The day football came back...briefly

I don’t know about you, but I’m passing the extended lockdown by noting anniversaries of the otherwise mundane: the last time I had a coffee at Caffé Nero, the last time I went swimming, the last time I saw someone in the flesh who wasn’t a member of my immediate household. That sort of thing. For example, Easter Sunday marked an exact month since my last haircut, and given my barnet’s normal growth rate, I’m surprised I'm not yet resembling Tom Hanks in Castaway.

It is now six weeks - SIX - since I last saw a football being kicked in anger, (Chelsea's 4-0 battering of Everton, since you ask, easily the best game I've seen this season). In other circumstances this might have bothered me, but like so many aspects of the viral crisis, there are other things that now take priority and, frankly, football is not one of them. Not that football isn’t perfectly capable of crowbarring itself back into consciousness, whether it is the idiot Kyle Walker getting caught in flagrante with a couple of “sex workers” who clearly weren’t members of his household, or his former club Tottenham Hotspur digging itself into a hole by placing half of its 550 non-playing staff under the government’s furlough scheme and imposing 20% pay cuts on other employees (despite being the world’s eighth-richest football club which recently posted record annual revenues of £461 million and a profit of around £70 million). Facing a backlash from its own fans and even some players, Spurs have wisely made a U-turn, with Daniel Levy, the club’s chairman (who earned a cool £7 million last year) announcing that all non-playing staff will now get paid in full for April and May, with only the board taking a pay cut. Last week Liverpool staged a similar volte face. In truth, clubs like Tottenham and Liverpool - 8th and 7th, respectively, for global club revenues last season - can most afford it. Others, like Bournemouth and Norwich City probably can’t and have carried on with drawing on the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

We are on shaky moral ground, here. Elite football generates - and spends - ridiculous amounts of money, money it earns, if it is a Premier League or Championship team, from they eye-watering deals done with television companies. Matchday gate receipts and income from merchandise and sales of dodgy burgers is, for some clubs at this level, something of a bonus. For clubs lower down, however, every last bottle of Coke sold could be the difference between a bleak future or not when this thing is all over. Here, like so many businesses across the spectrum of enterprise, there are people working at these football clubs who earn a mere fraction of the sums trawled by the players they serve. That said, Spurs should never have put themselves in the spotlight with such a PR disaster.

In a club statement Levy said: "The criticism the Club has received over the last week has been felt all the more keenly because of our track record of good works and our huge sense of responsibility to care for those that rely on us, particularly locally. It was never our intent, as custodians, to do anything other than put measures in place to protect jobs whilst the Club sought to continue to operate in a self-sufficient manner during uncertain times.” Be that as it may, but when the businesses of the very fans who keep these clubs going are facing very uncertain futures, Spurs' unnecessary insertion in the coronavirus news cycle was ill-thought through especially, without little fanfare, while other clubs have simply been getting on with it (Leeds United’s first-team squad have agreed wage cuts to assist others at the club, Juventus players have taken a four-month pay cut and Barcelona players have agreed to a 70% pay cut).

Picture: Nike

Were it not for this brouhaha, football would have dropped completely from view. I am, though, inclined to care less about whether the current season ends, or whether Liverpool’s somewhat justifiable receipt of the Premier League title, happens or not. "Staying in, saving lives" has replaced everything else in my consciousness. Last Monday I started a new job, which at least managed to supplant days framed largely by an unhealthy diet of rolling news and watching delivery vans out of the living room window speed up and down the road. Covid-19 has rapidly reshaped our priorities and interests, not that football was exactly an obsession. But I've now realised how much of my time was, pre-crisis, spent on watching, reading, WhatsApping, tweeting and blogging about football. And then, nothing. Like I'd reached the end of the universe and discovered that beyond it, there is nowt. Well, there was, until Easter Sunday when, in much the same manner as EastEnders' Nasty Nick appearing out of the blue to say "'Ello Ma, fancy a cuppa?", the football void was momentarily broken by a bittersweet memory. On Sunday afternoon the BBC cast our minds back to something which, despite coming 30 years ago, still fills football fans with tear-inducing nostalgia: Italia ’90.

The 1990 FIFA World Cup, to give it its full name was, for England fans at least, a moment of mass cultural change. Football was still in the doghouse after the 1985 Heysel disaster and, just a year before, the Hillsborough tragedy in Sheffield. The game didn’t exactly disappear, but it certainly wasn’t where it is now - or at least was before that nasty little virus arrived on these shores. Italia ’90 was a football tournament, obviously, but it managed to transcend that in England, largely thanks to the BBC’s coverage of it. Fronted by the smoother-than-silk Des Lynam (“Desmond”, as commentator John Motson consistently referred to him), the Beeb bought into the dreamy Italian vibe with Luciano Pavarotti’s rendition of Nessun Dorma from Puccini's opera Turandot as its theme tune. “You’ll be humming it soon – you’ll know the words to it by July 8”, Lynam quipped on the opening day, setting an incongruously cultured tone to coverage of a tournament normally less sophisticated. I’m not going to recall the whole thing here - Roger Milla corner flag dance and Totò Schillaci’s eye-bulging reaction to scoring a winner notwithstanding - rather than reminisce over last Sunday’s unexpected flashback: West Germany-v-England.

By 1990 England had been bereft of international footballing success for a full 24 years (“30 years of hurt” would prevail beyond Euro ’96), so England reaching a semi-final against Frans Beckenbauer’s pre-unification West Germany was a big deal. Before the tournament had begun the usual negativity surrounding England had been added to by news that manager Bobby Robson would leave after the competition to join PSV Eindhoven. Then came England’s opening game, a dismal 1-1 draw against Ireland. For the next match, against the Dutch, Robson changed the system around, allowing the-then 23-year-old Paul Gascoigne’s talents fully into the fray. England would win their group, raising prospects - “could this be the year, finally?”. Gazza became a joy to behold and easily England’s breakout tournament start. His supply to David Platt in the last-16 tie against Belgium, enabling the striker to volley spectacularly into the goal with seconds to spare in extra time, marked the youngster as the one to watch. Next came Cameroon in a quarter-final, from which England progressed, just. By this time of the World Cup, Italia ’90 fever had reached its peak. As Des had predicted, Nessun Dorma had become the soundtrack of the summer (along with New Order's World In Motion). Coupled with England’s run, with a team comprised of players in their prime, like Gary Lineker, John Barnes, Des Walker and even Peter Shilton, who seemed old in 1990 (he retired soonafter) but looked absolutely rock-solid between the sticks, we were lured by the charms of the Italian peninsular, its islands and its football culture. Channel 4's Football Italia would come not long after (and could be a whole separate blog post, as I waxed on about James Richardson laconic Saturday morning magazine show).

In that Italian excursion in the summer of 1990 there was one last challenge: that semi-final, on Wednesday, 4 July at the Stadio delle Alpi in Turin. The last group of Englishmen to get out of the northern Italian city with their dignity intact was probably Charlie Croker’s men in The Italian Job, but here was Bobby Robson’s team, on the back of lucky but scintillating results, facing the mighty Kaiser, Franz Beckenbauer, and his imperious collection of blond, mullet-haired grafters. I could go on lengthily about that game, except that I won’t. If you missed Sunday’s streamed broadcast then I hope the BBC will dig it out again sometime, and you’ll be able to relive what felt like the first truly romantic football experience of my life. It had highs and lows, and some of the best England football I’d seen at that stage, Gazza in particular proving to be so inventive through the middle, until his rashness showed through and ‘Gazza’s Tears’ became as much an icon of Italia ’90 as Pavarotti’s aria. And the lows? England hitting the inside of the German upright in normal time and then again in the extended period after Lineker’s 80th minute strike had kept them in the game, only for the penalty shootout to end in disappointment for Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle (though lucrative commercials for Pizza Hut must have alleviated the pain for the England left back).

Sunday’s airing of the 1990 semi-final brought back the memory that, in some small way, football had been excused, especially in England. It was OK to talk about the sport again amongst friends and colleagues. England hadn’t just come close to their first final in a generation - indeed, closest to winning the World Cup on foreign soil than any England side before or since - they also played with an aplomb the national side’s critics had hitherto been bating them for. Some might argue that the euphoria of England hosting the Euros six years later - and suffering a similar fate to the Germans… - beats the Italian World Cup in 1990. I just see it as a turning point in football’s reputation, when the classical surroundings of stunning Italian cities, some broadly decent games sprinkled with era-defining moments, did much to restore football. You could even say that Italia ’90 recovered the sport from the neanderthal ugliness that had periodically impaired its profile in the '70s and '80s. It was fun to be transported back 30 years to that July evening. Strangely, it didn’t make me hanker for football to return yet in 2020. Football will come back, like everything else - going to the pub, shopping for clothes, going to the gym - when it’s the right time. Yes, some clubs will suffer. Many will even go out of business, like so many other commercial activities. But it will come back.