There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? to say that English football managers just aren’t as intelligent as their foreign counterparts. In a comment left on an earlier post, John Sinnott said “I’ve done lots of interviews with overseas players and managers and invariably they were always smarter and brighter and more analytical than their English peers.”

There’s a lot of truth in that. Here’s why.

English Education

Professional football emerged onto the scene at the same time as state education. Many Edwardian players were the first people in their family who were able to read. There are conditions specific to the Edwardian situation, but by the time Bobby Charlton was at grammar school in the late 1940s and early 1950s, intelligent, talented young sportsmen were being encouraged away from the playing field and towards white collar careers. Brian Clough’s long-time captain, John McGovern, was bound for university and a very different kind of life when Old Big ‘Ead intervened. Education creams off some of the brains that might otherwise have been inclined to football.

The Maximum Wage

The Maximum Wage for footballers was introduced in 1901 at a level of £4 per week. At the time, this was well in excess of what most players could hope to earn, so there was relatively little opposition to the move and much of that was weak. What’s more, £4 per week would remain a good wage in relation to what could be earned in mine, mill or factory. The maximum wage would remain good in such limited terms until after the Second World War. The effect on many contemporary players was small. But the long-term effect the Maximum Wage would have on the game was not. League football became permanently class-based. In 1901, it was far from unknown for an amateur player like Vivien Woodward to turn out for England. The Maximum Wage finally closed the door – which, it must be admitted, was already swinging to – on middle class players, or intelligent boys for whom there were other, more lucrative options by the time the 1950s consumer boom was underway.

That wouldn’t have mattered so much was it not for the unconscious creation of a management tradition in the ’10s and ’20s.

Only a Horse Can Become a Jockey

Edwardian Secretary-Managers weren’t always former players – there simply wasn’t the pool of ex-professionals in retirement that would exist a decade later. But by the 1950s, it was assumed almost without question that a manager would have played, preferably at the top level:

To be a good coach you must first have been a good player (Bill Shankly)

There are arguments for and against this position. A glance at the Premiership shows Arsene Wenger, Avram Grant, Sven Goran Eriksson, and Rafa Benitez amongst those who failed to reach the very top as players for one reason or another. Jose Mourinho, recently at Chelsea, was another.

Mourinho himself has argued that a good former player will have an instinctive feel for parts of the game that the intelligent non-playing observer will miss.

Whichever side of that argument you are on, one thing is clear. Management has not been a way back into football for Englishmen who missed out on playing. Becoming a player is the footballing equivalent of the 11+. Fail it, and you are gone for good.

Sir Clive Woodward was a brilliant young footballer, invited to trial by serious League clubs. His father disapproved, and packed him off to a rugby-playing navy boarding school. He’d eventually find himself in rugby, both as a player and a very successful coach, but when he sought to bring his expertise into his first sporting love, he was obstructed and rejected. Sir Clive Woodward is a case study in the self-imposed exile of English football from the possibility of bringing in intelligence and innovation, not from outside itelf, but merely from outside the ranks of former players.

Kinds of Intelligence

There is an urge – don’t you feel it? to assume that the kind of intelligence you possess is the kind those purblind other people need in order to progress. The same goes for your outlook: I’ve often pondered what a middle-class English football culture would look like. One where the kind of impulse that creates a Beagle 2, or a Concorde, held sway.

So when surviving England players from the ’50s and ’60s lay into “blackboard manager” Sir Walter Winterbottom for being too much the well-spoken scholar, it’s natural for me to want to leap to his defence, to say “you could all have done with a bit more of that.” Natural, too, to watch blurred 1970s interviews with Rinus Michels and to feel Holland-envy.

But football isn’t a Space Race or a work of art, for all that it can feel as exciting as the first and as beautiful as the second.

Footballers need to be barked at by sergeant-major types. (John Aston, ex-Manchester United)

He didn’t know how to handle players, how to talk to them. He spoke too well, too precisely, like a schoolmaster. Walter had this impeccable accent, whereas football’s a poor man’s game, players expect to be sworn at, a bit of industrial language. (Sir Bobby Charlton on Sir Walter Winterbottom)

Communication, in other words. You can have all the ideas in the world, but if you can’t take people with you, they are as good as none. It’s been part of Sam Allardyce’s success that he has brought in new ideas by the cartload, to Bolton and now to Newcastle, whilst making them sound like bootroom tradition. It’s not just intelligence, but intelligence properly applied, and less intelligence, well applied, will trump genius delivered by tactless, insensitive, arrogant means. The intelligence that writes a novel, or composes music, or builds a business, or creates technological innovation, is not the kind that holds a team together and makes the most of its combined, limited, strengths.

There are managers who can do both. Jose Mourinho would be considered an intellectual in many English circles if they knew more about him. But that doesn’t stop him playing a very effective leader of his band of brothers. The question is, do class vs intelligence issues keep the English Mourinhos out of the game? We can’t really know. I think so, probably. But it’s only my hunch.

English football is like the National Lottery

Steve McClaren is reported to be earning £2.5million per year as England coach. Premiership stadia are the newest and best in Europe, and so are many of the training facilities. Why isn’t football becoming attractive as a career choice to the middle classes?

Perhaps it is, but the trend is too new to show up. But I don’t think so.

Because, in a white-collar, middle-class world, football is a handle people can grasp when they want to make working-class claims. It’s the preservation railway of a long-finished class war. And middle class values of intelligence, change, creativity, aren’t welcome because, by and large, we don’t want them to be. Football’s always been an entertainment more than a sport for the English, and now it has that escapist quality; it’s a place where you can STOP being so middle class and can shout and swear and drink and just stop thinking for a little while.

And it’s fake money: there are only twenty Premiership coaches, and 81 English players, in the Premiership. Since 2004, the National Lottery has created nearly 500 millionaires in the South East alone. If we have such long odds on tapping into Lottery winnings, how much less chance do we have of cutting in on Premiership wealth in playing or coaching roles? Instead, the middle classes are in charge of the new football support industries – reporting, broadcasting, product placement, kit design, stadium development, market expansion. Sport medicine. Even catering. Everything except what is going on on the pitch itself.

So, why aren’t English managers more intelligent? Because there are too many ways in which you can not become a football person, and not enough ways in which you can change direction, and become a football man later on in your life. Because you have to have been a horse. And because, ultimately, we just don’t want this sort of change to happen. It would be like asking for a more intellectual version of “Play Your Cards Right.”

Football’s a heritage industry, and it ain’t that kind of heritage. Be careful what you wish for.

I never meant it to be a central theme at this site. You can blame the press that it has been. It was their myth after all – that the kind of feelings fans experience watching football are the same feelings that the team needs to have on the pitch in order to win.

It’s hard to argue against, because it doesn’t come from argument or from thought. It comes from other things – category errors, footballing exceptionalism, football-as-soap, football-as-war, the myth of the inspirational manager.

The inspirational manager became the central point at issue. Then we had the bizarre spectacle of people on the one hand pooh-pooing the existence of football’s psychological side, on the other lambasting Sven for a perceived failure to enact that non-existent psychological side.

We’d agree, wouldn’t we, that for most sports, what you want is to keep your nerve, apply your strengths, keep going and put failure behind you as quickly as possible. In most sports, we want our representatives to show a concentrated, determined calm, and we want them to keep trying until the end of the event.

Except in football. There, we want – at least, the vocal amongst us want – a traditional captain shouting at his players, we want Churchill in the dressing room at half time, and we want – those ever-changing other things that we want.

There’s something violent and punitive about all that, isn’t there? Always someone on the receiving end of something, whether a speech, a rant or a kick up the backside. I suspect that it’s always the same sort of people who urge on this kind of thing – that they think they are the salt-of-the-earth, university-of-life, common-sense ones – that they think they speak for the silent majority – that if they aren’t paid attention to, then they should be. I think they are the ones who crack under pressure – who can’t stand being isolated – who spend their time laughing too loud at the rest of the world with the boys in the crowd. Gents – and it’s mostly gents, if I’m not stretching the definition of gent too far – you’re hollow.

Is football different? So very different from this, say?

Because here’s a little slice of football, don’t you think, in the form of McEnroe, up against the ideal sportsperson, in the shape of Borg. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, I was just a fan, of whatever I could find on television or in the park, and I was first for Connors and then for McEnroe. This was partly underdog support – Borg was just better than the pair of them – and partly a reflection of Borg’s pulling power. Girls liked him; I was a boy, so I liked his opponents. And I never quite got over the fact that I really enjoyed the kind of behaviour you could expect from Connors and McEnroe. And from the young Agassi after them.

Is football so different from other sports that the kind of mental state that flourishes in every other sport – including boxing – is to be mocked and derided? Or is the difference in our attitude towards football – is it that we don’t want it as a sport qua rowing or athletics, but a kind of national ritual to display what we hope are still our native characteristics? Even if those characteristics – all that bulldog stuff – mean that we fall short against teams who are prepared to be clever, or cunning, or even just prepared to pace themselves?

Thierry Henry said this week that his young Arsenal side now had the character to win titles. Did he mean that they had decided to become eleven Danny Millses? If not, what did he mean? That their skill had ceased to matter? That they had learned to toss tactics into the bin for the last fifteen minutes of every game and lump it up to the big man? That Henry himself was going to do a Gerrard and spend those last fifteen minutes hopelessly out of position, peppering the goal with hopeful long-range shots, seeking to be a hero? That they had all shaved off their hair and were now bawling at each other constantly? Or did he mean that they had learned faith in themselves sufficient to keep their shape for the whole length of the game, to keep on playing their way, confident that they can thereby come through often enough to make a difference?

So, heart-on-sleeve passion against calm and control. The tie-break continues:

I suppose it’s inevitable that of the three men – Borg, Connors and McEnroe – it’s been the latter who has been taken to the English bosom, and it’s been the latter who has reflected most usefully on his career and experiences.

There are three points to take from McEnroe, to be distinguished from the points we’ve just seen Borg take from him. First, that social background and wealth have no impact on sporting desire. McEnroe came from a family who’d be considered extremely wealthy over here. (For that matter, Frank Lampard’s weren’t exactly poverty-stricken, nor Michael Owen’s, and I could go on). Second, that you can care too much and that can lower the quality of your play. Third, that “personality” is less effective in the big arena than none at all. McEnroe was number one in the world for a long time – but how many like him have been, compared to men like Federer and Sampras? The greatest tennis players have been the cool heads, or, like Borg and Agassi, have made themselves into cool heads. Brad Gilbert is trying the same thing with Andy Murray, with notable success. Oh, and tell me about Murray’s poverty-stricken background and good traditional working class values while we’re on the subject. No?

McEnroe wins the tie-break, but loses the match.

McEnroe is loved here now not because he was a great champion, or a beautiful player to watch, although he was both. He’s loved because he has said the right things to us late in the day, and because, through the window of time, his personality-driven “performances” have become the subject of comic nostalgia. And it’s nice – that niceness that’s part of the genuine pleasure of watching Wimbledon, or almost any UK broadcast golf.

I noticed yesterday that the DVD of the 2006 Ryder Cup is out. Here’s what’s written on the cover:

It has been called the greatest Ryder Cup in history and surely none of the tens of thousands present at The K Club, or the one billion people watching the event live on TV would disagree!

For noise, passion and emotion The 36th Ryder Cup, played for the first time in Ireland, is unmatched. Europe, with arguably their finest team performance ever, made history by winning the Samuel Ryder Trophy for a third successive time.

From the courageous Darren Clarke, who was carried along on a wave of home support, to the sensational Sergio Garcia and Colin Montgomerie, once more the heartbeat of the European team, Captain Ian Woosnam had a dozen dynamic heroes. Just as at Oakland Hills, two years earlier, the American side were again overwhelmed by the record score of 18½ points to 9½.

I swear this nonsense is spreading. Mark my words. It’ll be chess, next. And then it’ll be fishing.

Football’s full of throwaway lines – and this is one of them: the game as religion, the grounds as cathedrals, the supporters as worshippers. Throw in Bill Shankly’s life-and-death quip and you have the perfect metaphor for a country that went from Vitae Lampada to Itchycoo Park in two generations. Like so many of these things, when you look more closely it all falls apart. But in this case, the falling apart leaves something behind that is far more interesting and thought-provoking.

The great post-Suez decline in churchgoing and in new vocations was every bit as anti-Betjeman as the destruction of our town and city centres 1955-75, the Beeching Programme or Mission Praise. It goes to show that football doesn’t always follow other trends in society: three of my “best-ever” England sides came and went in 1955-75, and British club sides, along with Italy’s and Spain’s, dominated the European competitions. Religion’s perceived decline, at its steepest in the sixties, left people wondering if a vacuum would be left in its wake, that other things would rush in to fill. Drugs, shopping, television – football.

But there are at least two stuns to memory operating here. In the first instance, we’ve forgotten what an architectural holocaust the 1880s and 1890s were – the Victorians built their townscapes on top of older things, and, especially in relation to London, there are thousands of mournful photographs of lovely Stuart and Georgian buildings, taken by sad men and women who had no mechanism to protect these ancient, beautiful things. And we’ve forgotten that the real damage to universal religion in England – if it ever existed – came via industrialization and population growth. By the 1850s, by Church of England reckoning, there was space in the nation’s places of worship for less than half of the living population. The problem was worst in the cities, and there, if anywhere, would have been the vacuum left by religion: all one can say for the proposed vacuum fillers is that they took their time turning up.

By the time I developed my own religious life, all of that was long in the past, and football was creeping towards the end of the dark days of hooliganism, bankruptcy and shattered old stadia. As the only Christian in my family, I learned early on the extent of the dislike and resentment the Church, indeed churches, generates, how much of that is actually richly deserved, and how bizarre the attempts to reduce or deflect it have been. As I write I get a picture in my mind of a gowned cleric in the foothills of old age laughing as he toepunts a football in front of the local press…

…and I found out the difference between the lay idea of what “having religion” means and what it actually entails. I’m not going to enter into a full discussion of that here; suffice to say that if religion is a crutch, then you have that crutch with you wherever you go, even on your way down the stairs at Hampstead (Northern Line) when the lifts are out of order.

Instead, let’s compare football-as-religion with religion-as-religion.

Football stadia are constantly compared to cathedrals, and like cathedrals they can be spectacular, area-dominating structures pulling in large numbers of people. The largest English cathedrals, when full, typically hold somewhere in the region of 2000 people. On Saturday 13th January, 2,547 people saw Rochdale lose 1-0 to Bristol Rovers. Football, at almost any level, has a pull that completely eclipses anything any church has ever managed. If Spotland Stadium, home to perhaps the least successful club in League history, is outselling Ely Cathedral (to which entry is free) and has been doing so since before the decline in religion is supposed to have begun, then we can at least say that football isn’t filling any kind of vacuum but exists for its own sake.

That’s not to say that people don’t worry about football taking religion’s place. They do. Here’s a lengthy discussion of the relationship between football and Islam, written from a Muslim point of view.

Certainly, the parts of religion that most intrude on you when you are deeply involved in it don’t seem to have direct equivalents in football. Football tells me nothing as to why I exist. But it can provide a secondary level of meaning. Because I really do care about what happens to the small number of clubs whose results I look out for. (We all have a little stable of clubs, don’t we – one main one, and some minor ones we become affectionate towards for one reason or another.) If things are going badly in my own life, it does help if one or another of my clubs is doing well – it really makes things better for me. But it’s no good in the face of death. (Cricket might be good in the face of death, though – how many dying men’s last words have been an enquiry as to the score? I’ve always wanted to die at a cricket match, quietly in a deckchair with a broadsheet newspaper over my face.)

Nor does football tell me a great deal about how to live my life. It’s a comment I often hear both from foreign friends and from foreign-born clients – that the British just don’t know how to live, a comment usually made in response to a visit to the High Street on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday evening.

But it does tell some people some things. How to operate within a team – how to play “fair” with others – how to lose gracefully – to keep on trying – to do your best – to channel your energies in productive ways – to control your emotions. These are real life lessons. Yet aren’t they all the result of playing football, when the “religion” metaphor is mostly about watching the game? Hints there of that lay idea about Christianity, that it’s all about going to church. (C.S. Lewis was right about going to church – it’s all about tolerating people who are different from you and never living up to the tenets of their faith and enduring your wrongheaded vicar and putting up with boredom and stupid music and uncomfortable chairs and – these days – getting through the “Peace” without making a dash for safety. Not unlike playing football altogether, and, in some instances, not unremoved from watching it, although this definitely isn’t what people mean when they describe football as a religion!)

What about the relationship between football support as a gesture of allegiance, versus religious sectarianism? Of course, there is a point to be made there. I don’t like hostile club rivalries, and I don’t like religious sectarianism (nor do I like the intellectual dishonesty behind the idea that all religions are different ways up the same mountain). The two collide all the time, most obviously in Glasgow and Edinburgh with Rangers/Celtic and Hearts/Hibs respectively dividing the cities along a Protestant/Catholic divide replete with malice and stupidity.

So, yes, there are parallels and meeting places – but no, this isn’t what people mean by football as religion.

The religious allegiance is, in any case, of a particular kind. Even Anglicans do not pelt God with tomatoes when he comes back from the World Cup in disgrace. We do not seek to have him sacked and replaced with Martin O’Neill. We do not think he would do better if he had a holding midfielder behind him to free him up for those rampaging runs into the box. We do not stage protests at the way he starves the manager of funds in the transfer market.

I can imagine Anglican men, working themselves to death on the Burma Railway, giving God three games to get things back on track. But let’s keep these metaphors at an appropriate level. Between 100,000 and 170,000 people died building the Death Railway, and it’s in those sorts of conditions that you discover which metaphors hold, and which are frivolous.

Nor does football give me any sense of what will happen to me when I die.

More of us have done that peculiar, modern, Cupittian thing of internalising our religion: privatising it in the knowledge that there isn’t anything or anyone actually “out there”. One of the oddest hunches – false hunches – that history can give you is the sense that there was once something and someone out there, someone who coped badly with the aftermath of a drinking bout with David Hume and was subsequently voted out of the League along with Barrow and Workington.

At the same time, history also shows the place that religion actually had in pre-Darwinian, pre-Enlightenment society, and it isn’t what many people might think. Outside of the plague years, the general population seem to have been quite content to leave religion to the religious and to the clergy. In some parts of medieval Europe, religion was left to professionals. Ottonian Germany used monasteries as prayer banks, covering the sins of the warrior castes with supplication and worship, and as depositories for otherwise-dangerous non-inheriting second and third and fourth sons. Nunneries too were prayer banks, but also safe havens for heiresses otherwise in danger of kidnap from said non-inheriting second sons. In some places, southern France being a case in point at about this time (c.1000) inevitable warrior caste rule could lead to effective anarchy and mayhem, which the larger church would occasionally seek to damp down.

The religion of men such as Otto I had something distinctly fetishistic about it. Holy relics were considered possessed of great power, and Otto’s own large collection played a significant part in his personal preparation for the Battle of Lechfield in August 955.

Holy relics.. there’s an echo there, isn’t there, of the huge market in football memorabilia that thrives on Ebay and elsewhere today. Perhaps the most famous piece of memorabilia is Michael Browne’s painting The Art of the Game, which displays Eric Cantona rising from the dead in Christ-like fashion whilst his MUFC colleagues (who look very young compared to the way they look today) lounge about in Roman uniforms.

It’s a religious image, sure – but, and I’ll come back to this, it’s also a military one.

I’ve mentioned here before that football grounds are becoming cathedral-like in another respect, that is, the accumulation of memorials to the glorious dead. That thought was triggered by my visit to Craven Cottage last year, when Fulham had just renamed a stand after Johnny Haynes, and were encouraging fans to sign an enormous “Johnny Haynes shirt” for the club museum.

I might have spoken too soon. A brief survey of the Premiership clubs reveals that there’s been relatively little memorialising going on, and most of what has been done has little to do with football as religion.

Manchester United have the Munich memorial, and a statue of Matt Busby. Liverpool have the Hillsborough Memorial, a statue of Bill Shankly, and gates named for Shankly and also Bob Paisley. Charlton have a statue of Sam Bertram, and a stand named for Jimmy Seed. St James’ Park, Newcastle, where you might have expected this kind of thing to be let rip, have a bar named after Alan Shearer which contains the stone steps from the long-vanished Gallowgate stand. Arsenal have a bust of Herbert Chapman, and will have the Highbury Clock in due course. Beyond that, it’s all stand renamings. It doesn’t amount to much, and I must admit I’m surprised (and quite pleased) by that. It turns out that the over-obsession with historical minutiae and absurdly minor commorations (“it’s forty years since Peterborough scored two goals at Burnden Park” etc.) is all commentator’s colour. It’s all about trying to find something to say about a match. It’s not a reflection of a culture taking a morbid turn.

What’s more, a large proportion of Premiership stadia are either brand new, or so heavily rebuilt in recent years as to be unrecognisable. The problem many clubs now face is how, having moved to a beautiful new high-capacity ground, to recapture the atmosphere of the old one.

It’s something the Church never quite pulled off. When Richard Poore moved the bishopric of Salisbury away from its traditional ground at Old Sarum, it was to a brilliant new cathedral on a new site. Like Ashburton Grove, the new building was architecturally consistent, in the Early English style. I have to say, it lacks something next to e.g. Wells, Winchester, and, most of all, Canterbury. Even the Close fails to awaken anything in me, and I can’t see any future memorial to Ted Heath changing that.

But then – exciting my emotions is all what a football ground is supposed to be about. Not the emotions I want raised by a cathedral or church – nothing reflective or eternal. If football is a religion, it’s one that exists to service emotional needs quite unlike any of the great religions of history.

Think of what we want from sportsmen in Britain. The following, now offline but written in response to the last England Ashes defeat, puts it particularly well:

In blighty, there are millions and millions of sporting fans who work hard, pay taxes, put up with a lot of sh** with the weather, the public transport, crime, rip-off prices and cr** food. All we ask for in return for putting up with this miserable life is a bit of pride from our national football and cricket teams.

The football team is made up of overpaid thugs who have as much pride in wearing the national shirt as Borat does in donning his tight-fitting thong. And what do we get from our cricketers on a mission more important than the moon landing of 1969? Here’s what we get; Marcus Trescothick feeling homesick so has to go home; Harmison homesick and bowling balls in the direction he throws his toys out of the cot; Ashley Giles spinning the ball about every 20 overs; the two wicket-keepers holding the bat as if it is a live grenade; Saj Mahmood looking like the world has come to an end whether he bowls bats or fields; dropped catches; lousy bowling; key advantage points lost; poor captaincy; capitulation by the lower order on a regular basis. The list, I’m afraid, goes on and on and on.

And some bread and butter from the ECB (David Collier) I think actually defending the massive cost of bringing out wives, girlfriends and children (some of them at an age now to suggest there had been clearly too much jiggery-pokery on the last winter tour). Sitting in the cold in Clapton, east London, I see life very differently. If I was honoured to be picked to represent my country at cricket and play in an Ashes series, to stay in five-star hotels, to pit myself against the best in the world, I think I may just be able to motivate myself and put in a performance that my fellow suffering countrymen back home would be proud of.

What we have witnessed is a spineless, gutless capitulation.

It isn’t winning. It’s pride. It’s a display of courage, of pluck. We want our footballers, indeed our sportsmen in general, to display a particular sort of puissance: to embody on our behalf some basic virtues that we value. It’s more important than skill, or beauty. When a non-league team goes to a Premiership club and loses by a couple of goals in each half, but runs itself into the ground until the final whistle, both sets of fans will stand to cheer that team off the pitch.

Much as we enjoyed winning the Rugby World Cup in 2003, there was still a feeling that our failure to come out and attack – to win through pack strength and the boot of Johnny Wilkinson – wasn’t quite what we loved. Jason Robinson’s great try in the Final gave us permission to really celebrate: had we won without a touchdown, I wonder.

All of this – the desire for a group of men to embody values on our behalf, the fetishistic collecting of objects connected to them, the ability to turn on them viciously if they let us down, the wearing of colours and singing of songs, the local rivalries, even the fan violence – all sounds less like religion to me – and a lot more like the behaviour of one of those medieval warrior castes and their coteries. In fact, it sounds exactly like that. And I find that interesting, because precisely none of the people concerned has any idea of the parallels between what they are doing and events in some mead hall in the Dark Ages.

And suddenly, the war comparisons leap forth, don’t they? We want players who are fighters, we bombard the opposition penalty area, but despite that, the other team are killing us. We’re not on the march with Ally’s Army, not any more. Campbell is a Judas, but we really mean he’s a Quisling.

It all brings us back to Vitae Lampada, but also perhaps to another Newbolt verse, taken from “He Fell Amongst Thieves’: our hero awaits execution at dawn at the hands of the tribesmen who have betrayed him:

He did not hear the monotonous roar that fills
The ravine where the Yassin river sullenly flows;
He did not see the starlight on the Laspur hills,
Or the far Afghan snows.

He saw the April noon on his books aglow,
The wistaria trailing in at the window wide;
He heard his father’s voice from the terrace below
Calling him down to ride.

He saw the gray little church across the park,
The mounds that hid the loved and honoured dead;
The Norman arch, the chancel softly dark,
The brasses black and red.

He saw the School Close, sunny and green,
The runner beside him, the stand by the parapet wall,
The distant tape, and the crowd roaring between,
His own name over all.

He saw the dark wainscot and timbered roof,
The long tables, and the faces merry and keen;
The College Eight and their trainer dining aloof,
The Dons on the dais serene.

He watched the liner’s stem ploughing the foam,
He felt her trembling speed and the thrash of her screw;
He heard the passengers’ voices talking of home,
He saw the flag she flew.

And now it was dawn. He rose strong on his feet,
And strode to his ruined camp below the wood;
He drank the breath of the morning cool and sweet:
His murderers round him stood.

Light on the Laspur hills was broadening fast,
The blood-red snow-peaks chilled to dazzling white:
He turned, and saw the golden circle at last,
Cut by the Eastern height.

“O glorious Life, Who dwellest in earth and sun,
I have lived, I praise and adore Thee.”
A sword swept.
Over the pass the voices one by one
Faded, and the hill slept.

We don’t feel that way about real war anymore, but the attitude has nonetheless found itself a new home to go to, and lives on in a modern form. It was the Great War that did for all of that, of course. The famous 1914 truce, discussed in yesterday’s England v Germany video, took place after four months of unprecedented horror and bloodshed, during which officers and men of both sides had attacked whilst kicking footballs out ahead of them. There was still little sense of what was to come, and the kind of thing that took place only a decade and a half before at Mafeking would soon be gone for good.

In April 1900, more Boer troops arrived to join the besieging forces surrounding the British at Mafeking. Among them was a young Field Cornet, by the name of Sarel Eloff, Kruger’s grandson. Eloff was keen to launch an all-out attack on the town, but General Snyman held him back. What he did then seems almost inexplicable to us.

He sent Baden-Powell, the British commander, a message suggesting that Eloff bring a Boer cricket team into Mafeking to play the British.

I suppose it would have helped pass the time, but even so!

Baden-Powell’s reply was equal to the occasion.

Just now we are having our innings and have so far scored 200 days, not out, against the bowling of Cronje, Snijman, Botha… and we are having a very enjoyable game.

It’s magnificent, but I think we’re content to internalise the football-war links now: we want football to present us with a display of the virtues that we think might be worthy in the kind of old-fashioned war we know we can no longer have. War never really was like that, of course.

In fact, I think that’s the key to the real value of football now. For the first time in history, in the forms of football and (I think) manned spaceflight, mankind has things more exciting than war to get on with. Football in particular seems able to suck into itself the kind of desires and emotions that otherwise spill over into actual, not feigned, conflict. And it does so leaving us with honour, reminding us that

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

In the Netherlands, a Muslim football team and a gay football team played each other to prove that after all, it is possible for us all to just get along. (Hat tip: Norm). The Muslims won 4-0:

The soccer tournament was organized as part of a conference on fighting discrimination against immigrants who come out as gay — particularly, against gay Muslims by other Muslims.

As well as gays playing against Muslims, a team of women played Latinos, with some players swapping sides to illustrate competing identities.

Long renowned for its tolerance and liberal attitudes on issues such as gay marriage and cannabis use, social tensions have risen in The Netherlands since the 2002 murder of openly gay anti-immigration populist Pim Fortuyn.

High-profile attacks on homosexuals in Amsterdam last year stoked a debate about homophobia blamed on the country’s growing immigrant community — particularly Muslims, who make up 6 percent of the Dutch population of around 16 million.

A survey published last week showed that about 40 percent of the gays polled believed that violence and aggression against them was on the rise, while about the same number said they were the victim of homophobic abuse last year, most of it verbal.

It can be done: England v. Germany is just a football match these days, the game sucking up all of the old hatreds and putting them somewhere where they can be got off the chest safely. (Although the Germans really don’t understand the English take on that – their great cultural enemies are the same Dutch mentioned above).

What follows is a thinkpiece I created for IMGTV in relation to their August 2005 programme, “Being Jose Mourinho”.

An attempt to answer three questions: what sort of man is JM? what sort of man does what he does? and how does he do it?

Football is a game full of men who are motivated by the pain of failure: they hate losing, they fear losing, and they mark defeat with some of the most emphatic body language to be seen anywhere. For men such as this, victory is as much a relief as it is a triumph – note how similar the scenes at MUFC’s FA Cup win in Cardiff in 2004 were to West Brom’s relegation survival game in 2005. Both in their own way showed the euphoria of escape. Roy Keane has commented far more often on shortcomings and failure than on success. Gudjohnsen commented before the Champions’ League semi-final with Liverpool that he “didn’t want to feel like that again”; he was referring to defeat in the same fixture to Monaco twelve months ago.

JM is the opposite of this. He moves towards the things that challenge and please him. He comments that he could have stayed at Porto and been a hero for the rest of his days; instead, he takes a job in what looked at the time like a managerial snakepit, Chelsea. He has turned it into something far more attractive and stable, but that was his doing, and it’s his willingness to do that that is interesting. Erickson is of the same mould, but not Wenger. Ferguson once was, but no more.

The psychologically significant characteristic of JM in this regard is his attitude to failure and mistakes. He seems to regard himself – his specific person – separately from what he does and accomplishes. If he makes a serious error, he does not interpret it as a comment upon himself or upon his ability. He cannot be damaged at the level of his own identity by error. Neither does he take error and setback as predictions. Learning situations, perhaps, but not a means to tell the future. At the end of Chelsea’s (unsuccessful) Champions’ League semi-final, it’s notable how quickly he turned the attention of his press conference to the future.

In relation to this, JM is curious – he is a noted learner. That small elite of international coaches are all characterised by the depth of their study of the game; only JM and Steve McClaren actually took time off from their careers to learn more, and only JM has encapsulated his findings in the famous “black book” way. Unlike other coaches, JM takes the widest possible view of learning in relation to football – “what does he know of football that only football knows”; he is alleged to have acquaintance with literature and philosophy in additiion to fitness, tactics and coaching. Whilst this is the source of his confidence and certainty – he knows that none of the competition can match his knowledge across the board – he takes no kind of pride in knowing more than others – he still sees learning more as more important than resting on his laurels.

Another facet of his moving towards what he wants and enjoys is his energy. Energy has to do with physical fitness, to be sure, and JM is fit. But it is as much to do with psychological energy. JM is not sapped by self-recrimination or self-doubt because of his attitude to error and failure, as above. He is able to remain interested in trying again, in moving forward, in seeking out new approaches and new experiences.

Likewise, he is willing to take risks. He has put himself in a position to take informed risks – see learning – and he knows he is not going to suffer unduly psychologically if they don’t come off. So dramatic gestures such as the triple substitution in the FA Cup against Newcastle are open to him where lesser managers would have neither the knowledge nor the attitude to attempt anything so bold. (It’ll be interesting to go over the pattern of his substitutions across the course of the season). Going to Chelsea was a risk; his various, deliberate run-ins with authority have been risks.

This moving-towards meme is also visible in his attitude towards his players. It’s very much the British way to take too much out of a player in terms of what they CAN do, and then to hammer them repeatedly over what they can’t do (Hoddle’s relationship with Beckham is a superb example of this). JM seems to concentrate on improving what is already there – as exemplified by the success of mediocrities such as Carvalho. What JM has done to transform Joe Cole seems different but it isn’t: he hasn’t attempted to add anything to Cole’s range of skills, just make them team-friendly. Cole is not the only Chelsea player who has had his in-team performance transformed, but he’s the obvious focus for media opinion given the frustration of Erickson et al with him.

JM operates with an internal frame of reference. That is, JM is genuinely his own judge as to his performance, his next action, his relationships; the opinion of other people is feedback and input, but never decisive. For all his recent denials, this is where I would put his “special one” comment: he knows his ability, and that knowledge is not open to adjustment by the opinions of other people.

The advantages of this to a football manager are many: how many managers end up selecting their team in line with their press coverage? JM seems to regard his relations with the press lightly, seeking only to shield his players from its pressure. If it’s JM being pilloried by the press, or by UEFA, then it’s not his players, and he is unlikely to be psychologically hurt by whatever is said about him, all the less for having provoked such comment deliberately.

JM is what is called a mismatcher – a noticer of differences. This is another vital part of the makeup of the small elite group of managers. Attention to detail, which is one facet of noticing differences, is one of the two important means of motivating players, of being a leader (the other component is the communication of certainty). In JM’s case, he watches a game of football in a different way from most managers, indeed, most people. In talking of a game of football as consisting of 3d movement, JM notices multiple patterns where his competitors notice only one. In one Portuguese game, he substitutes his centre forward, who had just scored, because he had noticed a pattern in play that everyone else had missed completely, that he felt was better exploited by a different kind of player. (It will be interesting to compare JM’s decisions with the automated Championship Manager ones).

Roy Keane’s autobiography constantly calls attention to the importance of attention to detail for players. It’s more than just diet, or making sure that training facilities are adequate. It’s the difference between treating all players in the same way, and knowing how to manage each player in relation to their own individual personality. It’s the search for new ways in which to give players the opportunity to improve, more, than their competitors. The eagerness of players to join Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea is as much that they are sure to become better players and perhaps internationals, as it is for the money.

JM as a mismatcher is a man in search of new experience and variety, and he will bring these things to his players also. Players comment about all of the small elite group of managers that training is more various, more interesting, with them than with the mass of bosses. JM has had an extremely good idea of how he wants training to be at his club for a long time; variety, at Chelsea, has come as much by building a new training ground (where Ranieri and Vialli failed, notably) as by ringing the changes in an already various routine.

JM’s status as a mismatcher – a noticer of differences – has given him one advantage that seems unique among even the elite group of managers. He sees his communication and relationship with the Chelsea owner and board as equally important as those he has with his players. I know of no similar example anywhere. By taking intense care of his relations with the board, he maximises his decision making capability, and minimises his complications. So, he writes a report (daily or weekly; I forget) for Abramovich, explaining what he does and why. Equally, he keeps the lower echelons of the club involved.

In understanding JM, it’s important to compare how he becomes acquainted with other people’s ability as compared with other managers. As with all of the elite group, he needs to see a player himself to be convinced of their worth or otherwise. In terms of skill and ability, he needs perhaps a couple of training sessions – no more. In terms of character – none of the elite group will work with bad-attitude players, whatever their level of skill – JM seems to need a maximum of two weeks to know if he wants to work with a player or not. One of the key differences between JM and the non-elite coaches is that the latter group can take up to two years to decide whether or not a face fits. They lack workable criteria to make that kind of decision in the optimum time frame. JM’s criteria are relatively fixed, but he is still willing to make a mistake (he seems open to have Crespo back at Chelsea, for instance) as we have discussed above. Many “average” managers will buy on the strength of scouts’ opinions alone; if a player’s face doesn’t fit, they won’t communicate this, leaving that player in the dark and taking that much energy out of the team unit.

JM is motivated by what is possible, not by what is necessary. This is a common trait amongst the elite group of managers – none of whom have any need to do football as opposed to anything else. But JM has used the freedom this basic trait allows more liberally than most. Taking time out of his career to focus on creating his coaching “black book” would have been looked on as suicidal by all of his contemporaries, who would have urged him to take a job, any job – and indeed, not to have left his old job without having a new one lined up. Only Wenger’s trip to Japan is comparable among the managers currently in the English game. Likewise, he was remarkably unwilling to be intimidated by the pursuit of a quadruple for much of the season – he didn’t feel compelled to write off the possibility or to play it down – it excited him, and he saw it as doable. Again, his adventurous substitutions come in here. As does his failure to rest his principle players in the run-in to the title, where many managers would have been tempted to win the title more slowly by grinding out results with bit-part players, JM (who doesn’t have bit-part players) went for it. Wenger and Bryan Robson are two other managers who successfully ignore “necessity” and achieve playing football their way, having seen the possibility and opted for it.

JM operates what is called a “proximity strategy” at Chelsea. Namely, he works in a group of people, but he is in charge. Whilst his relationship with his players is notably warmer and closer than that of either Ferguson or Wenger, to the point where one wonders if he is committing the ultimate managerial sin of befriending his players, in my opinion the fact remains that he has made them “his” players by one means or another. They owe their position to him, and feel that emotionally. Either he inherited them from Ranieri and made them his own by keeping them (Gudjohnsen, Terry, Lampard) or he brought them with him from Porto (e.g. Carvalho) or he bought them (Drogba).

JM motivates his players by: providing them with certainty and attention to detail, by fostering a them-against-us attitude (in the pure Ferguson style), by building on their strengths, not hammering on their weaknesses, and by making them his overt choices. Unsurprisingly, his players report that he makes them feel like “big men”. He is a communicator and explainer, not an autocrat, and tells the players why he wants a particular approach taken, a specific tactic adopted. The certainty he gives them has two sources. His own certainty, first of all, is based upon his preparation and intelligence, and his awareness of both of these. He is better suited to the job than most managers, he has prepared vastly better, and he knows it. Secondly, because his training methods are more effective than other managers’, his players realise quickly that he is indeed able to improve them as players and as a team, thus to take them to the fulfilment of their ambitions. If they go along with JM, they will achieve what they want to achieve. The them-against-us attitude, of course, comes from generating anti-Chelsea press and then telling the team that no one wants them to win, that everyone hates them. This tactic is being applied to a group that he has already chosen for its group dynamic in the first place, so it is doubly effective (it wouldn’t have any effect on a disparate group of players who don’t get on with each other). JM has explicit team and training reasons for his belief in a 24-man squad; one reason must surely be that 24 men can continue as a viable unit where the 33-34 of MUFC cannot; 24 men can all expect to take some significant part in events, unless their name is Scott Parker. But JM’s slashing of the Chelsea squad means that those left are the survivors: “chosen men” in the military parlance.