Seoul Glow

Rod Gilmour

Description

Seoul Glow tells the story of the Great Britain men's hockey team who won gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Little to the team's knowledge, the final caught the British public's imagination as they beat rivals West Germany in the gold-medal match. After Sean Kerly's semi-final heroics and Imran Sherwani's double in the final, BBC commentator Barry Davies uttered the now infamous line: 'Where were the Germans? But, frankly, who cares?' Victory, for a team of amateurs, who had either quit their jobs or taken holiday to play in Seoul, propelled the team to celebratory heights on their return to British shores; it was GB's first hockey gold in the post-war era and followed an eight-year plan for a major title. The story also reveals how the team was inspirationally led by the late Roger Self, the manager who gelled his players into Olympic title holders.

Sujets

• Reino Unido
• History of sport
• United Kingdom
• South Korea
• Field hockey
• Great Britain
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 31 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785314681
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2018
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Rod Gilmour, 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978-1-78531-431-5
eBook ISBN 978-1-78531-468-1
---
Ebook Conversion by www.eBookPartnership.com
Contents
Foreword
Prologue
Introduction
1. A test of fitness and character
2. You re all losers ... now get on the bus
3. Here s Self motivation, the hard way
4. Don t drop your rifles, boys
5. Part-timers play the professional game
6. Where were the Germans?
7. So, where do we go from here?
Epilogue: The Coach s Voice
The 1988 Olympic squad
Acknowledgements
Seoul results
Bibliography
Foreword
I T was a very special sporting triumph. 1 October 1988. Thirty years ago.
It was a day I have enjoyed more than any other. To those who watched it, whether in Seoul or on television, it will now flood back to life from the pages of this book. For the uninformed, it is a rattling good tale to read.
The story is told through the thoughts of the 16 players and their coach and their memories of the manager who drove them to become Olympic champions.
At the start, and maybe a little further, he sowed questions in the minds of the amateur officialdom who ran the game of hockey.
But at no stage did he stop demanding answers from the amateur players whom he drove to become world-beaters.
Rod Gilmour puts the ultimate achievement in true perspective with an opening chapter which gives a potted history of Great Britain hockey and where the game was when the Olympic journey began; the home countries divided and with a clear failure to keep up with the pace being set by those beyond our shores.
And then there was the false start, with hockey being one of the sports which bowed to the government s wish to support the futile boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Russia.
From that point, despite the fact that most of his readers will know there is to be a happy, not to say delirious ending, the author manages to maintain a thread of excitement on a journey which for some lasted more than eight years.
With the painstaking introduction of the competing players he helps the reader to feel their growing hopes and their apprehensions. All have plenty to say and all have opinions of the man without whom there would probably have been no tale to tell.
Barry Davies, MBE
Prologue
I REMEMBER watching the Olympic hockey final at Seoul 1988 as a 10-year-old. Details are sketchy, but it could have been on a black and white television. I remember lying on the kitchen bench at home. Perhaps those of a certain age can only keep the small details which so many still remember today. After all, those in Britain had to wake up at 6am to watch the final unfold.
If you are unfamiliar with the story which left Great Britain s hockey players as front page news in October 1988, Seoul Glow is an attempt to delve deeper into one of the great stories of British team sport - and before the women s team achieved the same in Rio 28 years later.
For those who do remember Seoul? Well, Kerly, Sherwani and Where were the Germans? seem to be three popular reminders at the forefront. The two players, as the goalscorers, were the ones who were thrust into the public consciousness, while Barry Davies s famous phrase on the BBC television coverage remains a classic commentary moment in sport.
But what of the 14 other players, with a miscellany of full-time jobs, who made their mark in Seoul? Their stories are recounted here, where the backbone of the story began to unravel as I tracked down the Olympians of yore.
I also knew that Roger Self was to play a vital part in the journey: his modus operandi forming an uncompromising approach to management, while his pugnacious, nononsense style would certainly be frowned upon in today s modern coaching era.
A love-hate relationship with the players ensued through to 1988. His primary aim was to gel his parttime players with the pressure-cooker environment of international hockey. He did so in the face of a hockey association lacking clarity or vision on finding success for Great Britain, and whose officials were seemingly against playing in tournaments which offered prizes or cups . It was all very amateur.
The 1980s was also a period of change in the sport. As Sean Kerly, the star forward of the time, has reflected: When I started there was offside at the half-way line, hand stops from 12 yards at short and long corners, goalkeepers wore cricket pads and small kickers, all-weather pitches were red shale, sticks were bendy and made of wood, oranges were served at half-time, no turning, you had to play for 70 minutes, replace divots after the match and have a shower to wash the mud off your legs.
When I finished you could shield the ball, there was no offside, pitches were made of plastic, sticks were made of carbon fibre, goalkeepers wore full body armour, teams had psychologists, short corners were stick-stopped outside the circle and backhand shots were allowed.
For Seoul, these were the days of the offside law and little protection. The hard-hitting strikes we see today at penalty corners were in plentiful evidence 30 years ago, and the runners from the line didn t have masks, boxes or mouth guards. West Germany s Carsten Fischer, a corner exponent with an irrepressible shot, was once timed at 143mph. Standing in his way were hardened defenders, with the scars and the wounds still recalled and on show today.
The Seoul Olympics had deep wounds of its own on 27 September 1988, the world of sport rocked by the news of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson s fall from grace after his drug test failure.
Three days later, hope for honest sport was restored in glistening style.
In an era when national newspapers had hockey correspondents, a visit to the archive at the British Library proved a fruitful experience. Back then, Chris Moore, Sydney Friskin, Bill Colwill and Pat Rowley covered the game with column space aplenty in the broadsheet newspapers and through the domestic and international season.
During Seoul, Great Britain s matches were all covered, while newspapers sports correspondents also provided colourful copy to go alongside the match reports. It is largely thanks to these reports that a picture was being painted for the British public of the part-timers rise from their Cinderella job at Los Angeles ahead of their moment in the Seoul sun on 1 October 1988.
Nowadays, the scenario is vastly different. General sports coverage has dwindled substantially over the last decade. At the Rio 2016 Olympics, there was paltry coverage of the GB women s path to the final against the Netherlands. For three of the group games, I was the only British hack watching.
The environment changed drastically for the final, of course - so much so that the Daily Mail had three correspondents covering the gold-medal match.
In trying to match the Seoul squad s hatful of anecdotes, the Rio experience did bring out one classic, which is still related at dinner parties by the correspondent in question.
The Friday night deadline times of the Rio final meant that, in some cases, copy had to be filed before the end of the final for early editions.
For the man from the Daily Mail, this was going to prove problematic. Not only was the final just the second hockey match he had ever covered, but he also had to produce player ratings for the final, a task more associated with the bigger sports like football, rugby and cricket. A hockey first, that s for sure.
With the women s side looking down and out and silver on the cards behind the all-conquering Dutch, GB women s coach Danny Kerry received only 5/10 for the first edition, with the words: Content to let his team sit back and absorb pressure. Dangerous against such strong opposition. By the end of a glorious night, Kerry had been marked up considerably, while said correspondent had added ... but a stunning win .
One can only wonder what Self would have made of player ratings 30 years ago and the intense stare he might have offered reporters. I d expect that his laissez-faire attitude to such trivial matters meant the ratings would not have bothered him one bit. His coach s marking in Seoul would no doubt have been a 10 .
In his obituary following his death on 5 June 2017, The Times highlighted that following the Seoul success the players forgave him for the pain he had inflicted. The training regime overseen by a man rarely inhibited by sensitivity had been both unorthodox and unyielding - but it worked.
Hockey s lack of prima donnas means that there are few concessions to flamboyance in the sport, barring the outlandish skills being offered on the pitch. Back in 1988, Self, who always kept out of the spotlight, made sure his players also never became egocentrics individually on the pitch.
However, it is his forthright views on how the game should be run which ultimately changed the complexion of Great Britain hockey and how it has borne fruits today.
His work is unheralded. British sport in the 1980s saw Torvill and Dean, Bob Champion triumphing over cancer to win the Grand National, Ian Botham s Ashes, Liverpool s hour in Rome, Daley Thompson s decathlon gold, Desert Orchid s Gold Cup victory and Barry McGuigan s featherweight heroics. GB hockey s 1988 gold i