The Arsenal team salute fans in Beijing this summer: top clubs are detached from the local communities that once sustained them
In the end defeat, though long awaited, took some time to declare itself. Finally, at 10.24pm on a sultry mid-June night in Kiev, after 120 minutes of creative stalemate and a morale-sapping penalty shoot-out, the fatal moment came. Ashley Cole, England’s tabloid-haunted full back, scuffed the ball slantwise into the gloves of Gianluigi Buffon, the case-hardened Italian goalkeeper, whereupon Alessandro Diamanti, a player previously thought surplus to requirements by the English Premier League, stepped up to put the quarter-final tie out of reach.
As ever on these occasions a fine variety of facial expressions was on display. Roy Hodgson, the England manager, looked even more like one of those sorry Shakespearian jesters, stranded on the blasted heath, fearful of losing his head. The English fans—a quivering wedge of red-and-white sports shirts and ripely perspiring foreheads—hollered and wept. Back on the pitch the players looked peevishly indignant, like a gang of bricklayers ticked off by their foreman for a wall built several inches out of trim. Italy were through, and we weren’t. The Euro 2012 dream was over.
Within seconds the post-match recriminations had begun. Had Wayne shown up? Had Andy Carroll, the big, pony-tailed, Number 9 justified his selection? In fact, the press response was oddly muted. Most English tournament campaigns open in a blaze of rapt, proleptic glory, the Silvo already bought to burnish the trophy, the dim-wit predictions that Glenn, or Sven can do it buzzing through the TV studio ether. This time round, alternatively, a chill wind of realism had been blowing through the England camp and expectations were lowered from the start.
England’s players, a host of commentators rushed up to assure us, simply weren’t as accomplished as their continental rivals. The general opinion was that Our Boys were technically limited, while advertising welcome qualities of doggedness and application, and that Hodgson should be congratulated for taking them as far as he had. And now, gentlemen, it was time for a short vacation, a rest from all this seething but essentially factitious emotion, before the really serious business of the 2012/13 Premier League recommenced.
And a really serious business it definitely is: turning over billions, making Croesuses of its elite performers, silhouetting anyone at large in its upper echelon in the celebrity-ville searchlight. The national obsession with football is very old—the clerks in PG Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City (1910) talk of nothing else—and yet the impulses that currently govern it (money, TV, overseas investors) are disconcertingly new, a whole new value system ripe to compromise the myths that give the game its resonance. Is English football still true to its original spirit? Or, to put it more starkly, what kind of sporting-cum-commercial behemoth has been created here, and at what cost?
* * *
The beetle-browed gravity with which the British media turns its eye on association football never ceases to astonish foreign onlookers. From the public utility angle, this astonishment is well worth registering, for there is a way in which what passes for national discourse in this country takes place in interstices, “in between talking about the football,” as the Scottish writer Gordon Legge titled his 1991 short story collection. On the other, the “it’s only a game” argument occasionally wielded against these constituencies manifestly won’t do. The simple things you see in football are invariably much more complicated than they look, so self-evidently more than the spectacle of 22 young men kicking lumps out of each other while a baying crowd chants obscenities in the background.
To begin with there is English football’s infallible link with English nationalism, that by now almost mythical invocation of the green sward of Wembley Stadium in 1966 on which Bobby Charlton and Geoff Hurst saw off the embarrassed German hordes in a metaphorical equivalent of World War III. Then there is football’s historic status as one of the few reliable channels of working-class self-advancement. Even today, in a world of vastly expanded educational opportunity, England’s leading players hail from an instantly recognisable demographic: the sparsely educated and under-qualified working- to lower-middle-class, where a GSCE is a big event.
All this leads us to the third aspect of football’s well-nigh unique significance to British life: its extraordinary commercial heft. The recent auction of televised football rights raked in £3bn for the not exactly poverty-stricken Premier League: a sum that even its chief executive, Richard Scudamore, had the grace to look faintly embarrassed about. Success brings instant rewards: even my own club, the deeply unfashionable Norwich City, have upped their turnover from £17m to £75m after a two-year canter from League One into the top tier. Yet more enticing, to a wily overseas investor, is its genuine international compass. The big transatlantic pastimes barely exist beyond their national boundary lines, whereas the top six English sides spend the close season on lucrative tours of the Far East. As brands go, this is a marketeer’s dream.
By chance, England’s Euro campaign coincided with the publication of Richer than God: Manchester City, Modern Football and Growing Up, by the sports journalist David Conn. As a connoisseur of crook agents and boardroom cupidity, Conn has no difficulty in exposing some of the consequences of the game’s new-found corporatism. But he also has a rheumy eye for some of that corporatism’s knock-on effects. One of these, naturally, is the increasing detachment of the top clubs from the localities in which they reside, and the local patriotism that previously sustained them.
Another is the lopsidedness of the fiscal take: if the finances of Chelsea, winners of the 2012 Champions League, would be irrevocably shot in the absence of their cheque-wielding proprietor Roman Abramovich, then perhaps a quarter of the clubs beyond the Premier League perimeter fence would be found to be trading illegally were the standard financial tests applied. A third, ominously enough, is the long-term mediocrity of the national team. The Premier League may be a roaring international success, but the majority of the players at large in its upper levels aren’t local. For all the talk of nurturing young talent, the odds on an English teenager turning out for his nearest Premier League club grow longer by the week.
The constant cutting of the generational pack, which sees fewer and fewer Englishmen involved in the upper levels of the English game, has not gone unremarked. One enduring sports-page subtext is the precedence that Premier League activities tend to take over national commitments. Sir Alex Ferguson, a canny Scot, couldn’t care less about his players’ availability for England call-up. And where, if it comes to that, do Wayne Rooney’s loyalties lie? Young Wayne’s work-outs in the four international tournaments in which England’s most influential footballer has thus far disported himself have been consistently short on results.
* * *
To the friction caused by an absurdly wealthy sport that concentrates its riches on the upper five per cent of its personnel can be added the tensions brought about by football’s two contending traditions. The professional game as we know it came into existence in the north of England in the late 19th century when works sides quietly began to pay some of their players. Yet the codification of the sport, and its moral underpinning, was, essentially, an amateur project. The Football Association, for example, founded in 1863, consisted of the representatives of public school old boys’ clubs based in the soft, gentlemanly south.
Naturally the northern professionals soon disposed of lah-di-dah Home Counties competition (although the celebrated amateur side The Corinthians were still going strong in cup competitions well into the 1930s). But what might be called the Corinthian spirit, with its emphasis on “playing the game” and the competing being more important than the winning, proved unexpectedly durable. The boys’ school stories of the inter-war era, wish-fulfilment fantasies aimed at children a great deal further down the educational scale, were bent on propagating the amateur code. Their echo could be heard as much as half a century later in the pre-teen comic Roy of the Rovers, whose blond-haired hero plays for a professional club, but is a walking embodiment of the virtues of “sportsmanship” and “fair play.”
All this had a profound effect on the generations of football fans born into the world before telephone number salaries and Sky Sports. Members of the 1966 World Cup squad were conceptualised for the mass audience in almost mythical terms: Bobby Moore, the stalwart but scrupulous captain; Bobby Charlton, his unfailing, well-mannered sidekick. Its most natural consequence, to anyone reared on this tradition of footballer as moral agent, is a lurking resentment of the players for not living up to these exacting standards. A fantasy-commentary from Euro 2012 in which England players were rated merely for their activities off the pitch would go something like: the man who is up in court next month on a public order offence has passed it to the man who in his autobiography declared himself slighted by only being offered £55,000 a week, thereby freeing up the man whose car was burnt out as it lay in his driveway…
Footballers sometimes complain that they don’t set themselves up as role models and shouldn’t be treated as such, to which the answer is that there are children out there cutting your pictures out of Match of the Day magazine, and the fan who applauds a wife-beater for scoring the winning goal has lost sight of a principle that most ordinary people would rather want to be retained. And so the average supporter’s attitude to what takes place on the pitch is queerly double-edged. He was brought up to regard sport as a romantic activity, whose satisfactions lie in the heroic feat and the subtle twist of fortune. Meanwhile, down on the greensward the usual collection of brawny louts are snarling abuse at each other and tapping each other’s ankles when the referee’s back is turned.
Inevitably, these are false distinctions. I once spent an instructive half hour in the company of Bobby Moore’s ghost-writer: as he remarked, no hint of genitalia-exposing, table-bestriding “raucous Bobby” ever made it into print. On the other hand, England’s 1966 World Cup campaign positively reeked of the Corinthian Spirit. Alan Ball remembered coming back to the hotel room he shared with Nobby Stiles with £1,000 each in cash, courtesy of their kind sponsors, and being so bewildered by the sight of so much ready money that they cascaded the notes over each other’s heads. What had kept this attitude more or less intact through the first half of the 20th century was ready money’s absence. The English game’s commercial turning point, close inspection insists, was the early 1960s. The end of the maximum wage came about in 1961; the BBC’s Match of the Day premiered in 1964. Two hulking juggernauts with the capacity to change the game for ever—television and money—were on collision course in an arena that had previously got by on paying spectators, lofty aims and thrift.
* * *
Half a century later, English football has gone the way of business in general. The big clubs have grown bigger and (with certain exceptions) more prosperous; the smaller clubs have grown smaller and more hard-up. Formerly run by people who were interested in the game and prepared to bring money into it, clubs are largely run by people with less of an emotional stake who are keener on taking money out of it. The ancient link between football clubs and the communities from which they originally grew is irrevocably shattered.
Worse, the advent of huge salaries and over-priced season tickets has produced an unofficial cartel with a stranglehold over the upper echelon of the English league. Twenty years ago a Norwich side assembled on a shoe-string almost carried off the first Premier League title. No club with this kind of funding will ever do that again: the procedural difficulties and the squad constraints are simply too great. Of the 20 clubs competing for this year’s league trophy only four—or possibly five—have a serious chance of winning it.
All this ought theoretically to inspire a dreadful cynicism among the intelligent fan, and yet somehow this abandonment rarely takes place. The myths are too resonant; the ancestral ties too sinewy; the glamour too seductive. Who would you prefer to see on the pitch before you—European and World Cup-winning David Silva, or Nowhere United’s Lee Fredge? Even David Conn found himself exulting over Manchester City’s last-ditch triumph in the league last season. To go back to unfancied Norwich, who will spend the next nine months trying to avoid “second season syndrome,” it is possible to deduce that the playing field on which the competition takes place is horribly uneven, and biased in half-a-dozen ways in the interests of the leading clubs, while exulting in the fact that each alternate Saturday afternoon brings a new Premier League star strutting his stuff on the Carrow Road turf.
In the same way, “objective” analyses of football nearly always founder on their inability to comprehend the vestigial romanticism that, even now, attends the game. In his essay “The Sporting Spirit,” inspired by the visit of the Moscow Dynamo XI to these shores in 1945, George Orwell remarked that: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
No doubt something similar could be said now, but it would not be true. After all, if football really were entirely expedient then a player who feigned injury in pursuit of a penalty would be regarded as a hero, whereas even Sir Alex appears to feel slightly queasy about Ashley Young’s stage-managed tumbles in the box. Simultaneously, the striking of moral attitudes about the game is rendered yet more problematic by its essential theatricality, and the gradual elevation of the leading performers to subsidiary rungs on the international celebrity ladder. The persona dreamed up for tabloid love-rat Ashley Cole, for example, is approximately as “real” as Katie Price or Kerry Katona; he is essentially a blank space on which the lower-end media can project whatever they think, or don’t think, about the game.
Forty-six years on from that legendary encounter on the Wembley turf, English football is a curious, hybrid entity: a big business, certainly, but one still constrained and to an extent tempered by the tribal loyalties of its fans, awash with sentiment, undermined and sometimes enlivened by chauvinism and accompanied on its journeys by a whole raft of moral baggage originally assembled at around the time of Queen Victoria’s widowhood. Undoubtedly over the next ten years—and despite the levelling effect of the new UEFA solvency rules, which will prohibit off-balance sheet financing by wealthy owners—all these tendencies will be exacerbated: more filthy lucre; more teenage millionaires; more exorbitant ticket prices bent on excluding ordinary supporters from the game.
And so this particular devotee, his 2012/13 season ticket safely trousered, will go on supporting with at least some of his illusions intact: that cash-strapped, talent-starved League Two Davids will occasionally be able to bring down a Premier League Goliath; that England has the scintilla of a chance in the 2014 World Cup; and that the burly gentlemen at half-a-dozen Premier League grounds chanting “who’s the wanker in the black?” are still Roy of the Rovers fans at heart.
In the end defeat, though long awaited, took some time to declare itself. Finally, at 10.24pm on a sultry mid-June night in Kiev, after 120 minutes of creative stalemate and a morale-sapping penalty shoot-out, the fatal moment came. Ashley Cole, England’s tabloid-haunted full back, scuffed the ball slantwise into the gloves of Gianluigi Buffon, the case-hardened Italian goalkeeper, whereupon Alessandro Diamanti, a player previously thought surplus to requirements by the English Premier League, stepped up to put the quarter-final tie out of reach.
As ever on these occasions a fine variety of facial expressions was on display. Roy Hodgson, the England manager, looked even more like one of those sorry Shakespearian jesters, stranded on the blasted heath, fearful of losing his head. The English fans—a quivering wedge of red-and-white sports shirts and ripely perspiring foreheads—hollered and wept. Back on the pitch the players looked peevishly indignant, like a gang of bricklayers ticked off by their foreman for a wall built several inches out of trim. Italy were through, and we weren’t. The Euro 2012 dream was over.
Within seconds the post-match recriminations had begun. Had Wayne shown up? Had Andy Carroll, the big, pony-tailed, Number 9 justified his selection? In fact, the press response was oddly muted. Most English tournament campaigns open in a blaze of rapt, proleptic glory, the Silvo already bought to burnish the trophy, the dim-wit predictions that Glenn, or Sven can do it buzzing through the TV studio ether. This time round, alternatively, a chill wind of realism had been blowing through the England camp and expectations were lowered from the start.
England’s players, a host of commentators rushed up to assure us, simply weren’t as accomplished as their continental rivals. The general opinion was that Our Boys were technically limited, while advertising welcome qualities of doggedness and application, and that Hodgson should be congratulated for taking them as far as he had. And now, gentlemen, it was time for a short vacation, a rest from all this seething but essentially factitious emotion, before the really serious business of the 2012/13 Premier League recommenced.
And a really serious business it definitely is: turning over billions, making Croesuses of its elite performers, silhouetting anyone at large in its upper echelon in the celebrity-ville searchlight. The national obsession with football is very old—the clerks in PG Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City (1910) talk of nothing else—and yet the impulses that currently govern it (money, TV, overseas investors) are disconcertingly new, a whole new value system ripe to compromise the myths that give the game its resonance. Is English football still true to its original spirit? Or, to put it more starkly, what kind of sporting-cum-commercial behemoth has been created here, and at what cost?
* * *
The beetle-browed gravity with which the British media turns its eye on association football never ceases to astonish foreign onlookers. From the public utility angle, this astonishment is well worth registering, for there is a way in which what passes for national discourse in this country takes place in interstices, “in between talking about the football,” as the Scottish writer Gordon Legge titled his 1991 short story collection. On the other, the “it’s only a game” argument occasionally wielded against these constituencies manifestly won’t do. The simple things you see in football are invariably much more complicated than they look, so self-evidently more than the spectacle of 22 young men kicking lumps out of each other while a baying crowd chants obscenities in the background.
To begin with there is English football’s infallible link with English nationalism, that by now almost mythical invocation of the green sward of Wembley Stadium in 1966 on which Bobby Charlton and Geoff Hurst saw off the embarrassed German hordes in a metaphorical equivalent of World War III. Then there is football’s historic status as one of the few reliable channels of working-class self-advancement. Even today, in a world of vastly expanded educational opportunity, England’s leading players hail from an instantly recognisable demographic: the sparsely educated and under-qualified working- to lower-middle-class, where a GSCE is a big event.
All this leads us to the third aspect of football’s well-nigh unique significance to British life: its extraordinary commercial heft. The recent auction of televised football rights raked in £3bn for the not exactly poverty-stricken Premier League: a sum that even its chief executive, Richard Scudamore, had the grace to look faintly embarrassed about. Success brings instant rewards: even my own club, the deeply unfashionable Norwich City, have upped their turnover from £17m to £75m after a two-year canter from League One into the top tier. Yet more enticing, to a wily overseas investor, is its genuine international compass. The big transatlantic pastimes barely exist beyond their national boundary lines, whereas the top six English sides spend the close season on lucrative tours of the Far East. As brands go, this is a marketeer’s dream.
By chance, England’s Euro campaign coincided with the publication of Richer than God: Manchester City, Modern Football and Growing Up, by the sports journalist David Conn. As a connoisseur of crook agents and boardroom cupidity, Conn has no difficulty in exposing some of the consequences of the game’s new-found corporatism. But he also has a rheumy eye for some of that corporatism’s knock-on effects. One of these, naturally, is the increasing detachment of the top clubs from the localities in which they reside, and the local patriotism that previously sustained them.
Another is the lopsidedness of the fiscal take: if the finances of Chelsea, winners of the 2012 Champions League, would be irrevocably shot in the absence of their cheque-wielding proprietor Roman Abramovich, then perhaps a quarter of the clubs beyond the Premier League perimeter fence would be found to be trading illegally were the standard financial tests applied. A third, ominously enough, is the long-term mediocrity of the national team. The Premier League may be a roaring international success, but the majority of the players at large in its upper levels aren’t local. For all the talk of nurturing young talent, the odds on an English teenager turning out for his nearest Premier League club grow longer by the week.
The constant cutting of the generational pack, which sees fewer and fewer Englishmen involved in the upper levels of the English game, has not gone unremarked. One enduring sports-page subtext is the precedence that Premier League activities tend to take over national commitments. Sir Alex Ferguson, a canny Scot, couldn’t care less about his players’ availability for England call-up. And where, if it comes to that, do Wayne Rooney’s loyalties lie? Young Wayne’s work-outs in the four international tournaments in which England’s most influential footballer has thus far disported himself have been consistently short on results.
* * *
To the friction caused by an absurdly wealthy sport that concentrates its riches on the upper five per cent of its personnel can be added the tensions brought about by football’s two contending traditions. The professional game as we know it came into existence in the north of England in the late 19th century when works sides quietly began to pay some of their players. Yet the codification of the sport, and its moral underpinning, was, essentially, an amateur project. The Football Association, for example, founded in 1863, consisted of the representatives of public school old boys’ clubs based in the soft, gentlemanly south.
Naturally the northern professionals soon disposed of lah-di-dah Home Counties competition (although the celebrated amateur side The Corinthians were still going strong in cup competitions well into the 1930s). But what might be called the Corinthian spirit, with its emphasis on “playing the game” and the competing being more important than the winning, proved unexpectedly durable. The boys’ school stories of the inter-war era, wish-fulfilment fantasies aimed at children a great deal further down the educational scale, were bent on propagating the amateur code. Their echo could be heard as much as half a century later in the pre-teen comic Roy of the Rovers, whose blond-haired hero plays for a professional club, but is a walking embodiment of the virtues of “sportsmanship” and “fair play.”
All this had a profound effect on the generations of football fans born into the world before telephone number salaries and Sky Sports. Members of the 1966 World Cup squad were conceptualised for the mass audience in almost mythical terms: Bobby Moore, the stalwart but scrupulous captain; Bobby Charlton, his unfailing, well-mannered sidekick. Its most natural consequence, to anyone reared on this tradition of footballer as moral agent, is a lurking resentment of the players for not living up to these exacting standards. A fantasy-commentary from Euro 2012 in which England players were rated merely for their activities off the pitch would go something like: the man who is up in court next month on a public order offence has passed it to the man who in his autobiography declared himself slighted by only being offered £55,000 a week, thereby freeing up the man whose car was burnt out as it lay in his driveway…
Footballers sometimes complain that they don’t set themselves up as role models and shouldn’t be treated as such, to which the answer is that there are children out there cutting your pictures out of Match of the Day magazine, and the fan who applauds a wife-beater for scoring the winning goal has lost sight of a principle that most ordinary people would rather want to be retained. And so the average supporter’s attitude to what takes place on the pitch is queerly double-edged. He was brought up to regard sport as a romantic activity, whose satisfactions lie in the heroic feat and the subtle twist of fortune. Meanwhile, down on the greensward the usual collection of brawny louts are snarling abuse at each other and tapping each other’s ankles when the referee’s back is turned.
Inevitably, these are false distinctions. I once spent an instructive half hour in the company of Bobby Moore’s ghost-writer: as he remarked, no hint of genitalia-exposing, table-bestriding “raucous Bobby” ever made it into print. On the other hand, England’s 1966 World Cup campaign positively reeked of the Corinthian Spirit. Alan Ball remembered coming back to the hotel room he shared with Nobby Stiles with £1,000 each in cash, courtesy of their kind sponsors, and being so bewildered by the sight of so much ready money that they cascaded the notes over each other’s heads. What had kept this attitude more or less intact through the first half of the 20th century was ready money’s absence. The English game’s commercial turning point, close inspection insists, was the early 1960s. The end of the maximum wage came about in 1961; the BBC’s Match of the Day premiered in 1964. Two hulking juggernauts with the capacity to change the game for ever—television and money—were on collision course in an arena that had previously got by on paying spectators, lofty aims and thrift.
* * *
Half a century later, English football has gone the way of business in general. The big clubs have grown bigger and (with certain exceptions) more prosperous; the smaller clubs have grown smaller and more hard-up. Formerly run by people who were interested in the game and prepared to bring money into it, clubs are largely run by people with less of an emotional stake who are keener on taking money out of it. The ancient link between football clubs and the communities from which they originally grew is irrevocably shattered.
Worse, the advent of huge salaries and over-priced season tickets has produced an unofficial cartel with a stranglehold over the upper echelon of the English league. Twenty years ago a Norwich side assembled on a shoe-string almost carried off the first Premier League title. No club with this kind of funding will ever do that again: the procedural difficulties and the squad constraints are simply too great. Of the 20 clubs competing for this year’s league trophy only four—or possibly five—have a serious chance of winning it.
All this ought theoretically to inspire a dreadful cynicism among the intelligent fan, and yet somehow this abandonment rarely takes place. The myths are too resonant; the ancestral ties too sinewy; the glamour too seductive. Who would you prefer to see on the pitch before you—European and World Cup-winning David Silva, or Nowhere United’s Lee Fredge? Even David Conn found himself exulting over Manchester City’s last-ditch triumph in the league last season. To go back to unfancied Norwich, who will spend the next nine months trying to avoid “second season syndrome,” it is possible to deduce that the playing field on which the competition takes place is horribly uneven, and biased in half-a-dozen ways in the interests of the leading clubs, while exulting in the fact that each alternate Saturday afternoon brings a new Premier League star strutting his stuff on the Carrow Road turf.
In the same way, “objective” analyses of football nearly always founder on their inability to comprehend the vestigial romanticism that, even now, attends the game. In his essay “The Sporting Spirit,” inspired by the visit of the Moscow Dynamo XI to these shores in 1945, George Orwell remarked that: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
No doubt something similar could be said now, but it would not be true. After all, if football really were entirely expedient then a player who feigned injury in pursuit of a penalty would be regarded as a hero, whereas even Sir Alex appears to feel slightly queasy about Ashley Young’s stage-managed tumbles in the box. Simultaneously, the striking of moral attitudes about the game is rendered yet more problematic by its essential theatricality, and the gradual elevation of the leading performers to subsidiary rungs on the international celebrity ladder. The persona dreamed up for tabloid love-rat Ashley Cole, for example, is approximately as “real” as Katie Price or Kerry Katona; he is essentially a blank space on which the lower-end media can project whatever they think, or don’t think, about the game.
Forty-six years on from that legendary encounter on the Wembley turf, English football is a curious, hybrid entity: a big business, certainly, but one still constrained and to an extent tempered by the tribal loyalties of its fans, awash with sentiment, undermined and sometimes enlivened by chauvinism and accompanied on its journeys by a whole raft of moral baggage originally assembled at around the time of Queen Victoria’s widowhood. Undoubtedly over the next ten years—and despite the levelling effect of the new UEFA solvency rules, which will prohibit off-balance sheet financing by wealthy owners—all these tendencies will be exacerbated: more filthy lucre; more teenage millionaires; more exorbitant ticket prices bent on excluding ordinary supporters from the game.
And so this particular devotee, his 2012/13 season ticket safely trousered, will go on supporting with at least some of his illusions intact: that cash-strapped, talent-starved League Two Davids will occasionally be able to bring down a Premier League Goliath; that England has the scintilla of a chance in the 2014 World Cup; and that the burly gentlemen at half-a-dozen Premier League grounds chanting “who’s the wanker in the black?” are still Roy of the Rovers fans at heart.
