Hype and Glory: The Decline and Fall of the England Football Team from Revie to McClaren
Gavin Newsham (Atlantic, £20.00)
As writer Newsham wryly notes, there have been twenty major footballing tournaments since that July Saturday in 1966 when Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup Trophy for England. Twenty tournaments that have resulted in precisely nish. Having lived through all of them I winced, flinched and laughed as Newsham’s compulsively readable book took me back through the inevitable wave of expectation each tournament brought, and the crushing disappointment that followed just a week or so later.
Newsham takes as his driving force the footballing fortunes of ten England managers - Alf Ramsey, Don Revie, Ron Greenwood, Bobby Robson, Graham Taylor, Terry Venables, Glenn Hoddle, Sven Goran Eriksson, Steve McLaren and Fabio Capello - and uses anecdotes, original interviews and press snippets to build a truly compelling narrative. The politics, the setting, the small glories and the heinous mistakes - all are artfully presented in style that says as much about English football as it does about the changing face of England itself over these last forty years.
How’s this for a snapshot of England in 1972: England manager Alf Ramsey is on a train back to Ipswich from London. By chance he is sitting next to a friend, Ted Phillips, once an Ipswich Town player under Ramsey; a telephone cable fitter post-football. The two men chat lightly and have a couple of drinks. Ramsey seems subdued, but waves to his friend as they part. The next day Phillips, on the way to work, reads that Ramsey has been sacked. ‘Bloody hell!’ recalls Phillips. ‘He never said a word. Nothing. But that was Alf. He was a very proud man.’ Indeed.
These vignettes bring the book alive. Yes, we see the team selections and the odd interludes - Joe Mercer’s strange seven game stint in 1972, say, that saw flair players like Colin Bell, Frank Worthington, Stan Bowles and Alan Hudson find spots in the team - but these would be but glorified press clippings without the crafted flow of Newsham’s prose, his fresh take on the facts, and his ear for a good story. Did you remember (or even know) that Don Revie oversaw the change in manufacturer of England kits from Umbro to Admiral, and that for the first time the manufacturer had to pay the FA for the privilege? Just the addition of red-and-white trim to the shirts caused ‘outrage’ in some quarters at the time. These cultural tremors may have been all but forgotten, but spring from the pages here, often to comic effect.
Newsham takes the games and key events and makes them fresh. Nuggets of intrigue crop up on almost every page: despite having to endure Simple Mind’s Alive and Kicking as pre-match warm up England beat Poland in 1986. In 1988 after going out of the tournament in West Germany the England team repaired to a bar where Peter Shilton accused Bryan Robson of being a bottler. Robson punched Shilton from his barstool, a fitting end a tournament plagued by England fan’s rioting. In 1996 the England team famously got epically drunk after a pre-Euro tour of the far East. On the flight back to England Paul Gascoigne was woken with a slap to his face. Enraged, he set about destroying the First Class cabin - so violently that Dennis Wise had to take refuge in an overhead locker!
Past prejudices are visited and reconsidered. Graham Taylor, while unsuccessful in the England job, comes across as astute, tactically creative and above all a sound, honest, nice man. And one who picked up John Barnes for Watford for the grand sum of a set of kit to Sudbury Town. Kevin Keegan comes across as a keen golfer.
Steve McLaren, on leaving the England job, compared his time as manager to a ‘rollercoaster’. Newsham points out; ‘It had been a rollercoaster, only one that was incapable of going uphill.’ Not an accusation that could be hurled at this book. For a document on a sporting quest that, since 1966, has ended in failure, Hype and Glory is singularly engaging.
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