Rivals Game , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing - Douglas Beattie

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134 pages

English

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Why do football fans decide to support one club over another in cities where intense, deep-seated rivalries exist?What makes them choose: family ties, geography, politics, religion or perhaps race? 'Rivals Game' author Douglas Beattie spent two years discovering what lies at the heart of Britain's greatest derbies. Beattie takes the reader to the matches that have long been seen as passionate, divisive and vitally important to the entire cities in which they are played. These are the games that have a history of violence, feuding, social unrest and bigotry. But what is the truth about their origins and how does the enmity, so often displayed by supporters and gleefully by the media, manifest itself in an era which sees top clubs funded by billionaire chairmen and awash with TV revenue?

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing
Date de parution	02 décembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781908051264
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Simon Kuper
Introduction
1. SHEFFIELD: In The Beginning There Was Steel
2. BIRMINGHAM: An Unquiet Easter
3. NORTH LONDON: Land, Lies and Lasagne
4. MANCHESTER: Red Rising, Citizens Return
5. LIVERPOOL: Fiery Across The Mersey
6. GLASGOW: Prisoners of History
7. EDINBURGH: The Dancers and The Harp
8. TYNE AND WEAR: Across the Frontier
9. AFTERWORD
Photographs
This book is dedicated to K M Beattie (who gave me the chance) and Lindsey (for those amazing eyes and always believing)
Author s Acknowledgements
I t is no understatement to say that without the help of dozens of people The Rivals Game would never have been written. Almost everyone I approached was kind enough to freely give their time: journalists, politicians, clergymen, lawyers, authors, fanzine writers, historians and the countless supporters on the street who were buttonholed to air their views. Many went far beyond the call of duty to assist and advise.
In particular my sincere thanks and best wishes go to all of those individuals quoted in the text. They were not alone, indeed, some of the most illuminating conversations were held with people who did not wish to be named (for various reasons). All I can say is you know who you are - oh, and the drinks are on me the next time we meet.
A considerable amount of faith was shown by all at Pitch Publishing and Paul Camillin in particular. Thanks a million.
This book draws some inspiration from those who have gone before me, in particular Simon Kuper in Football Against The Enemy . Simon is owed an immense debt of gratitude for his kindness in writing the foreword to this volume. It meant a great deal, Simon. Thank you.
To the rest of you, thanks one and all for your time, support, views, and - in some cases - all that we have shared down the years. In Sheffield: Richard Batho, Keith Farnsworth, Karl Taylor, Jan Wilson, Andrew Gilligan, Andrea Neville and especially Gary Armstrong. In Birmingham: Bill Howell, Roger Blake, Andy Davis. In north London: Barry Baker, Bernard Corcoran, Vic Wright, Bernie Kingsley, Ken and Stevie Benjamin. In Manchester: Andy Mitten and Dave Wallace. In Liverpool: Bernard and Suzanne at the Feathers, Simon Favour, Ben, Veronica and (the one and only) Nick Astor. In Glasgow: Val Lemmon, Stephen Townsend, Joe Ferrari, Barry McKinnon. In Edinburgh: Tam Wright, Rhona Crawford, Jane Reid at St Patrick s. In the North-East: Colin Patterson, Roger Fairlie, Kevin Douglas, John Clayson, Louise Wanless and Gary Oliver.
Never to be forgotten: Jason Hall, Franny Graham, Russell Bell, Clive Scott, Danny Cotter, Big Deev McVittie, John Rae Elliot, Graeme Cooper, Nick Harvey and Sarah McLean, Alan Guy, Gilly Bavington, Lucy Marrs, Georgie Steele, Lennox McBay, Duncan Ritchie, Stephen Rae, Gordon Stewart, David Ewart, Neil Gill, Natasha Serlin, Amelia Hill, Jenni Doggett, Pauline Ainslie, Sandy Reid, Ed Grenby, Ruth Rocket Isherwood, William Cadogan, Simon Coulson, Michael McPartlin, Steve Bottomley, Tom Hodgkinson, Paul English, Donald Graham, Mark Anker, the cricket writer Simon Lister (for endless good advice), all my friends at Kalendar and in the radio newsroom (forever the unsung heroes) and the finest of BBC journalists, Mick Robson and Anthony Birchley.
Although it is often ignored by the supposed great and good of the game - without you there would be no football. Good luck to all your teams.
Douglas Beattie February 2011
Foreword by Simon Kuper
A few years ago I went to watch Spurs play Arsenal with some friends who happened to be Gunners fans. We sat in the away end at White Hart Lane and, when Dennis Bergkamp scored in the goal in front of us, my friends - who all had yuppie London jobs - gesticulated madly at the entire stadium while everyone else threatened to kill us.
Though I knew that Spurs and Arsenal fans were enemies, it baffled me. At 16 I had returned from the Netherlands, where I grew up, to live in a London neighbourhood about halfway between the Spurs and Arsenal grounds. Some of the locals supported Spurs, and others Arsenal, but what struck me is that they seemed to be exactly the same people. There was nothing in their origins - not religion or class or anything else - that determined which club of the two they chose. Rather, it was an apparently random decision. My friends that day happened to have chosen Arsenal, and so they despised the people who happened to have chosen Spurs. They even despised each other in the same vocabulary. I had a friend, a Tottenham fan, who used to wander around absentmindedly chanting We beat the scum, 3-1 in honour of the famous FA Cup semi-final of 1991. However, in this eye-opening book Douglas Beattie describes Arsenal fans at another derby singing: You re scum and you know you are.
Beattie s book is a pursuit of that strange beast, the British derby. There is probably no other footballing nation with as many inner-city rivalries, and British ones are spicy enough to have drawn in the whole world. People in Shanghai or Soweto will live Everton versus Liverpool as fully as if they grew up just off Stanley Park. Yet south of the Scottish border it s usually impossible to discern what these derbies are about. Is all this passion really random and pointless? Beattie tries to find out.
In other European countries, it tends to be clear what derbies are about, or at least what they were originally about. When Milan played Inter, for instance, Milan used to draw their supporters from the poorer migrants to the city, while Inter s tended to come from the better-established indigenous middle class. In France, where I live now, the regional derby between Lyon and St Etienne sets a wealthy bourgeois city against a post-industrial working-class one. At a recent game, Lyon fans unfurled a banner that said: We invented cinema when your fathers were dying in the mines.
In Glasgow, of course, the derby was about religion. Beattie also makes a typically energetic visit to Edinburgh, where he shows that the Hearts-Hibs derby is drenched in class. As one Hibs fan tells him: If you look back over the board of Hearts compared to the board of Hibs, Hearts was very much, until the 1980s, successful businessmen, lawyers, but also people who were brought in from major businesses like the banks. For Hibs it has always been small businessmen, bookmakers, guys with building firms, and before that, bakers, more artisan successful tradesmen.
Beattie has traipsed round this island and sought out fans whose voices you seldom hear, except when they are chanting: the hardcore, the local supporters who care most. Nick Hornbys they are not, but they are the people who give these derbies their passion - or, to drop the euphemism, their venom. But Beattie is enterprising and willing to range: outside Lime Street station in Liverpool he runs into Michael Howard, Liverpool fan and former leader of the Conservative party, and asks him what he thinks.
Thanks to all this legwork, he builds a distinctive picture of each derby, with charming detail. Only in Liverpool, for instance, could there have been a Charity Shield match like this: The teams came out together with Ray Wilson of Everton and Liverpool s Roger Hunt parading the World Cup they had won with England that summer. Then, together, both sides showed off their winnings from the previous season - Everton had the FA Cup and Liverpool the league championship.
Beattie has ended up writing a book not just about football, but about Britain - and in particular, its unlovely provincial cities, the ones nobody would notice unless, if walking through the little streets, you didn t suddenly hit upon a football ground and then, just a mile or two away, another.
Introduction
A wise man once wrote: hardly anyone seems to query the importance attached to the game. For those who do the kicking and those who watch it so avidly, the whole matter is taken for granted. Football is football 1
Quite so. Football in the second decade of the 21st century is now - and has been for a number of years - a sport and a spectacle for billions around the globe. This was the case in 2006 when I began trekking the streets of the various cities which have provided so many of the most famous clubs in this land; it remained true in 2011, when I went back over the same ground for this edition of The Rivals Game.
The five intervening years had seen great economic change in the form of a banking crisis and crash of near catastrophic proportions. Some of the leading teams are now seriously feeling the squeeze, brought on not only by recession, but failure on the pitch and in the boardroom. Money, though still available, is more likely than ever to come from overseas investors.
For the supporters - as for the population at large - the background was very much the looming threat of job losses and cuts in services heralded by a new coalition government at Westminster, elected in the spring of 2010. Despite all this upheaval it was clear that the game had retained its long held place at the heart of national life. It had all been so different a century and a half ago when the sport-anew sport of Association Football - was about to spread its wings.
The embryonic clubs which were successful then are the ones which we think of as great institutions today. Often they would have to fight for success in their own towns and cities, sometimes even swallowing up other local teams, before reaching wider acclaim. These are the stories you will find here: of rivalry and how they were forged and shaped. Always it was the people, mainly the unknown supporters in their tens of thousands, who said this is my team , while rejecting all others. Football unites, but if we are honest, it also divides. It always has.
That is why I wanted to write this book. Growing up in Scotland I had always been fascinated by the idea of rivalry. It first grabbed me when I watched the Scottish Cup final o