All Crazee Now , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing Ltd - David Tossell

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312 pages

English

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All Crazee Now is the story of English football and its footballers in the 1970s, a decade that saw the start of the move from the 'old-fashioned' game towards the modern Premier League era; a transition that accelerated throughout the decade. Much of what we recognise in today's game is rooted in the seventies - including diverse ethnicity and multi-nationalism in club teams; the rise of commercialism; the cult of the manager; the end of the player-next-door; and the demand for victory ahead of individualism. The beginning of the decade remains the period in English football that supporters felt more connected than anytime previous or since. By the time the Thatcherite 1980s were dawning, the way had been paved for a rapid evolution towards 21st-century football. More than just a chronicle of trophy winners, star players and personalities, it offers a study of the tactical, philosophical, social, cultural, economic and political landscape that shaped football throughout a turbulent period for a nation and its favourite sport.

Sujets

Inglaterra

History of sport

England

Informations

Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	15 février 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785319013
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
David Tossell, 2021
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785317576
eBook ISBN 9781785319013
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CONTENTS
Introduction: The Day of the Damned
Part One: Get It On
1. Rage Against the Machine
The Style Council
When Worlds Collide
2. Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?
Dandies in the Underworld
Read All About It
3. The Empire Strikes Back
The Best Years of Our Lives
4. Middle-Class Heroes
Power to the People
Twentieth-Century Boy
5. Sweet Talkin Guys
Fight to the Finish
What s Up, Doc?
6. Games Without Frontiers
There s a New Sensation; a Fabulous Creation
Beg, Steal or Borrow
7. The Year of Living Dangerously
The End of the World
Deeper and Down
8. Saturday Night s Alright for Fighting
The Moral Panic
Part Two: Something Better Change
9. Take Me to Your Leader
Pressure Points
Last of the Summer Wine
10. We Can Be Heroes
Part-Time Love
First Among Equals
11. England s Dreaming
Dancing with the Captain
When Two Sevens Clash
12. Young, Gifted And Black
Degrees of Difficulty
13. The Liverpool Way
Do Anything you Wanna Do
Fanfare for the Common Man
14. The Outsiders
This is the Modern World
Working for the Yankee Dollar
15. Could It Be Magic
The Winners Take It All
Trial of the Decade
1970s Roll Of Honour
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Introduction
THE DAY OF THE DAMNED
And this is just what English football did not want to see. Surely, we ve got to get away from this Bremner is off as well. They are both throwing their shirts down and, really, this is a side of English football, a face of English football, we do not want to see. What do the players think they are doing?... We are seeing the unacceptable face of English football.
BBC commentator Barry Davies, FA Charity Shield, 1974
You re gonna get your fucking heads kicked in.
Leeds United and Liverpool fans underneath Davies s commentary
THE SIXTIES, many in America believe, was bisected by the moment when, on 25 July 1965, Bob Dylan and his band took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island and, instead of their usual acoustic performance, plugged electric guitars into amplifiers and blasted out Like a Rolling Stone to a chorus of boos from the audience. If English football in the Seventies had a similarly identifiable mid-point it was Saturday, 10 August 1974, the day when the FA Charity Shield announced its arrival at Wembley Stadium with an extraordinary contest between League champions Leeds United and FA Cup holders Liverpool.
Both teams travelled to north-west London facing life without their architects, Don Revie having accepted the England job after his second title triumph at Elland Road and Bill Shankly shocking a football community on Merseyside and beyond by announcing, only days before the match, that he was retiring from the job that appeared to define his very existence. The opposite directions in which the two clubs were about to head would shape the remainder of the decade; the mantle of team of the Seventies passing from one to the other.
The symbolic nature of the occasion was made even richer, we know now, by the identities of the two men newly entrusted with guiding the fortunes of the two protagonists. Allowed to lead his team out one final time, thanks to the generosity of his successor, Bob Paisley, Shankly had made the same walk three months earlier before a 3-0 victory over Newcastle United in one of the most one-sided of Wembley finals. Captured by the television cameras seemingly conducting the moves with his hands from his seat on the touchline, there had been no hint that, after three League titles, a European trophy, and now a second FA Cup, Shankly was orchestrating a glorious farewell symphony. Nor did it seem likely on this disorientating August day that Paisley, the quiet assistant with nothing like Shankly s vibrant, overpowering personality, would have eclipsed his mentor s on-field achievements by the time the decade was up.
To Shankly s right strolled the unlikely figure of Brian Clough; the same man whose hatred of Revie s Leeds was legendary even before it was fictionalised and immortalised in book form and on celluloid by The Damned United three decades later. The appearance of a grinning Clough at the head of the bemused-looking line-up of Billy Bremner, Johnny Giles and the rest was as baffling as the sight of an electrified Dylan had been to the folkies in Newport. He d already turned up several days late for pre-season training and then, in what would become an infamous first address, accused the players of having cheated their way to their medals. The sense of trepidation around the club was reflected by Leeds fans being able to fill only three of the four chartered trains booked to carry them from Yorkshire to London.
The whole day had such an air of the surreal that it was hardly a surprise when the game, televised on that night s Match of the Day and accompanied by the horrified tones of commentator Barry Davies, degenerated into a punch-up. Bremner and Kevin Keegan threw their shirts to the turf as they marched towards their early baths, acts of rebellion for which they were subsequently suspended until the end of September.
With that punishment, English football seemed to be trying to draw a line. It was bad enough that the national team had been missing from the summer s World Cup in West Germany after failing to get out of a qualifying group that offered Poland and Wales as opposition. Now the new season was beginning with more of the nastiness that had become an increasingly visible blemish on the landscape over the past decade. There had been recent attempts to stamp it out, most notably three summers previously. Now it was time for an example to be made.
The climax of the match was entirely in keeping with the tone of the day. Following a 1-1 draw, Wembley s first penalty shoot-out was decided when Leeds goalkeeper David Harvey hit his team s sixth spot-kick over the bar. Despite Liverpool s eventual victory, it was an unsuitably shoddy final curtain on Shankly s career; a portent of the years ahead for Paisley only in the sense that Liverpool won; and a shambolic foretaste of what was to come at Leeds for Clough. His chaotic occupancy of Revie s old office would last for just 44 acrimonious days.
Events at Wembley can now be seen as a clear dividing line in the decade. Whether it was the reduced potency of Leeds - the team who for many epitomised the ugly realism of modern football - or a general turning of the tide, the Keegan-Bremner spat came to represent a low point in the game s on-field image. Liverpool under Paisley and, ironically, a Clough-led Nottingham Forest would dominate the latter years of the Seventies without attracting the kind of negativity with which Revie s Leeds were forever associated. Even the anti-establishment magazine, Foul , wrote in what was intended to be a farewell issue in June 1975, In spite of Norman Hunter winning the PFA Player of the Year award the season before last [and] the continuing presence of Storey and Chopper Harris the game has become a bit more civilised and identified a trend towards better days .
Under the more benevolent leadership of Jimmy Armfield, Leeds did manage to compensate for a stunted League campaign by reaching the European Cup Final. But, instead of it being a last crowning glory for the team that had dominated the psyche - if not the trophy cabinet - of English football over the previous decade, their controversial defeat by Bayern Munich, further marred by crowd violence, signalled the start of steady decline. Meanwhile, after one season of transition under Paisley, Liverpool were ready to launch themselves into successive League Championships, in 1976 and 1977, following up both with European Cup triumphs.
Clough, who had soared to unlikely heights with Derby County earlier in the decade, crawled back from the depths of his humiliation at Elland Road to create an even more remarkable narrative. Sticking two fingers up at those who had mocked his failure and defying those who thought this would finally knock the hubris out of the game s most outspoken character, he turned Second Division Nottingham Forest into the only team capable of regularly standing up to, and often overcoming, Paisley s Liverpool, both at home and in Europe.
This book, then, is presented in two parts. The first covers the period before Bremner and Keegan prompted Davies s lament for the state of the game; the years when Leeds, whom Revie had deliberately dressed up to look like Real Madrid, were the measuring stick for all of English football. The leitmotif of that period is the war that waged for the soul of the game; the battles between pragmatism and positive thinking, foul play and flair. The striving of the artist to find a home among the increasingly rigid science of winning matches.
The conflict was encapsulated by Striker magazine during the first year of the decade in a double-page feature headline