheeks. With the Prime Minister’s good wishes ringing in their ears (she also sent Ron Greenwood a handwritten letter personally thanking him for ‘restoring the pride to English football’), the team returned to their training camp.
Greenwood – previously general manager at West Ham – had taken charge in the summer of 1977. He had arrived too late to steer England to the 1978 World Cup finals in Argentina but had built an impressive-looking team by focusing on the basics. ‘Ron wasn’t swayed by the press, like Don Revie was,’ said midfielder Ray Wilkins. ‘He was loyal to those who served him well.’ Greenwood had a reputation for being a football purist, with clear ideas of how his teams should play. His emphasis on the passing game and an insistence that his teams avoided foul play had earned him the nickname ‘Reverend Ron’ with former Hammers players. Behind his back, England players sometimes sniggered about the manager they nicknamed ‘the Pope’. ‘He could be a bit preachy, a bit holier than thou,’ smiled forward Trevor Francis. As a young coach, Greenwood watched England being dismantled by Hungary at Wembley in 1953 and marvelled at the Mighty Magyars’ ability to exploit and anticipate the space on the pitch. As a young coach at Arsenal, he baffled the players with his fascination of space, walked into training one day with a copy of Time magazine, which had Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the front cover, and extolled the possibility of life on other planets, telling the players how they must, as he put it, ‘embrace space’ – in every sense.
He was a visionary. At West Ham in the ’60s, he converted left-half Bobby Moore into a central defender and Geoff Hurst from a winger into a centre forward. His West Ham sides played fluid football and won the FA Cup in 1964 and the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1965. But a decade or so on, Greenwood wrote of the 5‘depression’ he felt after he was moved ‘upstairs’ and John Lyall took over the day-to-day running of the team. Approaching sixty, he seemed set to retire, but then Don Revie walked out on England in 1977 to take the job as manager of the United Arab Emirates, and Greenwood was invited by the Football Association to become manager on a temporary basis. His subsequent permanent appointment may not have captured the imagination, but with the players still in shock from Revie’s departure, Greenwood was just what was needed. ‘Ron was a consensus man, a committee man and a bridge builder,’ explained Ray Wilkins. Unlike Ramsey, Revie or Clough, he didn’t appear to have any enemies amongst the press, or in the Football Association.
The irony of Greenwood wearing his favourite vanilla overcoat wasn’t lost on Nottingham Forest boss Brian Clough, who described Greenwood as being ‘as neutral as a human being can possibly be’. Revie’s departure in ’77 was English football’s version of the Watergate Scandal, which saw Richard Nixon resign in 1974 before he was impeached. But that didn’t necessarily make Greenwood English football’s Gerald Ford, Nixon’s hapless successor, who, after officially pardoning Nixon, lost the 1976 presidential election and was largely lampooned during his two-year presidency.
Greenwood remained in post for five years and, to a degree, imposed his own philosophy of leadership. But the respective scandals cast giant shadows over Ford and Greenwood. ‘There’s a feeling that after what’s happened with him [Revie], the role of England manager has been sullied. My job is to restore some pride,’ Greenwood argued. And that he did. With qualification sealed from a group featuring Denmark, the two Irelands and Bulgaria, plus Keegan leading the way with seven goals, England were amongst the favourites to lift the trophy. This was the first European Championships to resemble 6a proper tournament, with the quarter-finals no longer played over two legs. Instead, there would now be two groups of four, with the winners of each section progressing to the final. England were in the easier-looking of the two groups, having avoided a section that included holders Czechoslovakia, World Cup runners-up Netherlands and 1974 world champions West Germany. Instead, England’s main concern looked to be the hosts Italy, whom they would face along with Belgium and Spain.
Although the qualifying campaign had raised expectations for England, the build-up to the tournament was low-key. There was no team song, no Esso coin collection as there had been for the 1970 World Cup, no palpable frisson of excitement in the media, no funky Euro ’80 moniker. Match Weekly’s slightly underwhelming free gift – the Dial-a-Star, fashioned in the style of a cardboard England rosette, which enabled readers to ‘dial’ the international records of the 22-man England squad – encapsulated the less-than-enthusiastic mood. The sports papers appeared far more interested in events elsewhere. Eric ‘the Crafty Cockney’ Bristow beat Bobby ‘Dazzler’ George in the 1980 World Darts final. TV audiences, which topped 10 million, were glued to the drama and the close-ups, as the two showmen, with their embossed collars, glistening brows and flashy jewellery, went toe to toe. There was also the headline-capturing rivalry of middle-distance runners Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe, who smashed one another’s world records in the 800 and 1500 metres and were about to go toe to toe at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The Romford-based Matchroom sports management company, owned by promoter Barry Hearn, was on the cusp of glamorising snooker, with branded Matchroom products, including cues, aftershave and duvet covers. ‘Players like Steve Davis and Jimmy White – they became nationally recognised figures thanks to good branding, and 7television,’ Hearn said. Football was in desperate need of a reboot and a makeover, but that wouldn’t happen for more than a decade. ‘For now, it had to fight for its right to be seen,’ football commentator Barry Davies remarked.
At least England’s new Admiral kit, unveiled for the friendly match with Argentina at Wembley in June, garnered attention. Replacing the red and blue tramline number, which the team had worn since Don Revie’s appointment in 1974, the latest design had red and blue epaulettes on the shoulders. ‘It eventually became our biggest seller,’ said Admiral chief executive Bert Patrick, ‘but of course it wouldn’t have been an Admiral launch without the usual degree of controversy.’ Much of the Fleet Street media immediately showed disdain for the kit, which was the result of a £1 million deal signed in 1979 between the Football Association and the Leicester-based firm. When news of its impending launch broke in the Daily Mirror in January 1980, the pun-loving paper screamed ‘Strip off’ and accused the company of ‘taking commercialism too far’. Forty years on, Patrick reiterated the view he’d held throughout Admiral’s dramatic rise to prominence: ‘All publicity was good publicity. The new, shinier strip was designed to impress under floodlights and on TV. Within three years, every team in England had a shiny kit. We blazed the trail.’ In a column for Match magazine, Brian Clough blasted: ‘The wraps are off England’s new kit – and I’m saying now I don’t like it. It has the looks of one of my mother’s old pinnies!’ After the Argentina match, though, which saw England win 3–1, Ron Greenwood was buoyant and, alluding to England’s new Admiral design, insisted: ‘Everything about us tonight was luminous, I thought.’
The squad arrived in Italy three days before the Belgium match. Greenwood, the first England manager since Walter Winterbottom 8in 1962 to lead England to a tournament after qualifying from the group stages, had good reason to feel confident. He had a group of players that, in terms of honours at least, was far superior to Alf Ramsey’s 1966 vintage. With Liverpool and Nottingham Forest providing nine of Greenwood’s 22-man squad, which also included Forest old-boy Tony Woodcock and ex-Anfield stars Emlyn Hughes and Kevin Keegan (the double European Footballer of the Year at Hamburg), the group boasted a staggering nineteen European Cup winners. The key issue for England was that – Emlyn Hughes aside – there was no international tournament experience in the squad whatsoever. With Greenwood’s first-choice forward Trevor Francis ruled out after rupturing his Achilles tendon, thereby depriving the team of pace, England’s hopes appeared to rest largely upon Keegan.
Famously, his Hamburg striking partner Horst Hrubesch said: ‘Kevin is as comfortable in a business suit as a football kit.’ In 1978–79, Keegan had been instrumental during his team’s run-in, scoring eleven goals in the last twelve games of the season, and Hamburg were crowned Bundesliga champions. Fans christened him der Mächtig Maus (the Mighty Mouse). At the end of the title-winning season, his first single, ‘Head Over Heels in Love’, was released, which reached No. 31 in the UK charts. Prior to the 1979–80 season, with Keegan again making noises about moving on, Hamburg insisted that he make up his mind one way or another, in order that their proposed sponsorship deal with British Petroleum wasn’t jeopardised. Keegan stayed. By 1980, his annual wage at Hamburg was £150,000, and extras netted him an estimated £500,000 a year. BP paid him £125,000, he advertised milk on German television and he earned around £3,500 pounds an hour for autograph sessions.
‘Kevin operated in a different universe financially from the rest of us,’ explained Ray Clemence. ‘The players thought “Good luck 9to you”, but there was sniping towards Kevin from some quarters. I think the fact he’d gone to Germany was a reminder that English football wasn’t perhaps in the best of health.’ Ironically, in the week that Margaret Thatcher welcomed the England team to 10 Downing Street, she’d vowed to ‘stem the “brain drain”,’ which was how sections of the press dubbed the ‘stampede’ of British scientists and businessmen to the United States and fellow EEC countries. ‘There was a certain feeling that Kevin, who was so sure of what he wanted and keen to fulfil himself commercially, wasn’t acting in a proper English way,’ Trevor Francis argued.
A level of disquiet surrounded Keegan. His right knee had troubled him for several months, and due to Hamburg’s appearance in the 1980 European Cup final, Keegan took no part in the May–June home internationals, but he insisted: ‘I’m ready for Italy. There are no excuses now if we don’t do well.’ Keegan’s former Liverpool teammate Ray Kennedy – whom Bob Paisley labelled ‘the most underrated English player of his generation’ – expressed concern about the clout that former Liverpool teammate Keegan and midfielder Trevor Brooking – who’d played under Greenwood at West Ham – held within the England camp. Kennedy was convinced that the two roommates had Greenwood’s ear when it came to tactics and team selection. In the mid ’70s, Kennedy alleged that Keegan ‘wanted to run the entire show at Liverpool. Kevin’s determination to be involved all the time disrupted the team’s flow. It was the same with England.’ Football writer Brian Glanville later claimed that Keegan was ‘neither fish nor fowl’ and suggested that Greenwood struggled to successfully deploy Keegan – neither an orthodox centre forward, nor a conventional midfielder – in his teams.
The normally taciturn Bob Paisley had also criticised Greenwood’s tactics. After taking the reins in 1977, Greenwood announced his 10keenness to tap into Paisley’s knowledge at newly crowned European champions Liverpool in order to ‘recreate the magic of the Anfield Boot Room at international level’. To that end, when England played Switzerland in a Wembley friendly later that year, Greenwood selected no less than six Liverpool players – Clemence, Neal, Hughes, Callaghan, McDermott and Kennedy – for the team. The game ended in a dour 0–0 draw, with Paisley criticising Greenwood for omitting the crucial fourth man – Jimmy Case – in the midfield quartet completed by Callaghan, McDermott and Kennedy.
With Case not playing, the unit was fatally disrupted by the absence of the ‘runner’. Paisley believed that Greenwood should have ‘made them [the Liverpool midfield] the fulcrum of the England team going into the 1980 European Championships’. Instead, when Ray Kennedy played, he was pushed forward to stop the opposite full-back attacking, thereby denying him the freedom of space he enjoyed at Liverpool. Greenwood then abandoned his fixation with Liverpool’s finest and deployed a raft of other formations that became a feature of his five-year tenure.
• • •
‘Today England will begin to learn the true currency of the recovery that has been achieved under the direction of Ron Greenwood over the last three years,’ wrote David Lacey in his preview of the Belgium match for The Guardian. Kicking off at 4.45 p.m., the match was shown live on BBC One. Tournament wise, it was the first ‘communal’ TV experience England supporters had enjoyed in a decade. The game was broadcast on BBC1, with Barry Davies and Bobby Charlton as commentator and co-commentator. In the days before the match, the Belgians – managed by Guy Thys – were quoted as 11saying they did not expect to beat England, but Greenwood wasn’t having it. ‘We don’t in any way underestimate them. They are a strong side, a side with experience, even if they are unpredictable.’ Just 15,186 were in the Stadio Comunale to see Ray Wilkins put England ahead after twenty-five minutes. Not a renowned goal scorer, Wilkins expertly lobbed the ball over the Belgian defence and ran through to chip goalkeeper Jean-Marie Pfaff and score. ‘It was a masterpiece of a goal,’ Wilkins smiled when I spoke to him. ‘Albeit a forgotten one.’
The night before, police arrested thirty-six English supporters in Turin, mainly for drunkenness. This was the first time that England fans, who, according to their banners, hailed from places as diverse as Grimsby, Gravesend and Grantham, had travelled en masse to an international tournament. Amongst them was Peter Myers: ‘Before the Belgium match, fans were puking up in the city centre in front of Italian families, beer glasses were smashed, chairs thrown about.’ At the match, there was a blend of jingoist and sick chanting. ‘Two world wars and one World Cup’ was a favourite. So was ‘No surrender to the IRA’. ‘Some fans from Bradford chanted: “There’s only one Peter Sutcliffe,”’ Myers recalls. The mob’s de facto national anthem: ‘You’re gonna get your fuckin’ ’ead kicked in’ was audible. Belgium’s equaliser at the Stadio Comunale sparked more violence. England fans threw some of the tear gas cannisters, fired by the Turin police, back towards the pitch. ‘That’s the irony of what happened,’ Ray Clemence told me. ‘The gas that affected me actually came from cannisters that were lobbed by England fans.’ Clemence likened the effect of tear gas to ‘someone sticking pins in the back of your eyes. My chest tightened. It tasted like pepper in my mouth.’ The stinging sensation disappeared after a few minutes, by which point Clemence was clear-eyed enough to see the mayhem for what it was. ‘I’d 12seen football hooliganism in England before. We all had. But tear gas? That was on a whole different level.’ Up in the commentary box, Bobby Charlton, one of the heroes from ’66, told Barry Davies he was ‘ashamed to be British’.
The match was always going to struggle to get going again after the trouble. Kenny Sansom described it as ‘feeling like a testimonial’. It ended 1–1, representing a point dropped for England but with them still in with a shout of reaching the final. The tournament consisted of eight teams playing in two groups of four, with the winners of each group contesting the final. UEFA convened an emergency meeting to discuss the violent scenes, with a points deduction or even expulsion from the tournament mooted as possible punishments. The resulting £8,000 fine was seen as lenient, with FA chairman Harold Thompson admitting: ‘It could have been a lot more serious. But it is a pity we have to pay for the actions of those sewer rats.’ It was a token gesture amidst fears of possible expulsion. Under the headline of ‘Softies’, Frank McGhee angrily wrote in the Daily Mirror: ‘That is roughly the equivalent of a slap on the wrist with a wet lettuce leaf … Punishment should hurt – and this one doesn’t.’
Travelling England fans were urged to hide their colours en route to their next match – a Sunday-night showdown with Italy in Turin. The Mayor of Turin, Signor Diego Novelli, threatened to cancel the match in the event of any more trouble from English fans and banned the sale of alcohol in the Stadio Comunale. On the pitch, whoever lost was staring elimination in the face. Italy had drawn 0–0 with Spain in their opening game, with the Spaniards then losing to Belgium. The match between Italy and England was the blue riband fixture of the group, and a crowd of 59,649 was the highest of the tournament. Greenwood handed a start to young 13Nottingham Forest forward Garry Birtles, and to Ray Kennedy, who replaced Trevor Brooking. Kennedy, who’d publicly criticised Brooking’s unwillingness to ‘track back’, had England’s best chance, crashing a superb volley off a post. Eleven minutes from time, Italy’s Fiorentina playmaker Antognoni fed Graziani near the left flank. Right-back Phil Neal was brushed aside by the Italian wide man, whose low cross was headed into the back of the net by Marco Tardelli. Late on, Dino Zoff brilliantly pushed out the subdued Keegan’s last-gasp overhead kick.
Keegan later admitted that the effects of a stomach bug had laid him low, but the day after the match, Italian newspaper Tuttosport reported that Keegan had accused Romanian referee Rainea of taking a bribe. ‘Nobody can take it out of my mind that he has accepted money,’ England’s skipper was alleged to have said. England’s Asti training camp was besieged by paparazzi desperate to talk to Keegan. Greenwood seemed powerless to prevent a media circus from gathering around his star man. A pair of photographers approached Keegan and asked if the England man could oblige with a photograph with an Italian model they had in tow. After England press officer Glen Kirton agreed, the photographers snapped away and quickly sold their images to Italian publications. ‘It created a lot of ridiculous gossip,’ Greenwood later recalled, ‘with journalists asking if the players were entertaining other women at the training camp.’
England’s route to the final was now blocked, and even though a much-changed side defeated Spain 2–1 in their final match, with goals from Brooking and Woodcock, it was too little too late. Peter Shilton replaced Clemence in goal, continuing Greenwood’s unusual practice of alternating his goalkeepers. ‘It became an annoyance,’ admitted Ray Clemence, ‘and I think that it made Ron look like 14he was a prevaricator.’ England were out, failing even to make it to the third place play-off match because Italy couldn’t break through against Belgium, who reached the final to face West Germany. Jupp Derwall’s team beat Belgium in the final, with Keegan’s Hamburg strike partner Horst Hrubesch scoring the winner. Once it was confirmed that England would not be playing in the playoff, the BBC ditched live coverage of the Italy v. Czechoslovakia third-place play-off match and replaced it with the Tommy Steele film Half a Sixpence. If one decision summed up the lack of enthusiasm for Euro ’80, then this was it.
The mood was one of disappointment, rather than abject failure. Nonetheless, the knives quickly came out from the gentlemen of the press. ‘He used nineteen players in three games,’ wrote Norman Fox in The Times. ‘His argument that all twenty-two players in the squad were equals was wrong and told of a nice guy who didn’t like to hurt feelings.’
The spectre of the 1980 European Championships loomed large for a long time. Greenwood lamented: ‘We travelled to Italy in high hope and returned with empty hearts.’ Margaret Thatcher insisted that English football had been ‘shamed abroad’. Throughout the ’80s, studies into the causes of hooliganism came thick and fast, with urban decay, rising unemployment and the increasing divorce rate once again blamed. But as Colin Ward’s Steaming In: Journal of a Football Fan and Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs illustrated, many wreaked havoc purely for the craic and because they knew they’d likely get away with it.
Pilloried from all sides as England embarked on qualifying for the 1982 World Cup, Greenwood continued to chop and change his side and his tactics in order to get the right blend. Ray Kennedy continued to flit in and out of the side, until he decided, in 15September 1981, to quit international football. The Sun’s headline read: ‘GREENWOOD CAN STICK IT.’ ‘I am resigning here and now as Greenwood’s bridesmaid,’ announced the outspoken Liverpool forward, adding: ‘I never felt like I was playing in a team for England. There was no unit.’ Perhaps most controversially of all, Greenwood stuck with his favoured – but ageing – duo of Brooking and Keegan.
• • •
With the England team failing to fire on all cylinders, hooliganism rampant and post-imperial Britain plunged into a recession, the issue of declinism, first applied to football in 1970 when England lost their world champions crown at the Mexico World Cup, was back on the menu. Throughout England’s tortuous qualification route to the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain, there was much hand-wringing about how the team’s fortunes appeared to mirror the waning state of decay in the country. On the face of it, England’s qualifying group – consisting of Norway, Switzerland, Romania and Hungary – shouldn’t have posed too many problems, especially with two qualifying slots available, since the World Cup had now been expanded from eighteen to twenty-four countries. But instead, Greenwood’s men slipped and stumbled on their way to Spain.
All looked straightforward after Norway were crushed 4–0 at Wembley, but warning signs were in place after England fell to a 2–1 defeat in Bucharest against Romania. ‘We were like rabbits in the headlights,’ recalled Dave Watson, ‘and struggled to get the ball off them. They were excellent passers of the ball.’ England drew against Romania in the return match and narrowly defeated Switzerland at Wembley, before an infamous return match in Basel. 16
The Swiss were not, as The Sun described them, ‘a bunch of cuckoo clock makers and waiters’, and in Claudio Sulser, Switzerland had the type of singular playmaker who always caused England trouble. If the hosts’ 2–1 win laid bare the deficiencies of England’s muddled tactics, it was the behaviour of visiting fans off it that attracted most media headlines. A jewellers was looted and bars smashed up as England fans rampaged through the city. ‘It was an unpleasant type of Englishness,’ Ray Wilkins commented. ‘“We are England. We’ll get pissed in your city and smash it up.” They were like drunken Crusades.’ Officially, 2,000 England supporters travelled to the game, but with tickets available at the stadium on the day, many more made the journey. It was little wonder that in such a depressing atmosphere, Ron Greenwood informed his players he was resigning on the plane on the way home. ‘The players rallied around Ron,’ Dave Watson recalled. ‘We told him we’d see it through together. Ron relented and carried on.’ But it was a clear illustration that even the manager doubted whether England would actually make it to Spain.
The 2–1 defeat in Norway was at least hooliganism-free. But, typically of this era, it had clear socio-political ramifications. England’s chaotic, panic-stricken play was punished by the determined and energised hosts, who’d ultimately finish bottom of the qualifying group. The final whistle not only provoked a joyous pitch invasion but one of the most legendary pieces of football commentary. ‘We have beaten England 2–1 in football! It is completely unbelievable! We have beaten England! England, birthplace of giants. Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana – we have beaten them all. We have beaten them all. Maggie Thatcher … your boys took a hell of a beating,’ ranted radio commentator Bjørge Lillelien. 17Lillelien’s stream of consciousness was so impassioned that the Norwegian Arts Council later selected it to represent their country’s contribution to mankind’s cultural heritage, along with a written part of Grieg’s concerto and Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen’s letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister. But it was the lesser-known preamble to Lillelien’s outburst, where he described England as a ‘giant’, which really crystallised England’s plight.
The ‘giant’ that gave the game to the world had taken its eye off the ball. Whilst lesser lights like Norway and Switzerland invested in science-driven coaching programmes from youth football upwards, England still relied on its brand of muscularity and physicality and, as Trevor Francis put it, had a ‘suspicion of players who dwelt on the ball for any length of time’. The Guardian’s Robert Armstrong believed that English football was suffering from the same affliction that blighted British industry; a lack of capital investment. As stadia at home crumbled and the living and playing styles of English footballers remained rooted in the past, other countries caught up. Remarkably, though, thanks to Romania failing to win either of their two final matches and England defeating Hungary at Wembley in their last match, Ron Greenwood’s men somehow made it to Spain.
Delighted skipper Kevin Keegan said: ‘We did all the things English football is renowned for.’ Keegan elected not to develop his point, but, with England showing a real togetherness that night, it’s likely he was alluding to effort, work rate and defensive organisation. In the nick of time, Greenwood’s men had found their distinctly English collective mojo, and that was in no small part due to the influence of new first-team coach Don Howe.
When I interviewed the bespectacled Howe about the adventures of Ron’s XXII in Spain, I was delighted to see that his faintly menacing and unnerving stare had lost none of its potency. Was 18he ever tempted – I asked him – to join the lines and bark out England’s official World Cup song ‘This Time (We’ll Get It Right)’, which reached No. 2 in the charts? ‘Certainly not,’ he snapped in his broad Wolverhampton brogue. ‘A rather different sound came out of my mouth when it came to football.’ I didn’t bother asking Howe if he’d ever heard the (almost) forgotten long-playing version, which featured Justin Fashanu’s disco-cum-breakdancing hit ‘Do It ’Cos You Like It’. In the recording studio, with England’s finest clad in Partridgesque sports casual England jumpers, Kevin Keegan sings ‘This Time’ with typical gusto, and defender Steve Foster deliberately garbles the words. ‘I actually thought it all sounded a bit Germanic,’ Howe said, ‘with the oompah band in the background.’ Also present and correct was Aston Villa winger Tony Morley. The debate around whether he deserved a place in the final XXII crystallised Howe’s and Greenwood’s differing philosophies:
Ron was more idealistic and a purist. I was more concerned with the unit, the defensive shape of the team. We were yin and yang in many ways. He wanted Tony in, whereas I thought that, explosive player though he was on his day, he was perhaps a luxury. In the end, Tony didn’t make the cut. We opted to play Steve Coppell out wide on the right and Graham Rix, a midfielder, on the left.
There was also the ongoing question of how – or if at all – Glenn Hoddle should be incorporated. ‘The finest talent of his generation. Breathtaking ability,’ Howe reckoned, before the inevitable ‘but’ was deployed. ‘But a team couldn’t be built around Glenn. For long periods, Glenn wouldn’t impose himself on matches. A Bryan Robson or a Kevin Keegan were more rounded players.’ So, with no out-and-out wingers and Hoddle on the periphery, the England side 19was resolute, defensively strong, solid but perhaps lacking genuine inspiration. And with Greenwood’s loyal lieutenants Brooking and Keegan injured (‘We were damned in some quarters for taking them, but their injuries were expected to clear up more quickly than actually transpired,’ Howe explained), some believed it lacked a touch of gravitas too.
• • •
In late spring, there was strong speculation in the tabloids that, due to the crisis in the Falkland Islands, the home nations might withdraw from the tournament. Ron’s (and Don’s) XXII might not have made the trip at all. World Cup hosts Spain had abstained in a United Nations vote that saw all members – bar Panama – deem Argentina the aggressors in the conflict. The tabloids printed stories of British expats in Spain being shunned by their neighbours, and, outside several English bars in Spain, crosses of St George were torn down and burnt by hostile Spaniards. According to (then) Sports Minister Sir Neil McFarlane, The Sun, with its headline ‘WORLD CUP CRISIS’, put unnecessary fears into British fans that a World Cup withdrawal was imminent.
Via letter (the method of correspondence favoured by politicians of a certain vintage), McFarlane outlined to me the Prime Minister’s thinking during that fraught period:
Margaret Thatcher had an emergency meeting with the Queen shortly before the tournament. Both were of the opinion that the home nations should go to Spain. Rumours were rife. The world and his mother seemed to have an opinion on what would happen if any of the three home nations met Argentina at the 20second group stage. The FA and the Foreign Office discussed the situation fully, and frankly, there was no solution. If ‘Domesday scenario’ had arisen, the game would probably have been played behind closed doors, or scrapped. We just hoped and prayed that the situation never arose.
McFarlane went on to say: ‘There was more concern about the hooligan element in England’s travelling support … if rival Argentinians met English or Scottish fans in the streets.’ Events over the next fortnight hinted that a home nation boycott may have been closer to reality than McFarlane cares to admit. On 12 May, eight days after ARA General Belgrano was torpedoed, the Daily Mirror predicted: ‘World Cup pull out looming.’ Around 20,000 copies of a government advice booklet for travelling English fans were pulped. In his column for The Sun, Jimmy Greaves advocated a four-way tournament between the home nations (including non-qualifiers Wales), the proceeds of which would be donated to families of the British victims of the Falklands crisis. The doom-laden forecast contrasted with Margaret Thatcher’s public assertion: ‘A good showing from our teams is just what our boys need.’ Ultimately, that’s how it played out. England travelled to Spain, along with Scotland and Northern Ireland. At the opening ceremony on 1 June, the Spanish crowd booed the English flag relentlessly, and Dick Wragg and Sir Bert Millichipp walked out in protest. But Greenwood’s men were present and correct.
By and large, the England camp was a happy one. Paul Mariner explained: ‘Most of us were just pleased to be at the party.’ There was none of the melodrama that ensued at rival camps. Italian players refused to speak with their own journalists after fake stories circulated in the Italian press about Paolo Rossi’s and Antonio Cabrini’s 21rumoured ‘affair’. From inside their luxury hotel rooms, West German players lobbed water filled balloons at their protesting fans who gathered to demand answers following the notorious Disgrace of Gijón match, during which the West Germans and Austrians time-wasted after Horst Hrubesch gave the Germans the lead. The result saw both teams progress to the next stage at the expense of Algeria, who’d beaten Jupp Derwall’s men in the opening game.
The England players entertained themselves with ‘Pac-Man’ and ping-pong competitions, played cards and read English tabloids. Try as they might, though, the Ipswich duo of Mariner and Terry Butcher, with cassette player going full blast, couldn’t convince teammates that Saxon and Iron Maiden were the best bands on the planet. ‘Neil Diamond, ABBA, ELO and Wings were more to everyone else’s taste,’ Mariner said. Greenwood’s men steered clear of the room occupied by the injured duo of Trevor Brooking and Kevin Keegan. ‘There was a bit of an atmosphere,’ Trevor Francis recalled. ‘I don’t blame either of them, but we could sense their frustration.’ England supporters, clad in their ‘World Cup Task Force ’82’ T-shirts, travelled in vast numbers. Reports abound of unpaid bar and restaurant bills, looted tills, broken glass around the city, fighting and urinating in public. The favoured chant was: ‘Argentina, Argentina, what’s it like to lose a war?’
There was concern within the management team about the growing number of English flags on the terraces. When the team performed the B-side to ‘This Time (We’ll Get It Right)’ on Top of the Pops, the England players (with British Airways stewardesses joining in) flew Union Jack flags as they belted out ‘England We’ll Fly the Flag’. ‘We had a tie-in with British Airways,’ Don Howe explained, ‘and Ron and the FA thought the Union Jack was more inclusive.’ Photographs from the era suggest, however, that there 22were as many Union Jacks as English flags at matches. Given the caution about using the Cross of St George, it’s perhaps surprising that ‘Bulldog Bobby’ – with his protruding beer gut – was chosen as the official team mascot, given that ‘Bulldog’ was also the title of a National Front publication.
• • •
The heat in Bilbao before England’s first match against France was every bit as searing as it had been in Leon twelve years earlier, the last time England had contested a World Cup finals match. ‘Even as we inspected the pitch in our flip flops,’ Paul Mariner recalled, ‘I was sweating from every orifice. The grass was hot. Wearing those bloody nylon Admiral tracksuits didn’t help, and I saw the thermometer shoot through 100 degrees as we ran out.’ The Basque capital’s notoriously poor air quality also affected the players (Ray Wilkins recalled ‘a clogging in the lungs’), but England made the fastest of starts, scoring after twenty-seven seconds from a well-constructed set piece, with Terry Butcher flicking on Steve Coppell’s long throw to Bryan Robson, who spectacularly hammered the ball home. Butcher, who was the youngest member of the squad at twenty-two – told me: ‘We’d rehearsed that move from the left, as Kenny Sansom’s throw was judged the more potent, but not from the right. It was fantastic improvisation.’ The French equalised before half-time, but England’s midfield proved more than a match for France’s dazzling talents Michel Platini, Jean Tigana and Alain Giresse. During the interval, at the behest of Don Howe, the England players removed their shirts and placed iced towels over their heads ‘to avoid passing out’, Butcher said. 23
In the second half, England’s doughty defending and pressing of the French midfield continued to work well, and Robson and Paul Mariner added two more. Mariner, who’d lost around twelve pounds of fluid during the match, put his arms up to the jubilant England fans, then dropped them and ambled back to the halfway line. ‘We were all totally spent,’ he told me. It had been a remarkably positive start, against a lavishly gifted side that would ultimately reach the semi-finals. Perhaps the team’s ‘we’ll get it right’ chorus from ‘This Time’ wasn’t misplaced. But the truth is that was the high point of England’s Spanish adventure. They beat Czechoslovakia 2–0, thus qualifying for the second group stage, after which Ron Greenwood instructed his men to ‘go and get drunk’.
His charges did as they were instructed. Many uncorked the bottles of Rioja they’d been presented with upon arrival at their hideaway on the coast near Bilbao (the deceased canine which saw the tabloids label the stretch of sand ‘Dead Dog Beach’ after the draw had been made in the winter was now removed) and then got stuck into crates of Sangria. ‘It was a monumental piss up,’ explained Paul Mariner. Many got sunburnt, and Ray Wilkins was so much the worse for wear that he slept on a hotel couch as the media conducted a press conference with Ron Greenwood. ‘The press didn’t muck rake,’ Wilkins recalled. ‘They could have made our lives awkward.’ The 1–0 victory over Kuwait was more than a little subdued.
As England entered the second phase and shifted bases from Bilbao to Madrid, the concerns surrounding Trevor Brooking’s calf injury and Kevin Keegan’s back problem were openly discussed by the squad. ‘The obsession amongst the press over whether the two fellas would be fit became an annoyance,’ Ray Wilkins explained. ‘It was a bit disrespectful to the rest of us.’ The two roommates, still 24unable to join full training, largely kept themselves to themselves, and their room became known as the VIP room thanks to Brooking’s MBE and Keegan’s OBE. ‘Kevin saw the funny side and stuck a Red Cross on the door like he and Trevor had the plague,’ Trevor Francis said. The fact that Keegan’s moonlight flit in a car borrowed from a member of staff at the hotel to his German specialist in a desperate bid to get fit wasn’t widely known about until after the tournament showed that the press weren’t all knowing.
The side that faced West Germany was the same as the one that opened against France. But with the reigning European champions the masters of the pressing game, England were never going to be afforded as much space as they were given against Michel Hidalgo’s side. In a tight match, England looked solid but one-paced and short of inspiration, both in midfield or up front. West Germany often outmuscled England. ‘Out of my way, little fly,’ barked the oak-tree-thighed midfielder Hans-Peter Briegel at the diminutive Steve Coppell as he barged him out of the way. In a 0–0 draw, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge crashed a shot off England’s crossbar, with Greenwood’s men creating precious little. Following the West Germans’ 2–1 win over Spain, England needed to better the score against the hosts to progress to the semi-final. By then, Keegan, whose epidural had cured his back injury, and Brooking were fit to play and were amongst the substitutes.
Generally not one for counterfactuals, Don Howe recalled that he and Greenwood, in the aftermath of the tournament, spent time discussing how England’s World Cup may have panned out differently. ‘We did say that winning our first group did us no favours, because we ended up playing West Germany, who were formidable, and Spain, who I always felt couldn’t dare to lose to us for fear of a huge backlash at home.’ 25
Had England finished runners-up in Group A, they would have progressed to a second stage group containing Northern Ireland and Austria. ‘It might have given us time to get Keegan and Brooking fully match fit,’ explained Don Howe, ‘and then they would have been fit for a semi-final, but those weren’t the cards we were dealt.’ In the event, the duo entered the fray in the sixty-sixth minute against Spain, and although they carved out England’s two best chances – Brooking’s shot was well smothered by Luis Arconada, and Keegan’s header flew agonisingly wide – the 0–0 draw meant that England were eliminated. They’d conceded a single goal in five matches (‘I was originally brought in to shore up the defence, and that aspect clearly improved,’ Howe said) but huffed and puffed ineffectually in the latter stages of the tournament. ‘We really missed Steve Coppell through injury during the Spain game. He’d have given us some dynamism down the right-hand side.’ Could the unused Hoddle – I asked Howe – have made a difference in either of the two second group stage matches? ‘Perhaps,’ Howe said,
but my gut feeling was that both sides would have double-marked him. My mind did flit to Tony Morley. He’d turned the Bayern Munich defence inside out for Villa’s winner in the European Cup final a month before. He was off the cuff but inconsistent.
Ron’s solid and stoic XXII didn’t get it quite right, but made a decent fist of it at the World Cup, and the major hooligan incidents that the government feared were mercifully avoided. Ultimately, they exited España ’82 not because, as Paul Mariner suggested (jokingly), the lighter Aertex Admiral shirts that the players asked for weren’t actually delivered until the day England headed for home, or because 26of a boozy bonding session or two, but because they lacked a dash of panache in midfield and up front.
England and their supporters stumbled through the rest of the decade, amidst fevered debates about hooliganism, tactical vacillation and misfiring star players.
