The sad truth about football programmes

When they occupy a cherished corner of your home, you like to think football programmes are a cut above the cliched destiny of newspapers as tomorrow’s fish and chips wrapper.

When writing some of those programmes put food on your table for over three years, that veneration only intensifies. And yet I now find that it may be an illusion.

Sunday afternoon on my knees was devoted to the heathen’s favourite religion for once. The desire to declutter that grips every self-respecting sixtysomething had turned my attention to the overflowing box of old programmes in the corner of my study.

Along with a small bookcase next to it, that pile of matchday memories was now blocking too much heat from the radiator behind it, in what is the coldest room in the house.

And besides, how long does any man need tangible reminders of a 1979 trip to Witton Albion?

I hoped to empty the box by half. Blokes being blokes, I eventually settled for a third. It was as I mulled over the fate of the cull’s marginal candidates, however, that the strangest thing happened.

Whatever their fate, the last thing I wanted to do, I realised, was open any of them and peruse their contents.

There is a bleak pointlessness to roll-calls of long-gone players and incomplete fixture lists. T.S. Eliot would have had a field day with the futility of 40-year-old AA directions to Plymouth Argyle.

And even if you’re one of the London School of Economics’ favourite sons, I defy you not to feel a dab of irrational resentment at no longer being able to get Puma Dalglish Hat Trick boots for £21.99.

No, the inside pages were a foreign land to which I had no desire to return.

Or need, for that matter. As the best and worst of them littered the carpet around me, I realised that reading the programmes wasn’t necessary. Like rolling a cigar by your ear without lighting it, I could assess them all by feel and nostalgia alone.

I held each one in my hand and its accompanying narrative rubbed off on me all over again like wet ink.

Who I was when I went to that game. Where I was living. What was worrying me and how different was the world in which I found myself.

Leicester City v Newcastle United, February 2 1980. The day I discovered that hooliganism was not the breaking point in a crescendo of accumulated grievances that I’d imagined; just spontaneous madness. “He’s got a blue shirt on…the kid ower there. Ha’way, Geordies, let’s get him…”

Bolton Wanderers v Southampton, February 16 1992. My ‘Douglas Bader Moment’. Crossing the road afterwards, a car at an uphill junction slid backwards, leaving my right leg momentarily trapped between his bumper and that of the car behind. Never have I been so relieved to hear first gear finally engage.

Middlesbrough v Southampton, November 18 1978. I reach every teenage football fan’s utopia, as Dad and I make the TV highlights on Tyne Tees’s Shoot, 24 hours later, in the backdrop to a throw-in. Do any men of advancing years still wear trilbies to football, I wonder?

Newcastle United v Everton, December 26 1986. When I discovered my 65-year-old father was tougher than I knew, his thoughts only for me as we were momentarily lifted off our feet in a horrid surge of humanity that squeezed its way down steps into the stadium like toothpaste from a clogged-up tube.

Three years later, the moment came flooding back to me. While other factors were in play at Hillsborough, that day at St James’ Park, there were morons shouting “HEAVE!!!” and cackling as they shoved the log-jam in front of them. I know because I heard them.

Ultimately wedged into the ground-level paddocks, Dad spent the whole game moving his head from side to side like a charmed snake in a fruitless bid to see any of the action.

So bad do I still feel about putting him through all that, I don’t know why I kept the programme in the first place. A sense of exorcism accompanied it onto my ‘REJECTED’ pile, 35 years later, its pages resolutely unopened.

In some of the memories, football is merely tangential…

England v New Zealand, August 24th, 1986. The day I broke a tout. The key, I now know, is to have Plan B straight in your head before you meet them. If I couldn’t get into The Oval, I’d decided on the train, I’d swap cricket for football and high-tail it to Highbury instead. Manchester United was in town and those were the days you could just breeze up to the gates on the merest whim and watch top-flight football.

He started off at three times the official asking price. “No, it’s okay, thanks.” I wasn’t being smug. It really was okay.

Twice the price. “No I’ll go and see the Arsenal game instead,” I replied turning back towards the Tube station.

“All right, face value,” he said, a gratifying hint of desperation appearing in his voice. “Don’t go to Arsenal, mate; you’ll get stabbed…”

As is often the case, the more whimsical memories come from the non-league game. Behold the back cover pictured at the head of this post, for example. If there is no longer a place for watercolours in the programmes of Matlock Town, then it’s a crying shame. As is the spurious ‘e’ at the end of ‘Spennymoor’.

Sweeping all before it in the What-the-Hell? category, meanwhile, comes this 1994 cover image from Colwyn Bay…

A subliminal message, perhaps?

There may be trouble ahead [promotion denied due to dilapidated stadium perimeter] but while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance, let’s face United and dance.

Well, you have a go, then.

What so many of these old programmes had in common, though, was that way in which their accompanying recollections could all flood back to me with barely a page being turned. For all the effort people had put into their contents, it was what I as the buyer vested in each one emotionally that made it a keeper or a goner.

I really hope I’m the exception to the rule in that respect. If not, then I effectively spent three years as a programme writer belting out arias to an empty opera house.

In the hope that it’s just me and because I regard throwing old football programmes into a bin as being one notch up from book-burning, the following are all available to a good home for no charge.

If interested in any of them, email me your name and postal address (British Isles only: I’m not made of money) and which programmes you want. And because it’s the era in which I grew up, allow 28 days for delivery. Yes, you have read that correctly…

FOOTBALL

Wolves v Moscow Dynamo 1989

Aston Villa v Barnsley 1972

Aston Villa v Watford 1969

Aston Villa v Fulham 1971

Birmingham City v Southampton 1984

Newcastle Utd v Everton 1986 (if I get shot of only one, please let it be this one)

Leicester C v Newcastle Utd 1980

Newcastle Utd v Arsenal 1984

Tottenham H v Southampton 1983

Peterborough v Blackpool 2003

Middlesbrough v Southampton 1989

Bolton W v Southampton 1992

Birmingham C v Southampton 1985

Notts Co v Newcastle Utd 1980

Nottingham F v Southampton 1984

Nottingham F v Southampton 1980

Manchester C v Southampton 1982

Aston Villa v Southampton 1983

Derby Co v Southampton 1989

Southampton v Chelsea 1990

Southampton v Aston Villa 1987

Southampton v Aston Villa 2001

Wimbledon v Southampton 1990

Derby Co v Southampton 1980

RUGBY UNION

England v Ireland 1982

England v Ireland 1984

England v Ireland 1990

CRICKET

England v New Zealand 1986

England v Pakistan 1987 (ODI)

England v Pakistan 1987 (Test)

MOTOR RACING

Birmingham Super Prix 1989

Boca Juniors and the natural conclusion for VAR in football

Pic courtesy of Marco Verch

I smiled when they said replay technology was coming to football.

I laughed out loud when they said it would improve the game.

Many times since the advent of VAR, when a decision has come down from on high, only for the whining among footballers to continue regardless, has my cynicism been vindicated.

Last week, however, that vindication reached its peak and VAR in football its nadir.

Two VAR calls went against the Argentine team Boca Juniors in their Copa Libertadores matches with Brazil’s Atletico Mineiro. The latter ultimately went through on penalties.

To say that the club I will henceforth call Boca Infants wasn’t happy would be an understatement.

And let’s face it, who can blame them? Some upstart in a booth, armed only with objectivity plus high-definition, frame-by-frame, ultra-slowmo replays filmed from every available angle, dares to presume that he knows better?

Better than 11 men drunk on a cocktail of testosterone and adrenaline, with the benefit of a full split-second in which to play judge and jury?

The sheer impertinence of it.

No, let those wimps in tennis and American football adopt replay technology with barely a hitch, if they must. Football as the rest of the world knows it is made of sterner stuff: full of visionaries who realise that VAR is but extra fuel on the fire. As it was always destined to be.

I know professional footballers past and present bridle at the suggestion that they’re all a bit thick. Many of them are nothing of the sort.

But the intellectually-honest among them must surely realise that sorry episodes like this are what feeds that perception. They are the reason why the phrase “bloody footballers”, accompanied by a roll of the eyes, has been a cultural meme since before we even knew what cultural memes were.

I’d knock the whole VAR thing on the head if I were you, football. You’re trying to sell sophistication to people who just aren’t having it. Bless them.

Gareth Southgate, Martin Samuel and how to talk yourself out of a job

Photo by Produtora Midtrack on Pexels.com

Daily Mail sportswriter Martin Samuel is one of my heroes in this business. This morning, however, he had me scratching my head.

Seven days ago, his Mail column included a segment beneath this headline:

Why do the FA want to tie down Gareth Southgate for the next Euros now?

Today’s column, meanwhile, starts…

Gareth Southgate is the best thing to happen to English football in decades

There follows a tribute so fulsome that the England manager’s PR officer would struggle to outdo it.

And I agree with every word. If we leave Euro 2020 with nothing, it will not alter the fact that Southgate, in his five years in the hot seat, has overseen England’s greatest triumph since its sole World Cup.

He has ruled a thick, black line beneath a July day of 55 years ago and created a culture of the here and now amongst a group of young men who couldn’t give a damn about 1966.

It is ancient history. You might as well try and gee up Harry Kane & Co with tales of Agincourt. They play for the present, gloriously unsaddled by the past.

Look at their body language. No ghosts shadow these men. No inner voices undermine them. No hexes, no here-we-go-agains, no thirty years of hurt mantras gnawing at the soul. This England is Norman Bates, minus his mother.

They were a week ago. They still are today. So in seven days, what on earth can have transported Samuel from a place where he’s urging the FA to kick Southgate’s tyres a little longer, to a place where he’s hailing the England manager as a Moses for our time?

Oh, of course. England has won two more games than it had this time last week. One of them an exorcism, the other a borderline rout.

I don’t know if former NFL coach Tony Dungy has any time for our version of football, but I suspect a knowing smile would cross his face were you to put Samuels’ conflicting columns in front of him.

For it was Dungy, interviewed in his time as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ play-caller, who exposed the relationship between a coach and his audience as being shallower than a teenage crush.

“If you’re real demonstrative and you win, you’re a motivator. If you’re real demonstrative and you lose, you’re too uptight. If you’re laid-back and win, you’re a players coach. If you’re laid-back and you lose, you’re not disciplined enough.

“The bottom line is, you’ve got to win. If you win, what you’re doing is right. If you lose, what you’re doing is wrong.”

Proof of this from an English viewpoint could be just days away, of course. If Southgate leads his team to the European championship, he can spend his next five internationals in full greasepaint, if he wishes, driving round and round his technical area in a clown car, and no-one will bat an eyelid.

Take a knee? The man could take a leak against the opposition dugout and excuses would be found for him. Nor would they have to be particularly elaborate to satisfy his besotted public.

“Well, he’s a maverick, isn’t he? If that’s what it takes…”

If this doesn’t say much for our inclination to look after much more than Number One, though, what does it say for the future of sports journalism?

When wins are the only story that matters, to the extent that just two of them can turn a senior journalist from Doubting Thomas into Billy Graham, why should we care to read about a coach’s preferred formation, lucky colour or how driven he/she is by having been bullied at school?

Suddenly, it all looks like pointless gossip.

I don’t say Samuel’s volte-face threatens the medium but he shouldn’t be too surprised if even some of his biggest fans change the habit of a lifetime and start reading their newspapers from the front page backwards.

Your hurt feelings, Kyle Krause, are the least of football’s worries

Had Kyle Krause – owner of Serie A side Parma – chosen his words more carefully, he could have emerged as a refreshing contrast to what we’ve seen from other Americans abroad these last few weeks.

“…if you truly believe in the strength of Serie A you say ‘how do I make Serie A, the Premier League, the Bundesliga stronger’ instead of ‘how to make my club stronger’,” the man from Iowa told The Athletic.

“…if we want Serie A to be the best league in the world, the second-best league in the world, I believe there has to be more parity in what happens in the league…”

Any American who wants to preach the gospel of parity to blinkered fools clinging to the deadening rich-get-richer model of European football, is welcome with open arms as far as I’m concerned.

Sadly, Kyle Krause couldn’t leave it there. Kyle Krause is displeased.

Kyle Krause has watched certain compatriots display rather less enlightened attitudes towards running football clubs in recent weeks and he has something to say on the matter.

In doing so, alas, he approaches it from completely the wrong angle.

It’s not the big powerful villains of the piece who are the problem, apparently, but the little people calling them out.

Of the negative stereotype that now accompanies Americans who own European clubs, he whines thus…

“I get very much annoyed at the collection. It’s like any stereotype, right? If we said, everybody who is X is the same. This is 2021. You can’t talk about people in that way. It does frustrate me.”

There’s an almighty irony in this bleat. For with his dismissive, “like any stereotype,” comment, Mr Krause is guilty of stereotyping stereotypes. Because they are not all alike.

Some, certainly, spring from nonsense. We could all name a few but I’m not giving any of them oxygen here.

Other stereotypes, however, endure because they are built on a foundation of fact.

Three English clubs involved in the recent Super League fiasco have American owners. But Krause shouldn’t think for one moment that our concerns with Uncle Sam’s influence started there.

He should ask Liverpool fans about George Gillett and Tom Hicks, for example. Or Sunderland fans about Ellis Short, or Aston Villa fans about Randy Lerner. He could even drop down a league or two and let fans of Chester City (RIP) rhapsodise over the glorious reign of Terry Smith.

Plenty of people of other nationalities have messed up football clubs, of course, and perceptions, like ocean liners, can always be turned around in time. But while feelings remain raw, the smart play for Kyle Krause would have been to bite his lip and accept that his boys have pretty much brought this upon themselves.

Instead, he sounds like a defence barrister who, despite being presented with Exhibits A, B and C in support of the prosecution case, still gazes imploringly at the judge and says, “Yes, but where’s the proof, your honour.”

Not only is his outburst logically flawed and tone deaf, it is also insulting. Club owners caused this ruckus, yet we are the ones being lectured by Kyle Krause, because he doesn’t quite care for the tone of our rightful anger.

Time and again, I see this from powerful people who know they and their peer group are on thin ice. Ignore what caused the message and just shoot the messenger.

If only Krause had left it at parity, he’d have looked like the US Cavalry, riding to the relief of a foreign game made tedious by its Darwinian mindset.

As it is, he just looks like Glazer Lite.

Good luck, Parma.

The biggest threat to the FA Cup are the people who ‘look after’ it

Image courtesy of joshjdss

Here we are at 6pm and only now does it occur to me.

“Isn’t it the Cup Final today?”

Me, for whom only Christmas Eve used to out-do Cup Final day in the giddy excitement stakes, some 50 years ago.

Until 5pm, the whole day was ring-fenced. Don’t expect me to focus on anything else until teatime.

As rites of passage went, My Dad’s at Wembley and It’s a Cup Final Knockout were right up there with zits and descending gonads.

It could never last, of course. Just as that ridiculous pile of boxes awaiting me each Christmas morning was bound to start dwindling as the years passed by.

No, what surprises me about the once-great occasion’s demise, is how it has been accelerated by its supposed custodians, the Football Association.

Even in an era where the once-respected UEFA Cup is repeatedly sneered at in its Europa League manifestation, I think there could have been life in the old FA Cup dog yet, had the FA insisted that it retain its status as the season’s last flourish.

The Premier League clears its decks and for one Saturday in May, the Cup is the only show in town. The last staging post at the end of a long wintery haul.

One last chance to vent, rage and despair before that leaky guttering gets fixed and the kids are finally taken to the park. The exclamation mark on another season.

Even if the prize didn’t glitter as it once did, the day could still have had a place in our hearts as a festival occasion.

Instead, following the trend of recent times, today’s Cup Final is lost between Southampton v Fulham and Brighton v West Ham. A sliver of cream between the Premier League’s stale bread and butter.

Over the next few weeks, the FA’s finest marketing brains will no doubt have yet another debrief,  to debate how on earth they save their flagship competition.

Letting someone else look after it, I suggest, would be a hell of a start.