The dry weight of this 1893 ball might actually be less than the dry weight of the new 2010 World Cup ball
The argument over the ball at the 2010 World Cup has brought to the fore, once again, the fact that even otherwise well-informed fans don’t always know the laws of the game.
It is a myth that the modern ball is lighter than the balls used in the past.
Since 1937, the dry weight of the ball has been specified by Law 2: 14-16oz. Prior to that, the rules governing the ball’s dry weight specified something lighter - 13-15oz.
This goes for the new ball used in 2010 just as much as it did for the 1966 ball. Whenever you read a comment along the lines of “I’d like to see modern players heading the leather pudding the ’66 boys had to put up with” you can assume that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
What has changed are (1) the material from which the ball is made, and thus the ability of the ball to avoid weight gain during the game through water absorption, and (2) the aerodynamics of the ball i.e. the smoothness of the surface.
The new ball isn’t lighter in of itself - which is what people seem to be assuming: but the new ball won’t get so wet in play. So in the broad sunshine of the ’66 World Cup Final, the famous orange balls were the same weight as the ones we see today. And so it has been on every dry day, on every dry pitch, since the balls were first standardized in the early 1870s.
Lecture inspired by a comment on Alex Massie’s TNT piece here – because I wasn’t able to comment there. As usual with the sort of places Alex posts at, onerous signing-up procedures loom..
Athletics, cricket and swimming have their blooper reels and ice hockey its fights. But only football has cock-up at its core. Only in football is savage and ridiculous public error key to so many significant moments and germaine to so many results.
That’s down to the random element, of course, and (let’s get it over with) the ball is round. But the slapstick element at the top of the game is in decline. Increased fitness, tactical sophistication and technical ability conspire and the outcome is Portugal v Ivory Coast.
Nevertheless, even this World Cup has had its moments, and can I just say that subsequent first round matches have made England’s performance and result look better and better?
But it’s not England who have impressed me the most. They’re in the second rank, alongside buccaneering Chile, the US (those boxers’ names: Clint Dempsey, Landon Donovan, Clarence Goodson..) and Germany.
No, it’s Brazil I’m admiring – that mix of strong, capable defence, patient midfield and two wild talents up front. So that’s what Robinho is really about.. and it’s good to see a country developing from backwoodsmen into a major sporting power. This Brazil is a mature, rounded squad, tactically and technically capable of taking on the Italys and Spains. Compare the 2010 team’s skill and efficiency with the hapless, ill-disciplined, panic-ridden and gallumphing Brazil of 40 years ago:
Steve Bloomer: 19 goals in 23 England Appearances 1895-1907
The first edition of James Corbett’s “England Expects: A History of the England Football Team” has sat somewhere near my desk since about a fortnight after its initial publication. There hadn’t really been a proper full England history before. Of course, there’d been books about England managers - but that’s not quite the same thing, and in any event, by the time Ramsey was appointed, the first proper England manager as we know them, English international football was already 90 years old. So Corbett’s huge red hardback, which combined concise match reporting from the very start, concentrated on players and audience as much as managers, and in sharp, clean prose avoided all of the usual laddish clichees, was extremely welcome.
The second edition is a reillustrated, tightened-up paperback, and it gives a reader confidence when a photograph of Edwardian striking star Steve Bloomer is captioned author’s own collection. For James Corbett, the first half century of international football – 1870-1920 – isn’t the usual source of sneering fun, and his account has none of the usual sense that writers give of waiting for the real business to begin. So this is the best short account of the amateur-versus-professional controversy. The wealthy pioneers like Lord Kinnaird are proper sportsmen, not moustache-twiddling sexual obsessives. Snobbery is not the only reason keeping the Football Association out of FIFA. Professional league football is not the usual unmitigated triumph for the working man. Corbett lets the game grow in its own time and context, and that time and context are assuredly not ours.
Even non-fiction accounts, when done properly, fall into one or another of the seven plots, and there’s an enjoyable debate to be had about which one the England football team follows and at what speed. The usual unconscious pick of football writers is decline, fall, recovery, triumph! fall again, recovery, Gazzamania, and (insert blur of journalism to bring us “up to date”). Corbett avoids this. The inter-war period, badly filmed and so little-known to most fans, is closely covered without distracting references to past and future, making good use of what are actually fairly extensive primary autobiographical sources. The great England side of the war years and after – Lawton, Mannion, Matthews, Finney, Carter and co. – are recorded and celebrated for their own sake, not for that of Hungary and 1953.
Not that 1953 came out of the blue: Corbett incorporates it into a longer account of relative decline after the wartime side broke up, and remarks that the 6-3 defeat itself caused less upset amongst the game’s players and administrators than you might think. 1950-55 was one of a number of the fallow periods that England’s team have passed through – the 1920s, either side of Dixie Dean, was another, and so was 1975-80, and 1991-5. How would the Hungarians of ’53 gotten on against the Byrne-Edwards-Taylor England of 1957, or the Charlton-Greaves England of 1962? England’s recovery after the 1954 World Cup, in both club and international terms, was real enough, and Corbett’s chapter about those sunnier last years of the Winterbottom regime is headed by a fine meditative photo of Stanley Matthews besuited, new holder of the ballon d’or, gazing into the future from the sand dunes at Blackpool.
That future would be one in which England built three separate teams, in the space of twelve years, which were capable of frightening anyone, even the 1970 Brazilians. Three good sides – without revolutions in training, without changes to the league system (save the scrapping of the regional divisions in favour of a national Division Four), and without reform at the FA. Some things had changed: the ’57-58 pre-Munich side were the best nourished in history, thanks to rationing, and, thanks to education reforms and Walter Winterbottom, many of the ’66 and ’70 sides had received proper coaching in good conditions at school at the right age. But the biggest change of all was the ending of committee selection, partially under Winterbottom and finally under Ramsey. Corbett’s long, detailed examination of Ramsey’s construction of the ’66 side against strong and vocal opposition is the deserved highlight of the book. If you want to know what the verrou system is, you’ll have to buy a copy.
What follows ’66 is a kind of flatlining: the endless, exhausting efforts to do it again, to retrieve some footballing self-esteem, all while the game goes on about its own, quite separate business elsewhere. There are ways to make sense of this. It comes back to plot again: and Corbett, confronted by the triumph/disaster dichotomy that night/days its way out of the mouths of fans and journalists, opts instead for theme:
the insatiable burden of expectation facing our footballers and the way they have often been overwhelmed by it..shattered dreams and unyielding expectation (stretching from) origins among the mid-Victorians through to a modern era defined by money, massive egos and chronic underachievement(..) the monstrous expectation.. rears its head again and again and in so many different ways. There is, alas, no happy ending.
But there is happiness along the way. Hudson’s match in 1975 against West Germany; Keegan and Brooking’s attacking 2-0 Wembley win over Italy two years later; the vindication of Bobby Robson and Alan Shearer’s romp in the sunshine against Holland. Before that game, Terry Venables summed it up: “We are inclined to be a nation (which thinks) we are the worst team in the world or the best. Neither is true.”
The final chapters cover England’s progress during what will have been the period of James Corbett’s own writing career. Unlike many journalists, he’s resisted the temptation to place himself at the centre of events, appearing only when doing so adds an essential psychological point (Corbett’s meeting with Steve McClaren six months before the future Eredivisie winner’s England sacking for example). Nor, while writing about the unbearable expectations placed on England, does he overpromote the issue: what keeps us interested, in the end, isn’t expectation, he says, but something lighter and better: hope.
England Expects is fully footnoted and contains a comprehensive bibliography and is published by De Coubertin at £12.99.
Scots talk about the English bringing up 1966 far more than English folk ever bring it up. I would note to Celtic fans reading if you tire of people talking of 1966 you might wish to put 1967 in a box. This very day, I sat in Kay’s Bar in Edinburgh and heard four Scots moan endlessly that the English talked about 1966. I was drinking with another English chap and neither of us had brought it up, the TV presenters hadn’t brought it up… the four Scots had brought it up.
I can still remember how surprised – shocked, even – I was on the rainy day in 1979/80 when I discovered that England had once won the World Cup. I was 11 or 12: My Manchester United-supporting stepfather had lived with us for seven years. I’d played at right-back for my football playing schools and sat through Argentina ’78 without once hearing anyone mention it.
So the news had to find its own way to me. Rummaging through a pile of old books in a junkshop in some left-over of a Bedfordshire village, in the last days of Callaghan’s Britain, I came across a battered Pan paperback about great postwar sporting moments. The usual list, but I was getting it for the first time: Maureen Connolly, Tommy Simpson, Gary Player, Cassius Clay, Celtic 1967. Oh, and England.
Well, the first thing I read about sex was a “found” copy of “Letters to the Happy Hooker” by Xaviera Hollander. She invites an American footballer over and, you’re joking..
In the late 1970s, England were a team of tired cloggers, playing heavy football in a wet, bored country without wine. Surely they’d never…and I wanted to run into the street to collar passers-by for confirmation: is this real? yet part of me thought I could believe it.. because I have early memories of a very different world and of a sunlight streaming into my pram, sunlight rich with colour and promise. 1960s sunlight, always dappling through leaves or through the long hair of the mini-skirted blonde who has bent down to pet me. A modern, confident light, shining on Alan Whicker and the Banana Splits and me, last seen at the 1970 World Cup and never again. In that light, anything can happen. Moonshots. Bob Beamon’s jump. An English World Cup win.
I had eleven months in which to enjoy the sixties, and, for want of better information, I trust I made the most of them. And I’d have eleven years in which I didn’t know about 1966: I hope I made the most of that, too. Because to listen to anyone who thinks the English don’t shut up about all that, you’d believe that we’re boasting about it: that England thinks itself, as of right, World Cup Winners, in the sunshine, top of the tree. Nothing could be further from the truth.
1966 is spoken about more than it was. Three contrasting things brought that about.
One is the 1990 World Cup, when England stumbled through the nettles to a semi-final that no one saw coming. Before the semi against West Germany, English mood was split. The casual fan, who hadn’t seen the horrible earlier games, was excited. Those of us who had watched them, through our fingers, felt only dread. The West Germans forecast they’d win 4-0. Most English opinion worth having agreed. The English opinion that wasn’t worth having, however, had had old memories stirred.
In the event, England played quite well. The luck tank was dry, but the performance inspired hope for the future. The very quality of that gallant defeat, and it was real enough, did something quite peculiar and contradictory to the English footballing mind. Without any change in the fundamental belief that England just weren’t on a level with Italy, Holland, Brazil and the West Germans, an expectation formed. From here, England could kick on… 16 years later, Charlton fans would have the same thought, as they bid farewell to underperforming Alan Curbishley. Over all who would kick on, a great dark bird silently circles..
And of course, (don’t blame Nick Hornby for this) in the wake of 1990, literary types took an interest. I’d like to, but can’t, pass over the nausea, the disgust-inducing nature of some of the TLS-style stuff that’s been poured over English football since 1990. Think yourselves lucky, Scotland, that you had Irvine Welsh. Because England got David Winner…
So here the TLSers come, like missionaries and anthropologists, and all of the fan violence and the decaying stadia and the obvious clicheed football things have to acquire context and meaning and they become a subculture and it all gets plugged into history, and what’s in history? 1966 is in history, and, lovers of clumsy lecture-room humour as the TLSers are, look! it’s just like “1066 and All That”. Which is really awfully amusing! And on the TLSers went, in Granta and the London Review of Books, taking from football such insights into post-industrial alienation and radical politics and the working class..
Thirdly, and most regrettably, in February 1993, Bobby Moore died.
Bobby Moore’s death was, and felt, premature. It hurt in the gut: shouldn’t people survive cancer, these days? There was a general sense that, although he’d not followed up on his football career, he still had time. And, if there was still time for him, there was still time for his playing colleagues to do whatever it was that you might call writing another chapter. Jack Charlton and Alan Ball were both still managers, weren’t they? Contemporary figures, men busy in the active present, not ready, yet, to be rounded up with Ramsey and the rest and frozen in carbonite..
More time for Moore would have been more time for us. When he died, death lurched a lot closer. It felt a lot later in the day, all of a sudden: no more pretending that the the 1960s have only just finished. No more pretending that all that brilliant sunshine is just waiting its opportunity to return.
With Moore dead, it became important to remember, and to gather the memories of those who had taken part in it all, whilst they were still around and able to reflect.
Idiots got their piece of the late captain too. Moore’s death amplified a thought that had always been there and thereabouts in the minds of control freaks and anal salt-of-the-earth types. England’s 1966 side, according to this thought, were the last of a better breed. What that breed was, no one could decide, but no matter. The last street footballers. The last real grafting working-class team who rode the bus to matches with the fans (no one ever refers to players riding the bus home with the fans afterwards, do they?) The last to cut their hair short/drink mild/use dubbin/pinch matron/shovel coal/wear slippers/wear lipstick.
The purpose of this particular, and very footballing, narrative is clear: it’s to rough up the moderns. To lay a punch on those long-haired types with their skinhead cuts, who’ve been made soft by the abolition of national service, white collar jobs, comprehensive school, Eagle Magazine, foreign cars, pretty girlfriends, Central London, not drinking with journalists, Southport, Dubai, Ipod Twitbook, corporal punishment, sex with nuns and the horrors of NuLab Thatcherism.
What it isn’t about, most emphatically, is English arrogance. If only it were so.
Because if you’ve read all of this up until now, you’ll know that although I’ve tried to tell it from the English point of view, I’ve missed out on the Scottish. Because I’ve been trying to say to the Kay’s Bar guys that it ain’t so. I’ve been trying to give them reasons to think more kindly, with more gentleness than they do, about England. But it’s not about that, is it? There are no reasons. What reason do you need to be shown?
The myths that sustain a nation and its sense of self, after all, can be about other nations. It’s a Scottish myth, that England go on about 1966 all the time. They don’t; it isn’t true. More than they did, but not all the time, and not like that. But the Scottish myth has its place in a much wider conversation. Argue, if you like, that it’s projection: Scottish insecurity, confronted with an English achievement that Scotland has undeniably failed to come close to matching, creates a mitigating counter-factual to reduce the pain of it all. But why bother?
Because they may be bigger than us, for all that we’re bigger than Scotland, more successful than us, they may have more money – but they’re more stupid than we are, they’re loud, arrogant, blundering, badly-dressed, less cultured, less educated and short on common sense. And this is all good news. Because without it, how could we English go on? Go on, being English, in a world we lost to the United States… (This isn’t a narrative I buy into – but you can see the parallels I’m sure).
I didn’t hear about 1966 until I was almost in my teens. This despite growing up playing the game and reading about it and watching it on television at every opportunity. (I discovered 1966 in the same year I found out about Munich, which says something) It wasn’t a topic of constant discussion in England then, and if it is a topic for some discussion now, it’s because the men behind it are dying like Beatles. And, to tell the truth, because we’re afraid we can never match them. And not just at football.
(And it’s a comparatively gentle myth, isn’t it? Typical of Kay’s Bar, really – the best sporting pub in the UK, a place where I once spilt a stranger’s drink and found him buying us a pair of replacement pints…)
The lack of English managers at the very top level has been well and truly noticed now: last night, Radio 5 devoted ninety minutes to discussing the situation with the likes of Tony Adams, Steve McClaren, Terry Venables and Sam Allardyce. The programme went out live, it’s not clear how much any of the participants had prepared, and the comments rarely went beyond the obvious and the hackneyed. Top clubs won’t give an English coach a chance; clubs don’t give managers long enough; there’s no realistic career path in which to gain experience; chairmen think top players turn into top managers.
Only Richard Bevan, of the League Managers’ Association, came up with anything new. Football management in England, said Bevan, is a profession that needs taking more seriously and whose members need taking more seriously, by those who employ football managers. His job is all about raising the profile and status of managers. This reminded me of the situation in Italy, where a manager is more likely to be considered experienced after a sacking than incompetent – and Italy, let’s not forget, trains its managers properly in an institution created for the purpose.
Privately, I was depressed by the programme. Compared with Scottish or Irish managers, the English ones – Sam Allardyce excepted – came across as inarticulate. And jejune, and ill-at-ease. Even Terry Venables. But then, the programme was live and it was long: plenty of bright, sharp people crumble at the mic.
What the programme missed was also depressing, but understandable. Here’s my take on the issue.
It’s assumed that there will, all else being equal, always be a through-flow of good English managers. It used to be assumed that there would be a flow of good English players, but not without reason: we’d set things up that way. Almost every school played the game from age 8 upwards; there were junior leagues aplenty, thousands of amateur football clubs, county and regional sides, and an army of volunteers to run it all. Post-war prosperity ate into all that to some degree, but there’s still a structure there that many countries would envy. We had players because we did something to get them. Not as much as Holland, but something.
What have we ever done to get ourselves managers? Even now, I would argue that UEFA ‘A’ and ‘B’ badges do not an infrastructure make. The programme noted, briefly and glumly, that there seem to be as many Scottish and Irish managers as there ever were, but no explanation was offered. I’ll offer one: there’s a cultural difference between Scotland/Ireland and England in their respective attitudes towards the possession of intelligence. England’s a clever, astonishingly literate country – so many people read on buses and tubes compared to Europe and the US – but it prizes the concealment of intelligence in the individual and team sports actively fear it. This doesn’t make for the production of managers, who need to be communicators and influencers (but you can be clever in a Scots or Irish voice without putting backs up). It makes for jobs for the boys, which is what England’s got at the moment.
Anyway: the good English managers are all dead. It’s not just that no English manager has won the Premier League – or, since Heysel, a European trophy. It’s that, with one exception, all of the English managers who have won League titles or European trophies have died. And the period of glory was brief. The first European Trophy won by an English manager, Tottenham’s European Cup Winner’s Cup with Bill Nicholson in 1963, is separated from Sir Bobby Robson’s European Cup Winner’s Cup with Barcelona by only 34 years. And we’ve had another 15 since then.
There were, in those 34 years, a small number of English coaches who were without doubt amongst the world’s best. Nicholson himself; Don Revie; Brian Clough (and Peter Taylor); Sir Alf Ramsey; Ron Greenwood; Bob Paisley; Sir Bobby Robson. (And I’d like to cull the list further – Clough and Paisley are streets ahead… but that’s an argument for the pub).
This suggests to me that there were the conditions, however briefly, in place to produce those managers. Those conditions have gone, and there’s nothing in their place. What conditions? Well…
Career dissatisfaction. Every man on our list lived through World War II. Greenwood, Nicholson, Ramsey and Paisley had their playing careers interrupted by it. Clough’s playing days were ended by injury, and he never got over it. Revie and Robson had full playing careers, but Robson “won nothing” in his and hated the fact. Keane, Adams, Southgate, Ince and co. had brilliantly successful, personally fulfilling careers. An earlier generation had finished playing but still had it all to do.
International and club humiliation at European hands. First it was Hungary in 1953. Ramsey played in that one: Revie changed his entire game because of it. Then it was Real Madrid, Benfica, Inter, Ajax, Bayern… not until Liverpool’s 1977 side was there an “English” team considered unequivocably, emulatably the best on the continent. But by then, the England team were embarrassingly bad. It’s hard to remember now, when England are assumed to be World Cup quarter-finalists and Premiership sides fill 3 out of 4 Champions League semi-final places, but for many years English managers fought as underdogs: there was something to prove and real humiliation to avenge. That feeling went before Heysel.
Northern Cultural Dominance. All of our list bar Ramsey were born in the north of England – and most of the northerners are from Middlesbrough or Newcastle. Of course, that’s to do with professional football being as much a phenomena of urban industrialization as machine shops, cotton mills and shipyards. Most people who played the game lived in the north. But in the sixties, seventies and early eighties, northerners were far more prominent in all of the most visible walks of national life. Where have they all gone, the Morecombes and Wises, the Barbara Castles, the Parkinsons, the Harold Evanses, the Alan Bleasdales? The working class voice of clichee used to come from Manchester or Liverpool, and the person using it was avuncular, middle-aged and smartly dressed: he was a warm and comforting figure that I knew well as a boy. But the Etonians are coming, and the working class clichee voice is Danny Dyer’s and despised. Cockney used to mean Michael Caine. We got accustomed to a world in which people from any background were starting to come through to national leadership, and then that world went away again. What Brian Clough stood for – brilliance, hope and rootedness, in one man – went with him, and we don’t know when we’ll see it again. His modern successors lack the polish and glamour that our age demands of leaders. Now, Roy Hodgson, you have to be posh or foreign, a Cameron or a Mancini. Signor Allardice was right. For the rest of us, there’s the X Factor.
A blue collar world. It’s old hat but true: football failed to follow the advice of a million working class mothers to go white collar. It’s starting to, now. But our great English managers predate, most of them, the days of universal secondary education. All of them possessed the intellectual strength to go on to 16, 18 and 21, but couldn’t. Today, it’s still unusual for an Englishman going into professional football to bother much with school after 16, but the question is whether potential Paisleys aren’t taking the risk that football represents as a career choice when staying on (and more than half of schoolchildren now express a desire to make university) offers such comparatively certain rewards. Football was never a great bet, and our great English managers won a hidden lottery to reach the places they did. But you have to be in it to win it, and with fewer boys playing football seriously in the first place, it has to be asked if men like our greatest managers aren’t now just choosing washing machines, cars, compact disc players, electrical tin openers and a fucking big television over the risk of football and the slim chance of great, grand adventure.
In short, I’m saying two things: there aren’t the English managers there were, and the big four aren’t entirely wrong to steer clear. But those that are around – Allardyce, Hodgson – aren’t given the chance because the culture’s played them crook. And Hodgson’s 63.. If this is to change, three things need to happen. First, “show us your medals” has got to go. Only one of the big four is managed by a man who was also any kind of player. There’s little real connection between great playing success and managerial brilliance. Second, England needs to set up a managerial college along French lines. Third, Richard Bevan’s efforts to raise the image of the profession must succeed, and the consequence must be that managers are given time and backing. If the structure of the league, which so penalizes failure now, must change to accommodate that, then so be it.
What mustn’t happen is any kind of affirmative action. It’s too late to appoint an Englishman to the England job just because he’s English: after Sven, after Capello, the second-choiceness of the situation would overwhelm anyone but the thickest-skinned. The next Englishman in the job must have the job because he’s the best of a superb bunch. And there’s many years of hard work and change before that comes about. In 1977, the choice was between Robson, Clough and Greenwood: that’s the level we must now demand.
A 1985ish Scotsport documentary on Alex Ferguson, the manager of Aberdeen, in three parts. It’s now ten years since the publication of Ferguson’s “Managing My Life” – if that doesn’t make you feel old, at the fag end of another year…
In 1981, Manchester City, a club in Salford whose big spending hadn’t brought results, allowed in the television cameras. Not entirely by coincidence, he chose the same period to sack championship-winning City coach Malcolm Allison in favour of John Bond, who’d take them to the FA Cup Final. Twenty years earlier, Bond had been a disciple of Allison’s, part of a group including Bobby Moore and Noel Cantwell who grew up in Big Mal’s exuberant shadow at West Ham.
It’s all here. Compelling, saddening, and embarrassing all at once:
So many forward-thinking men in English football in the Fifties: Matthews and Finney after seeing Brazil in the 1950 World Cup, Malcolm Allison after watching Austrians train in Vienna in 1946, Joe Mercer and Don Revie in the wake of the Hungarians. It took England four years to go from the Magyars to once again being one of the world’s best teams – a fact disguised, filthily, by Munich.
But even before then, they had their moments, Here England put nine past Ireland, with Finney man of the match:
Scotland drew the World Champions – and such World Champions! in their first round at their first World Cup. And played them off the park. Only Rivelino would have deserved a place in Willie Ormond’s side that day.
Scotland could, if they wished, remember 1974 for this. Only the Netherlands, against the same opponents, would put on a better display in the entire tournament. It might be the best Scottish performance of all time, but if you’d rather have Baxter in ’67, a much ropier display all round, then suit yourself.
