Go away and sort yourselves out
Posted in General on 23. Sep, 2010
Go away and sort yourselves out.”Well, now they have, and the funny thing is, the FSA and the National Federation of Football Supporters Clubs have merged into one persuasive Football Supporters Federation more quickly and painlessly than the Football Association has modernised its ageing council. They asked for money, and football replied: “There are so many bodies. In truth, he approached administration as he played – with impatience He was anxious to get on with it. He wanted to sweep things forward.It is a great pity – and a source of no small bewilderment outside these shores – that our Football Association was never able or willing to harness the talents of Charlton in the way the Germans did with Franz Beckenbauer.Back in the days when Charlton was launching his abortive bid for power, such as it was, the fledgling Football Supporters’ Association was helping the game’s authorities to campaign against Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s dreaded identity card scheme The supporters didn’t have much in the way of resources In fact, they were a rough and ready lot Some didn’t wear ties (this was before the FA went tieless). Neither football’s politicking nor its socialising held any great attraction for them.Only later did the politics of the game become even more intense. By that time Busby had gone, David Dein was climbing in the south and the television satellites had been launched.
In 1988 Dein and Everton’s Philip Carter lost their seats on the League committee because the clubs accused them of conflict of interest over the television negotiations: British Satellite Broadcasting had offered the League a lucrative 10-year partnership, but the big clubs preferred a different sort of security in the form of ITV’s guaranteed terrestrial coverage.Bobby Charlton stood for election to the ruling committee of the Football League that October, repeating the attempt he had made in June. Instead, the game continued to celebrate mediocrity and Charlton managed to gain a lowly place on the FA Council and its more mundane committees as a regional representative of clubs in the North-west.He was deselected after a short time because either he did not attend sufficient meetings or scratch enough backs. If they are the right people it doesn’t matter where they come from. It’s a pity because I think I have something to offer.”Only a fool could have argued that England’s record goalscorer, a distinguished ambassador for the nation with more than 100 caps and experience of three World Cup campaigns, had little to contribute.
Busby followed his chairman, Louis Edwards, father of recent chairman and chief executive, Martin, on to the League after Edwards was elected in 1968, the year of the club’s first European Cup triumph.For different personal reasons, probably, neither man could be said to have played a major role in the wider administration of football and, at a time when most of the work was carried out in London, both were invariably happy to return to their own milieu in the north. Moreover, it was prejudicial, he alleged, for the FA’s chief executive, Mark Palios, to consult senior councillors from Arsenal, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers and Liverpool about taking action over the Manchester United defender’s missed drugs test.
Whether or not it is true that Palios had to speak to representatives of United’s rivals before acting, the absence of England’s wealthiest club from the centre of domestic power since Sir Matt Busby left the Football League management committee in 1983 is intriguing. Gary Neville claimed that the Football Association prejudged his team-mate Rio Ferdinand’s misconduct case by withdrawing him from the England team prior to the match against Turkey. But not even that was as memorable as a sunny afternoon 25 years ago tomorrow.b.viner independent.co.uk. But success is a currency quickly devalued; it is now not even enough for the championship to arrive at Old Trafford, if the team has faltered in Europe.It was all very different in the late Seventies. Anfield was the high citadel of English football, and as Sir Alex Ferguson says with characteristic pugnaciousness, his greatest achievement in football has been “knocking Liverpool off their effing perch” Everton briefly dislodged them too, in the mid-Eighties.
Especially as Wolves had squandered a handsome lead in the First Division at the end of the previous season (the Walsall fan with whom I fell into conversation while squatting beside the 10th green at the Ryder Cup last September, whispered gleefully: “What’s the difference between Wolves and an arsonist? An arsonist would never throw away his last five matches”).It goes without saying that Wolves fans and Everton fans, and for that matter Northwich Victoria and Dagenham & Redbridge fans, would like more glory. And many United fans will scoff at Matt Long’s nostalgia for the Arthur Albiston years. Matt is a Manchester United fan who finds himself “missing the good old days of mid-table mediocrity, the excitement of the FA Cup and the odd night of glory in the Uefa Cup … I still celebrate five-a-side goals in the manner of Stuart Pearson” I can understand that. Not the bit Stuart Pearson, whose manner always irritated me, but the rest of it.Because, just as water tastes sweetest to the man parched with thirst, so the most enviable football fans are those who enjoy fleeting success in the middle of a drought of under-achievement.To put it another way, I’d much rather have been a Wolves fan celebrating promotion at the end of last season than a Manchester United fan celebrating yet another championship. Mick Pejic played a high ball upfield, Martin Dobson headed it down and Andy King let fly from just outside the penalty area.
He later admitted that the ball could just as easily have ended up in Stanley Park As it was, it ended up in the corner of Ray Clemence’s net. And famously there was a what-happened-next? after the what-happened-next?, when at the final whistle Inspector Jobsworth of the Merseyside Constabulary bustled King and the BBC reporter Richard Dukenfield off the pitch.Everton had won a derby for the first time in 362 weeks, and the manager, Gordon Lee, a man so lugubrious that he made an undertaker with piles look like the Laughing Policeman, cracked an entire smile. As for me, Liverpool fans will think it pathetic, but I have never known greater euphoria after a football match, not when Joe Royle’s “dogs of war” somehow overcame Manchester United in the 1995 FA Cup final, not when England beat Germany 5-1, not even when the Dunvegan Dribblers, for whom I was a sturdy right-back more Phil Jupitus than Phil Neal, won the University of St Andrews Sunday League Cup.And therein lies an eternal football truth which was touched on by a reader, Matt Long, in an e-mail he sent me last week. For Evertonians there was nothing remotely propitious in the Liverpool line-up of Clemence, Neal, Kennedy (A), Thompson, Kennedy (R), Hansen, Dalglish, Case, Heighway, Johnson (bloody turncoat) and Souness. The Everton team, which even the Street End faithful knew to be less formidable, was Wood, Todd, Pejic, Kenyon, Wright, Nulty, King, Dobson, Latchford, Walsh and Thomas.All Everton fans over the age of 35 know what happened next. It was three days after my 17th birthday and unusually sunny for late October in the north-west of England. The temperature on the terraces, once I’d squeezed into my normal spot near the stanchion from which a character known as Fozzie Bear used to hang, leading us in song, seemed sufficient to fry an egg.