As the tributes to Pele poured in last week, it was hard for anyone of a certain age not to look back to 1970 and all that. I was buying an off-cut in a local carpet warehouse and got talking to the owner about the great man and football more generally in the 1970s. He waxed lyrical about The Big Match, the Leeds team under Don Revie and giants of the game like Jimmy Johnstone and Norman Hunter. And I’m always happy to talk football to anyone. It’s one of life’s great conversational tools when meeting strangers.
It’s easy to be nostalgic about the game. Everyone does it. It doesn’t matter what age you are, there is always a period in your life that stands out as, at least superficially, being superior to now.
But the mind plays tricks. The instinct is to remember the good and forget an awful lot of bad and a life lived looking backwards stifles the future. Brexit has taught us that. But we need a good knowledge of history against which to judge the present in order to invent the future.
When I wrote a book about this called ‘Was Football Better In The Old Days? Or Is Now Better Than Back Then?’ I looked objectively at all periods of the game to overcome both blind nostalgia and what Daniel Storey once coined for me as ‘hindshite’ – the notion that the future is always better than the past, which is just as crippling a condition to suffer from, intolerant as it is, of any challenge to the orthodoxy that modern is always best. The denials involved in asserting that as a truth require the same levels of delusion as nostalgia.
My conclusion in that book was that while some things were worse, and some things better, actually football’s attractions remain pretty constant down the decades, especially once you go down the pyramid. Yes, having cruel, murderous autocratic regimes owning and funding clubs is objectively much, much worse than anything we have seen before in football, but that is just a disease that infects one small part of the football body. If you find that gangrenous infection too much to bear, there is other football to be watched, football that will deliver the joy, misery, entertainment and boredom you crave.
When I see Greenock Morton playing on a cold wet Friday night in the Scottish Championship, that is the football of my past, present and future. The manager doesn’t stare like Bambi caught in the headlights when asked how many people the club’s owners have put to death this weekend. Direct football is not…
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