Iron will but no sporting hero

Two years ago, Sam Allardyce, now manager of West Ham, felt the need to get something off his chest.

He didn’t hold back when he did so. “Since Margaret Thatcher stopped teachers being paid extra money for coaching sports after school, all sporting activities have diminished on a competitive basis,” Allardyce told The Sun. “It has not just undermined our game, it has undermined many sports in this country and created an unhealthy child. Thatcher killed football, there is no doubt about it.”

Thatcher died yesterday, at the age of 87.

Spare yourself the adjective “divisive”, because there seems to be near unanimity when it comes to the former British Prime Minister’s legacy across the water. “Toxic” would be a kind description.

Expect plenty of mentions for the miners’ strike, deregulation in the name of free trade, and the Falklands War in the next week or so.

But sport?

Allardyce’s outburst sums up a widely-held perception in Britain of the woman who once said “there is no such thing as society”, and her attitude to soccer could be taken as emblematic of her approach to sport overall.

For much of the 80s, hooliganism at games in the old First Division was an ongoing problem in England, and Thatcher’s answer was to propose ID cards for supporters, an initiative rejected out of hand by almost everyone apart from Luton Town (whose chairman was a Conservative MP, like Thatcher).

That wasn’t the only area of sport that suffered while Thatcher was British Prime Minister. Historian Kevin Jeffreys has pointed out that her “hands-off” approach to sport and education led to a staggering 5,000 school playing fields being sold off during her tenure, which clearly did little to make sporting opportunities available to young people.

Conservative MPs also questioned the need for a sports council or minister for sport while she was prime minister, and she was strongly in favour of boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest against Russia invading Afghanistan.

“Without the Americans and West Germans and the other sporting countries who have also decided to stay away, the Games will not be worthy of the name Olympics, and medals won at Moscow will be of inferior worth and the ceremonies a charade,” she wrote to the head of the British Olympic Association.

We omitted one item from the word-association list above, of course: the hunger strikes of 1981.

When Thatcher refused to negotiate with IRA prisoners seeking political status, some of them went on hunger strike, and 10 men died as a result.

It was a hugely emotive time, with Bobby Sands being elected MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone before dying, and there were protests supporting the hunger strikers all over the country.

For the GAA, it was a particularly difficult period: there were protests at many county grounds in support of Sands and the other hunger strikers, and a sizeable constituency within the organisation wanted the GAA to offer more support to the men in Long Kesh. When Sands became a political candidate, the GAA was able to point to its apolitical stance and distance itself from the issue, but it hasn’t lost its power to polarise opinion. In 2006, a jersey commemorating the 25th anniversary of the hunger strikes was launched by Gerry Adams and several Antrim GAA players only for the GAA to reiterate its apolitical stance.

Much of the visceral resentment towards Thatcher in Ireland dates from this period (exacerbated by subsequent revelations that contrary to her braying intransigence for the benefit of the Tory shires, her government promised concessions to the prisoners if they called their hunger strikes off).

In contrast to her, Thatcher’s husband Denis was a keen sportsman: a golfer and cricketer, he spent 13 years as a rugby referee, once acting as touch judge for an international game.

In one of his few ventures into the public arena, in 1979 he strongly supported the proposed Lions tour of South Africa, where the apartheid system was then at its height.

As an illustration of the change in political climate across the water since Thatcher’s time, consider the fact that Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron not only support sport generally, unlike her, but are almost required to support football teams (Newcastle United, Raith Rovers and Aston Villa, respectively) as an indicator of their normality.

A big change from the time their predecessor called for ID cards for all supporters.