"IT all started out as a rout in Hyde Park. The editor of London Last Night captained one side; the future literary editor of the Spectator and the New Statesman captained the other. There was a centre-half who had played Cassio at the Old Vic, and won, and the best player was a tree. Eventually the tree dropped out. He found it difficult to get to the away games".
The above is an extract from colleague Brian Glanville's recently published and eminently readable "memoirs", aptly titled, Football Memories. The team referred to above are the "Chelsea Casuals", a Sunday morning kick-around side founded by the enthusiastic Glanville (and others) some 40 years ago and for which, at the age of 67, he still turns out.
Football Memories is not an academic treatise, outlining the many significant socio-economic and cultural changes that have transformed the game in the almost 50 years that Brian Glanville has covered it, mainly as a sports writer for the Sunday Times. This book is something much simpler, much more engaging. It is one man's account of his lifelong, ongoing fascination and obsession with football.
Your correspondent must confess that Brian Glanville is both a colleague and friend. Over the years, I have spent many long bus, train and taxi journeys in his company, travelling the football tournament road from Gothenburg to Genoa and from Milan to Montpelier, often being entertained by his seemingly endless supply of memories and stories. In this book, Glanville shares his stories with everyone.
Sometimes poignant, often irreverent and invariably humorous, Glanville's recollections almost unwittingly provide a more insightful analysis of the development of football in the last half-century than any amount of well-intentioned, heavily-documented, institutional research. Above all, the book recalls a lifetime of funny stories of the `this-really-happened' variety.
Take the late Alf Ramsey, arguably England's greatest ever manager and the man who led England to that unforgettable 1966 World Cup success. Glanville recalls Ramsey addressing a post-match press conference after a 0-0 friendly draw with Mexico at the Aztec Stadium in 1969. Asked if he had anything to say to the Mexican public, Alf offered a case study in Whitehall diplomacy:
"Yes. There was a band outside our hotel playin' at five o'clock in the morning. We were promised a motor-cycle escort to the ground. It never arrived. When our players went out to inspect the pitch, they were abused and jeered by the crowd. I would have thought that they'd be delighted to welcome England, then when the game began they could cheer their own side as much as they liked . . . But, we are delighted to be in Mexico and the Mexican people are a wonderful people".
Glanville's book also recalls the soccer of a bygone era. When remembering the figure of Yorkshireman Ted Crawford, one-time Bologna and Livorno coach, Glanville recalls a story from Crawford's pre-war years in English soccer with Clapton Orient. Crawford had a team-mate called Arthur Rigby, a former England international who, when asked by the Orient management to give up smoking, replied: "Smoked when I was playing for England, I'll smoke at the bloody Orient".
Arthur, however, also had a penchant for the pint and one Saturday turned up for a league fixture much the worse for drink. After the ritual cold shower treatment, Arthur was wheeled out to play, with Ted Crawford ordering him to "go out on the left wing, Arthur and I'll keep the ball away from you". Glanville continues: "This he successfully did, till, late in the game, he had no alternative but to push ball out left to Rigby who promptly banged it into the net. Arthur went on to score twice more".
While fighting off tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Mundesley in Norfolk in the 1950s, Glanville came across Fred Westgarth, a Geordie player who kept pigeons in the roof of the stand at his club, Hartlepool United. Fred was a married man with children who also kept a regular girlfriend. When, on one unfortunate occasion, both wife and mistress arrived to visit him in the sanatorium on the same day, Fred simply looked up and commented: "Hallo! Clash of fixtures, here!"
Given that Glanville's father came from a Dublin Jewish family, a certain sympathy for the Irish hardly comes as a surprise. Recalling the 1994 World Cup, Glanville writes: "Above all, I enjoyed the first game that I saw where, to general surprise, it was the Irish not the Italians, who took over Giants Stadium en masse, and the Irish who won. In a stadium dominated by green and white, by those Irish supporters who, unlike their boorish English counterparts, contrive to sing inoffensive songs and enjoy themselves at football games, Ray Houghton scored the only goal".
By comparison with many of the fans who attended last summer's France'98 World Cup, the English fans (or at least a small minority of them) are considered by Glanville to be "an alienated underclass that could express itself only through violence, a miserably untalented subspecies".
There is more, much more worth reading in this book stretching from the Hungary of the 1950s to Ronaldo's Brazil, from the Derby County-Juventus affair of the 1970s, through to FIFA boss Sepp Blatter and from Matthews to Gascoigne. You may well disagree with many of the forthright opinions expressed, but you will find it hard to deny the book's final lines: "For my part, I still enjoy watching football, still enjoy writing about it, still enjoy trying to play it. And, for all that it has done for me, I am grateful".
(Football Memories by Brian Glanville, published by Virgin).
