Enda McEvoy: Italia '90 far from played out for me
DRY YOUR EYES MATE: Paul Gascoigne reacts to his booking against West Germany in Turin in 1990.
Thirty two summers ago, red of face from the sun and thoroughly sick of pizza, your correspondent tottered home from Italy. Only two items of business remained to be transacted that year.
The first entailed showing up in the bookie’s the day after the World Cup final brandishing a docket for a fiver on West Germany at 8/1 – those being the days, younger readers, when 40 quid was 40 quid and more besides. The second involved buying a copy of Pete Davies’s when it was published at Christmas and relieving at leisure those three halcyon weeks in Cagliari, Palermo, Genoa and Rome.
These fascinating nuggets are brought to you on foot of a programme on Channel 4 last week. It was entitled and you can guess the rest yourself.
We all know how it goes. England lost gallantly, Gazza cried, the game was beautiful again, a nation fell back in love and soon Sky Sports and the Premier League came along. Upon which football did indeed change forever.
Happily the show wasn’t as glib or predictable as all that. For starters it turned out to be episode one of three, meaning its themes and theories had scope to breathe. By way of foregrounding, moreover, the producers took care to paint the backdrop. Thus the opening instalment was as much about the 1980s as it was about 1990.
Especially about 1985, a most violent year. There was Heysel. There was Bradford. There was, above all, the riot at Luton Town/Millwall – “above all” because this was an FA Cup sixth-round tie shown live on BBC, complete with mournful commentary from poor old Motty.
Margaret Thatcher couldn’t but take notice. “A slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people,” as the editorialised the week after the Bradford fire.
The narrative hopscotched between the ‘80s and Italia 90, albeit never to an irritating degree. One moment members of the leading “firms” of the ‘80s were dilating about the adrenalin rush they got from their Saturday rucks, next minute the deputy police chief in Cagliari was reminiscing about the England fans who hit town in 1990. “They were all obese. All of them. That really threw me. It was impressive. Huge bellies. It was hard to beat them up.”
The fear beforehand was that England were drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. Any trouble and they’d be thrown out of international football. It didn’t come to that, as we know, but the prevailing sense of jeopardy was unmistakable.
On that point the programme did well to bring out the hypocrisy of the tabloids, who spent their time deploring hooliganism on the one hand while gobbling up the exploits of the likes of “super-thug” Paul Scarrott on the other. Scarrott’s World Cup proved to be shorter than Scotland’s; he was located in Rome’s Stazione Termini drunk and draped in a union jack, possibly not quite the Moriarty of hooliganism he fancied himself to be.
By the most serendipitous of coincidences just happened to fall out of the bookcase next day for the first time in three decades. Very handy. There was no option but to give it the once-over.
It remains an astonishing piece of work, even more so now than was the case at Christmas 1990. That it is infinitely superior to the World Cup it portrayed goes without saying. Equally obvious is that the notion of another is impossible, given that Pete Davies was embedded with the England team, though he did a lot of coming and going on top of that and watched no fewer than 12 matches in six cities during the course of the finals.
Davies was a novelist by trade. It shows. Consequently, he was beholden to nobody. It shows. People talked to him and he quoted them. Simple as.
Thus we get Bobby Robson, one of the very few heroes of the book, decent and dignified in the face of a mind-bending level of hostility from the press, revealing to the author on the eve of the tournament that he’s worried about Paul Gascoigne’s ability to read the game at the highest level. “But you just know with his genius, he’s capable of doing things that make you think, bloody hell… his free kicks, his dribbling. He’s something special.”
We get Davies overhearing the same Gazza at Heathrow on the phone to a woman who’d had the temerity to be out when he rang earlier. “The torrent of foul-mouthed abuse that ensued was just staggering. It was an ugly display of really noisy immaturity and, remembering it, I figured Robson maybe had a point.”
We get the chief sports writer (no less) of newspaper telling Davies: “Robson’s a c**t. I hope they don’t fucking qualify. Terrible team.” (Thought I was exaggerating about the level of press hostility?)
We even get Terry Butcher of Glasgow Rangers saying he won’t listen to U2 on the grounds that it’s “rebel music”. Now Bono can be accused of numerous offences, but knowing every word of Come Out Ye Black and Tans is not among them. Then again, in view of Butcher’s provenance we can probably let this one slide.
was re-released 20 years later under the title . No matter. If you haven’t, read it. If you have, reread it.
The first episode of by the by, concluded with a twist that, while not quite out of the drawer housing Roger Ackroyd and the Usual Suspects, still emerged from nowhere. Two of the hooligans interviewed earlier – one Millwall, the other Manchester United – were revealed to be undercover coppers. Neat. All this embedding, eh?
Part two airs next Monday. Should you reckon it’s your kind of thing, don’t miss it.
Admirers of the work of Martin Scorsese may find something of resonance in the following story.
Back in the mid-1930s an aspiring young shortstop called Phil Rizzuto who measured all of 5’5 went for a tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers manager wasn’t having any of it.
“Son,” he said, “you can stay and watch the game but after that you’d better run home and get a shoeshine box.”
Unlike Joe Pesci, who many years later would respond to a similar suggestion with extreme violence, Rizzuto didn’t lose his cool. He kept plugging away and ended up a much-garlanded New York Yankee.
When Rizzuto was in his pomp, as the American sportswriter Mike Vaccaro has pointed out, only three sports mattered there. Baseball was top of the pops by a mile, followed by boxing – Joe Louis was simultaneously in his pomp – and horse racing.
American football? A college game, and few people went to college. Basketball? Minor-league stuff. Golf? A rich man’s sport. Soccer? And then, around the same time that boxing became the victim of its own venality, television discovered that basketball, golf and gridiron were sports made for the small screen. Upon which, a generation before soccer in England, American sport did indeed change forever.
Apropos of yer man who told Pesci to go get his shine box, he - like Rizzuto - didn’t do too badly afterwards either. He picked himself off the studio floor once the cameras stopped rolling, materialised a decade later in the as the great Phil Leotardo and even parlayed the latter role into, of all things, an ad here for Permanent TSB.
It’s hard to keep a good (made) man down.
: Now a two-time PGA Tour winner, with his victory in Bermuda largely the result, he declared, of last year’s breakthrough in Kentucky. Success breeds success. Who knew?
Trained by the Shark. American Grand National hero. Stalwart customer of Bagenalstown hostelries. Next stop the Gold Cup at Cheltenham.
Doing their best to market their idyllic coastline and alleged rich foodie culture, only to find their online presence is “being completely suffocated” by the similarity to the name of some Manchester City employee or other.
: Trailing 3-2 after losing to only the second no-hitter in World Series history. Mmm, imagine that! (It’s okay. I haven’t the foggiest either.)
