Silver Linings

David Hartrick

Description

Silver Linings examines an historic and unforgettable period in the history of England's national football team. In his eight years as England boss, Bobby Robson was celebrated, derided, Diego-ed, and everything in between. His team missed one European Championship, self-destructed at another, were cheated out of Mexico 86, and then, just before he left, came within two kicks of a World Cup final. On this journey he had managed the good, the bad and sometimes the ugly. But through it all he maintained his belief not only in himself and his team, but in the notion of England. Faced with an unprecedented level of media hostility, Robson's team were inconsistent and frustrating, but at their best few could match them. Alf Ramsey may have won football's greatest prize in 1966 but no other England manager could equal the sheer drama of Robson's eight years in charge. Set against the backdrop of a vicious newspaper circulation war and the rise of hooliganism, this is the story of how Robson managed to deliver the seemingly impossible: hope.

Sujets

• Inglaterra
• England

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 07 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785319471
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
David Hartrick, 2021
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Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785317811
eBook ISBN 9781785319471
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Contents
Foreword
Prologue
1. Before
2. 1982
3. 1983
4. 1984
5. 1985
6. 1986
7. 1987
8. 1988
9. 1989
10. 1990
11. After
Acknowledgements
Bibliography and References
Photos
To Seb.
Maybe next time Gazza will score.
FOREWORD
by Daniel Storey, football writer and broadcaster
ITALIA 90 produced my first football memories. Perhaps that makes me incredibly fortunate. As a four-year-old who was still a year away from my first season ticket but was already consuming football VHS tapes and watching Match of the Day at least three times every week, I was a willing test case. Never before had I enjoyed multiple live matches every day, nor even considered that it might be a possibility. Nor had I experienced football as a global entity, a festival of sport.
The brilliant aspect of establishing a love for football - for anything - at such a young age is that you latch on to the best bits without feeling the need to focus on anything that might not fit your enthusiasm. Innocence and inexperience allowed me to consume football without context. Hindsight and the passing of time provokes a series of glorious, blurry half-memories. As a Nottingham Forest supporter I was devastated by Stuart Pearce s penalty miss and England s exit, but it didn t wrap my enjoyment in a thick smog. How could it when there were two more matches to come?
But the context of England s achievement did matter. It provides the backdrop for, and backbone of, David Hartrick s book. He places Italia 90, the book s crescendo, in the extraordinary circumstances that led to its unlikely reputation as English football s Age of Enlightenment.
The 1980s was the darkest decade for our national sport, and David provides exemplary detail and discussion of hooliganism, the circulation war that provoked visceral newspaper criticism, the damaged reputation of English football and English football supporters and the public discontentment and national anger that led to it. Our footballing landscape had become synonymous with tragedy and disorganisation, our clubs were banned from European competition and the national team s support was viewed as a cast of unsavoury, unpleasant yobs.
If Italia 90 marked a sea change in the globalisation of football, perhaps the best marker of the game entering the modern age, it was also a landmark tournament for England s national team. From the media diatribe and back-page scorn of the 1980s came hope of a new England team, one that could rise up to meet the challenges and pressures of a major tournament rather than crumple under them. The glorious summer of 1966 would never, and will never, be forgotten, but in terms of a lasting legacy and the weaving of individual storylines Italia 90 really did match up.
Bobby Robson is the protagonist of Hartrick s book, England s manager for eight years in the 1980s and a coach who constructed his own legacy at that World Cup. Robson s treatment at the hands of the tabloid media is examined in faultless detail. His struggle to establish England as a serious contender, through European Championship failure and World Cup infamy in 1986, passes comment on English football as a whole and Hartrick balances the micro and macro elements of the story expertly.
Robson s crowning glory, taking England to within two spot kicks of a second World Cup Final, is framed as a testament to the enduring optimism of the manager but also the eternal warmth, generosity and kindness of the man. There is a persuasive argument that no England manager has ever got more out of his players than Robson. From the penalty-box prowess of Gary Lineker, the natural aptitude of John Barnes and Chris Waddle, to the stereotypically English courage and passion of Pearce and Terry Butcher and the unique fragility of Paul Gascoigne, Robson proved himself capable of man-management through genuine friendship.
I have known David for a decade and am comfortable in asserting that I can think of no person better placed to document this period of English football. He is a devotee both of the England national team and the research required to detail its journey through such turbulent waters. He is unafraid to criticise - where appropriate - English football s structure, hierarchy, the behaviour of supporters and the fear that once seemed to engulf the England team when it mattered most. Hartrick does not avoid scrutiny of the mistakes and the missteps.
But this is not purely a tale of woe, even if there are times during the book where hope feels like another country s property. Without Mark Wright s winner, David Platt s volley and Lineker s penalties it surely would have been just another effigy to England failure. But Hartrick frames the stumbles, the roadblocks and the failures in the context of what we know the book s denouement will bring: glorious public salvation and that open-top bus tour of Luton during which every player was adored as a hero rather than lambasted as a statue to continued non-fulfilment of potential.
ID cards, perimeter fencing, segregation, Diego Maradona, Allan Simonsen, Ray Houghton, Margaret Thatcher - these could so easily have been the defining actors of England in the 1980s. But as the title alludes to, Silver Linings offers due recognition to them all while making a persuasive and illuminating argument that it was Robson who stepped forward as the defining individual and Gascoigne as a portent for the future, for better and occasionally - and infamously - worse.
PROLOGUE
Sunday, 8 July 1990
IT WAS never supposed to end like this. There should have been apologies and furtive looks to camera. A background of grey skies was meant to meet the hunched shoulders and bowed heads walking solemnly down a set of aircraft steps. A hundred newspaper columns were written and ready, each singing a joint chorus of I Told You So and Same Old England in perfect harmony.
Yet, here on the pavements, streets, walls and roofs of Luton on a beautifully sunny day, the scene could not have been more different. This team - boring, poorly managed, not good enough according to the tabloids - had found a way to tear up the script and write themselves a new one. In the process they had taken a nation with them and delivered something no one had seen in English football for a long time: hope.
Hope in a time of hooligans, fences and barbed wire. Hope in a time of ID cards, the Football Spectators Act and Maggie s war cabinet . English football, a landscape awash with tragedy and disarray for over a decade, suddenly looked like it may yet be able to save itself from itself. The masses had fallen in love again and the streets of Luton were testament. The people had false idols again.
Somewhere in the ever-churning sea of red and white an open-top bus crawled along an inch at a time. The authorities had taken measures for an expected crowd of somewhere around 100,000 believing, in truth, that doing so was more than over-preparing. In reality, most reports put the figure at well over 250,000, some as high as half a million. The police crash barriers that had lined the prepared route provided the perfect way to fashion a ladder to take you to the top of the nearest wall or bus shelter. Every surface of the town centre had been ruthlessly appropriated by a crowd desperate for a glimpse of their new heroes, the stars of England s footballing summer.
Most of that cast was either drunk or on their way to being so, with a few exceptions. They took turns to appear at the front of the bus, a rapidly repurposed London sightseeing vehicle in daily life now reduced to tip-toeing through the masses. Chris Waddle and Stuart Pearce started the journey sitting down, believing they would be heckled for missing those penalties as others were lauded. They realised just a few metres in they were not only forgiven but being demanded to wave and take the thrown scarves and hats alongside everyone else. Mass euphoria through glorious defeat.
And, of course, leading the crowd was the now beloved Paul Gascoigne. Gazza. Court jester turned national hero. His tears had typified everything the fans wanted to believe about this England, their England again. That the players cared as much as they did. That in Gazza they had someone on the pitch who was one of them, a lad who if he hadn t been playing would have been stood on a terrace somewhere singing at their side. The fact he was obscenely talented was merely the icing on the cake.
Not on the bus, however, was the man who had masterminded England s ascent through the 1990 World Cup which had just ignited the nation. A man who had endured the most venomous tabloid coverage any football figure had ever received and for a period of years rather than some mere passing storm. Bobby Robson, no longer England manager and bound for PSV Eindhoven - a job he had agreed to take before Italia 90 had begun - would have rivalled Gazza for some of