Stories
Before England played Portugal in their first match of the 1986 World Cup, the manager of the national side, Bobby Robson, went on television to reassure the English people that his players were prepared for what was to come.
“We have trained hard. We are ready,” he told the viewers at home, before he delivered the final note of comfort. “I will send the lads out with just two little words, ‘Have some self-belief in yourselves’.”
Despite the rallying cry, England lost 1-0. The Sun called them ‘The Mugs of Monterrey”. Robson’s side would, after some customary highs and lows in the competition, make what would become a traditional exit in a quarter-final, an exit accompanied by an equally traditional howl of injustice that England had been cheated.
Twelve years later, in St Etienne, England would once again go out to Argentina following a controversial turning point in the game.
At the post match press conference after midnight, a collection of beautiful Argentina players turned the press conference into a party. As Gabriel Batistuta, Ariel Ortega, Juan Sebastian Veron, Javier Zanetti and others gathered, the audience of journalists – or a portion of the English contingent anyway – was getting restless and soon the heckling started.
“Fack off!” one shouted. Another joined in, “We’ve got deadlines. It’s 6 o’clock in Buenos Aires, but we’ve got facking deadlines!” Batistuta, Ortega and the rest of the beautiful people on the stage observed this anger wryly as if it was nothing to do with them which, really, it wasn’t.
Four year later at the 2002 World Cup, England went out after Ronaldinho chipped David Seaman with a free-kick when the goalkeeper drifted off his line. As if to demonstrate that this loathing encompassed self-loathing as well, one English journalist booed as Seaman walked weeping through the media mixed zone afterwards.
“It is said that the Germans are the most militaristic people in the world but it is not so. The British are. Even winning at football is treated like a victory in battle.”
Many will point out that other countries had media which was as ferocious as England’s. But they rarely had media so certain of its own power and so convinced that power could be exercised.
To cover England in those years was to be exposed to the idea of English exceptionalism long before Brexit codified it into a self-destructive public policy.
But the belief in exceptionalism always appeared to be skin deep. “During the 1980s the England football team was increasingly used to evoke feelings of national pride by the popular press,” Matthew Taylor writes in The Association Game. But the pride was a notional one and the shame was real. Taylor references those like Stephen Wagg who studied the phenomenon and how the papers tapped into “readers’ anxieties about imperial decline through ever more sensationalist reporting of the (mis)fortunes of the national side and the ineptitude of the England manager.”
The front pages were being driven by Euroscepticism and, from 1989, the particularly lurid stores from the Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph about European crackdown on condom sizes, bendy bananas and plans to blow up the European Commission’s Berlaymont building.
The back pages, meanwhile, turned that exasperation inwards or at least towards whatever mug happened to be managing the football team.
Together they shaped a powerful story about England in decline, under attack from Brussels on one hand and let down by the weakness of their own so-called leaders on the other.
It was no surprise that in Mexico in 1986 Bobby Robson delivered the two little words – one word, really – which were so important camouflaged by others and framed with qualifications.
He wanted his team to have “some self-belief”, a tell which might have revealed he didn’t have much at all. Robson always had the natural expression, in one journalist’s words, of “a man who fears he might have left the gas on”.
It was an expression exacerbated by his treatment by some of the media who saw Robson as a safe appointment rather than the one the country needed. When England lost to Wales in 1984, The Sun issued badges with “Robson Out-Clough In” on them. (It was only when England reached the semi-final in 1990 and Robson then left the job that he came to be regarded as a national treasure).
So Robson could be forgiven if he could only stretch to “some self-belief”. It was also an English formulation as you wouldn’t want to be overdoing it either.
Too much self-belief and you might be confused for a preening narcissist. Nothing arrogant or over-confident. Just some self-belief. Enough to be going on with it which was never too much at all.
For forty years, England has wrestled with this conundrum as their brashness concealed their insecurity.
“Before I took over, I always had this picture in my mind of an England where everyone was a yard late,” Terry Venables wrote in 1996.
Those failings might have revealed themselves first when Hungary played at Wembley in 1953 and England embarked on a voyage of discovery which would end with Alf Ramsey rejecting individualism and advancing the notion of a collective as they won the World Cup in 1966.
Some felt that triumph set England back, fixed the country at a point where they felt there was nothing to learn from the outside world. In fact they argued, 1966, with its triumph over Germany, would create many problems
“They want to fly flags and beat drums because they are winning at football,” the German commentator Werner Schneider said. “It is said that the Germans are the most militaristic people in the world but it is not so. The British are. Even winning at football is treated like a victory in battle.”
Defeat has always been treated too to the most ferocious self-examination as if there can be no simple explanation, instead only the most punishing reckoning will do.
When England had lost to the USA at the World Cup in 1950, Stanley Matthews would believe that the way the individual was being forgotten.
“I blame this on the pre-match talks on playing tactics that had been introduced for the first time by our team manager,’ he wrote in an autobiography.
“You just cannot tell star players how they must play and what they must do on the field in an international match. You must let them play their natural game, which has paid big dividends in the past. I have noticed that in recent years these pre-match instructions have become more and more long-winded, while the playing ability of the players on the field has dwindled. So I say scrap the talks and instruct the players to play their natural game.”
Ramsey didn’t believe any of that. Jimmy Greaves, England’s most gifted goalscorer, would be sacrificed. “Ramsey recognised that the real strengths and values of English football were embodied not by Trevor Brooking but by Nobby Stiles,” Eamon Dunphy wrote in 1981. “Ramsey was right.”
Ramsey had the World Cup with which to take on his critics but even that wasn’t enough. Brian Glanville, the greatest of all English football writers, would describe Ramsey’s time as “one splendid success and eight years of anti-climax”.
But 1966 also became another lost Albion. By the 1980s, the tabloids’ own version of exceptionalism was contributing to the frenzy. Graham Taylor took part in a documentary called “The Impossible Job” which managed to convey the message that the job was not only impossible, but doomed as well.
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In the late 1980s, Associated Newspapers moved from their offices in Fleet Street to a new premises, Northcliffe House, an Art Deco building on Kensington High Street in west London. With journalists moving from the city to west London, it was considered appropriate that one of their favourite haunts might move with them.
Beside an entrance to the building a doorway led to a basement club called Scribes West (the original Scribes remained off Fleet Street). It was said that Carol Thatcher was persuaded to ask her mother, the prime minister to open Scribes West in the 1980s, but it soon became associated with another high profile figure.
“I have to admit I enjoy the company of journalists,” Terry Venables wrote in The Best Game In The World, “because they are mostly bright and lively people.”
For approximately seven years in the 1990s, Venables was an owner of Scribes West.
In this club, Venables sang and entertained and mingled with the press. It was here he agreed to become manager of Australia in 1997 after he’d left the England job. It was at Scribes where you could find players – Dennis Wise infamously had an altercation with a taxi driver outside the club – and it was Scribes that was one of the companies Venables was alleged to have mismanaged by the Department of Trade and Industry. Venables did not contest any of the charges which, in 1998, saw him being banned from holding company directorships for seven years.
Venables’s own career encompassed much of English football’s pathos as well as a certain type of pushiness others found unappealing. Like Ramsey, Venables was from Dagenham in Essex, but unlike Ramsey, who took elocution lessons, Venables would stay rooted in the place. “Mrs Smith in No 63 says hello,” he was supposed to have said to Ramsey when he was called up to an England squad. This went down badly with Ramsey. But if Venables remained a Dagenham boy, he saw it as a platform to look at the world beyond, especially anywhere there was an opportunity.
The restlessness in Venables manifested itself in many ways, among them the ‘Thingamywig’, a wig he invented to allow women to do their shopping while wearing curlers, but also in an endless curiosity about the world around him.
“Jesus, son, you’re the HG Wells of football,” Bill Shankly said when Venables published his novel ‘They Used to Play On Grass’ a book which was described as a “futuristic football novel” which imagined the game to come.
But Venables was – when he focused – a visionary in terms of football as well. He went from QPR to become manager of Barcelona and when Taylor left following England’s failure to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, the FA wrestled with its conscience and its piety before appointing Venables as England’s head coach. ‘England manager’ was too illustrious a title to risk on a man of whom there were so many questions.
“What’s he like? What’s he like?” Paul Gascoigne said the England players who hadn’t worked with Venables before asked him when he got the job. “I told them he was fucking marvellous.”
The players would mainly retain that view. Venables, remarkably in some ways, wasn’t afraid. England manager or England coach wasn’t an impossible job for him (it might have been some of his other projects which were impossible).
He would encourage the players and support them, in a way which might be familiar to how Gareth Southgate – a very different person – has managed his team.
Venables couldn’t have a romantic view of the press, but he felt he could handle them.
“I’d noticed a complete change in certain of the English tabloids while I was Barcelona’s coach in the 1980s,” he wrote in 1996. “That was when the Sun and the Daily Mirror began to get stuck into poor old Bobby Robson.”
Venables told how every night at 8pm he would head to the Princess Sofia hotel near Camp Nou for a beer and pick up some English papers at a kiosk on the way.
“What struck me as amazing was how reckless the popular tabloids had become. They had always been critical, and a lot of us in the game couldn’t handle that too well. But now you just saw naked aggression and a lack of truth in certain areas.”
Venables wanted his team to play a certain way, but there was nothing new in that. Resisting the idea that there were others who should be part of it – Matt Le Tissier was the call in his era – was where sometimes the pressure became too much.
But Venables found it easy to resist. During England’s journey to the final of the European Championships this summer, it is Euro 96 that the country has turned to for its nostalgia fix, not just because of the neat and packaged story of redemption that was Southgate missing a penalty 25 years ago and leading England with such confidence.
It was also a prolonged brush with glory, a tournament when England seemed to grow.
Venables asked more of his players than Southgate has but there are parallels in Southgate’s unwavering commitment to his players, even if the battlegrounds are different.
If Southgate has forged a bond with his players through his unwavering support of his players’ determination to take the knee. Venables could fight on more traditional grounds thanks to the trip to Hong Kong, a night drinking in the dentist’s chair and the damage to a plane on the flight back to London.
Venables was allowing the players to have a drink “at the right time”, in football parlance. Southgate was one of those who avoided the night having taken heed of a warning from Stuart Pearce who suggested giving it a miss. In the Sky documentary, Terry Venables: A Man Can Dream, Southgate recalls Pearce’s words. “He said, ‘When I’ve been away with England in the past, when there’s been a night out, you’d have thought the lads had never been for a drink before in their lives’.”
In the fall-out, the players issued a statement saying they were taking collective responsibility. Nobody was forced to step forward and apologise as happened two years later when pictures emerged of Teddy Sheringham smoking in a nightclub at dawn before the 1998 World Cup.
By then, Venables was gone, refusing to wait for a contract extension after Euro 96 in an act of pride which benefited neither side.
A year later, his successor Glenn Hoddle had gone too, the only manager to lose his job because, as the late George Byrne put it, “of his views on the transmigration of souls”. A year after that, Kevin Keegan quit in a Wembley toilet.
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England’s search for some self-belief over the past 20 years has taken them on a chaotic journey. Some England managers have departed under familiar terms – ‘The Wally with a brolly’ – and some have found new ways to go. Fabio Capello resigned when the FA stripped John Terry of the captaincy ahead of the European Championships as he was standing trial for alleged racist comments he made to Anton Ferdinand – he was cleared in court. Capello disagreed with the decision and resigned.
Entrapment by the media brought an end for two managers. Sven Goran Eriksson went after the 2006 World Cup following a sting involving the News of the World’s ‘Fake Sheikh’ while Sam Allardyce resigned 67 days into the job, when the Daily Telegraph secretly filmed him talking indiscreetly about how to get around FA rules on third party ownership.
Allardyce allowed Southgate to take over, an appointment which makes sense now but made less when Allardyce was the manager the English FA wanted a few months previously.
In another time, there might have been those who would have resisted the idea of Southgate as the manager. If things had gone differently in this tournament, they certainly would have.
“I knew that when we have had difficult tournaments as a country, the FA comes under scrutiny, so there is not going to be any enthusiasm for an FA man getting the job and I know people saw me as an FA man,” he said on Friday.
Southgate is that but he has emerged as more as well. England was a country which once seemed petrified and outwitted when it played in international competition. But the players have changed and have been shaped by their own experience. Insularity doesn’t come naturally to them.
In football terms, Southgate’s England could be said to stay close to the values Eamon Dunphy attributed to Alf Ramsey’s side. Declan Rice embodies the strength and values, not Jack Grealish. The clamour for Grealish to start can be seen now as a failure to understand how Southgate believes the team should function. England will wear teams down and when they are broken, the talented players are sent on to finish them off. And then, as happened with Grealish against Denmark, maybe take them off again. Whether it can work in the final against the most complete side they’ve faced in the tournament remains to be seen.
For England as a country, it doesn’t matter. Many will insist that the values of this team can be transmitted to the nation as a whole. There is a temptation to see in the communion between the players, the manager and the country a significance and a shared value system which in reality is hard to sustain.
England are making the people happy, uniting people who are not united and there is a lot to be said for that.
Yet this England stand for something too, a point Southgate repeated again before the game as he spoke about how the team has come to mean so much to so many people.
“That inclusivity is really important to us because I think that’s what modern England is and we know it hasn’t always been the case and there’s historic reasons for that, but that level of tolerance and inclusion is what we have to be about moving forward.”
Southgate’s comments which appeared on Friday night appeared, at the last, to be a slip into militaristic language he had previously avoided.
“People have tried to invade us and we’ve had the courage to hold that back. You can’t hide that some of the energy in the stadium against Germany was because of that,” he said, quite strangely.
On Sunday, England will be supported by the bad actors too, cheered perhaps by these comments. The former Brussels correspondent of the Telegraph who drove one element of the destruction of modern Britain as a journalist and accelerated it as a politician will be there, attaching himself to this England as he feels a prime minister should.
If Southgate’s England had failed, their values would be held against them. Thirty years ago, the failures were used to illustrate what the tabloids believed was a failing Britain.
The England of that era is gone. The media is not what it was and there’s a Whole Foods where Scribes West used to be.
Beneath the bravado and bluster that accompanied England in many tournaments and in the public arena was a feeling that, really, England wasn’t exceptional at all. It was a three-word slogan – Take Back Control, Football’s Coming Home – that hid a range of insecurities, technical, tactical, emotional and more.
Under Southgate, England has become a team that knows what it has to do and is comfortable with what it stands for. It has become a team that offers hope for those in England who felt despair at the direction the country was going in while paradoxically making those who led it in that direction happy as well.
If you unite a country, you don’t get to choose who you unite, but, in achieving that unity, Southgate has never stepped back from what he believes his side to be or what they represent.
His side have transformed England in one other key way as well. Under Venables at Euro 96, there were glimpses of an England that was sure of itself but it has rarely been witnessed since.
Southgate’s England is a team large enough to accommodate all the things people want it to be without crumbling under the pressure. At Wembley on Sunday, England will support a team that, after years of bluff and bluster, looks self-assured. They will see an England side that has mastered those two little words. A team, unlike those who govern the country still through bluff and bluster, that finally has some self-belief in themselves.
