When the Seagulls Follow the Trawler

Tom Whitworth

Description

English football changed in the 1990s. For better, for worse - but mainly for better. The shirts and shorts got baggier and brighter. Exotic-named players were enticed from overseas. New stadiums were built in the wake of the Taylor Report. The Premier League emerged and England hosted its first international tournament since 1966. The era of 'New Labour' and 'Cool Britannia', it was also the decade English football went mainstream. When the Seagulls Follow the Trawler author Tom Whitworth travelled to English football's hotbeds - the cities of London, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle - to meet the people who lived through an era of change: the players and the managers, the owners and the fans. He looks back at key moments, the teams, the title races, the twists and turns, the characters and the rivalries. All from a decade when English football began to shrug off its bad-lad image - at least off the pitch - and move out of the darkness and into the light.

Sujets

• Inglaterra
• England

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 08 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785319075
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Tom Whitworth, 2021
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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 9781785317613
eBook ISBN 9781785319075
---
eBook Conversion by www.eBookPartnership.com
Contents
Prologue: There We Were
1. In Manchester - Part I
2. Dancing in the Streets
3. Our Friends in the North
4. A Stadium for the 90s
5. Football s Coming Home
6. The Flickering Flame
7. Revolution
8. In Manchester - Part II
Epilogue: Here We Are
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Prologue
There We Were
THEY SAY you shouldn t look back. That to dwell on the past for too long does you no good. Always move forward. Reflect, then move on. But remember the 90s?
In Britain it was a decade of optimism and change, vibrancy and brightness, opportunity and emergence. A new way forward after the slog of the Margaret Thatcher 80s. It as when people listened to the Britpop bands like Oasis and voted into power Tony Blair s New Labour project. When they built the Channel Tunnel and made TV programmes like The Fast Show . When people drank those little cartons of Capri-Sun and Chris Evans, Gaby Roslin, and Zig and Zag started off your day on The Big Breakfast . It was when Ewan McGregor s Renton character ran around Edinburgh to an Iggy Pop tune in Danny Boyle s 1996 film Trainspotting , declaring Choose life Choose a career Choose a fucking big television. And when they put up those traffic-stopping Hello Boys Wonderbra billboards. So here s to looking back.
In the important world of football, changes were coming along too as the game moved into its own brighter future, away from the volatility and danger of the 70s and 80s to a new era of sanitised supporter experience and inclusivity. The 1990s - the decade when football emerged from its slumber, progressed and took its place in the mainstream of popular British culture.
On the pitch there would be tactical evolution as teams caught up with their European neighbours. The number of players and managers brought in from abroad would increase every year and there would be the shift from widespread booze culture to a more continental temperance approach, with pasta. On the muddying and bobbly playing surfaces, memorable moments were plentiful and goals would be scored by Robbie Fowler, Matt Le Tissier, Dennis Bergkamp, Roberto Baggio and, in off the crossbar, Tony Yeboah. The birth of the new Premier League, with the It s a whole new ball game Sky Sports advert, would lead to a bonanza of ever-spiralling transfer fees and player wages. Satellite television would beam the games into the pubs and living rooms of the fans. The standing terraces would make way for all-seater stands and many would be priced out of the newly transformed grounds.
The players even looked different. As one friend pointed out to me, the 1980s footballer seemed to have black hair and a moustache and wore short shorts. By the 90s the moustaches would mostly be gone and the kits would be baggier, featuring bolder and brasher shades and patterns. Plastered across them would be the club sponsors: mobile-phone networks, electronics manufacturers and lager brands.
The 1990s - when the game and its image moved out of the dark and into the light. When its image shifted from black and white to colour. Football s very own transition from Old to New .
I grew up in the 90s so it was my decade of footballing enlightenment, when I d been taken along to the matches and had seen for the first time the vast green expanse of the pitches. I had watched and listened to the fans in the stands singing and shouting, and heard the swearing blokes around me. I had my first kits bought for me, home and away (thanks Mum and Dad), and collected Merlin Premier League stickers - my swaps kept together by an elastic band for trading at school. I played Championship Manager on the family PC for far too many hours and for a few seasons was able to learn the name of nearly every Premier League player, along with the position they played. I watched the build-up to the FA Cup Finals that began hours before kick-off, recording them on our VHS player and neatly labelling them with the stickers those blank Scotch tapes came with. Until we got Sky Sports in our house, I d walk round excitedly to friends homes to watch the games.
Back in 1992, my club Sheffield Wednesday were founder members of the Premier League. But by the year 2000 they would be relegated from it. A few years ago I wrote a book called Owls , about their decline and subsequent wilderness. I opened some doors, spoke to many people and learned a lot about my club. Then I put down the words, 70,000 or so. Today as I type, 20 years and counting since Wednesday s drop from the top division, any kind of return for them seems a fair way off. The emergence of the Premier League and the revolutions that came to the game through the 90s seemed to take place away from my club as they drifted. As football transitioned from Old to New , Wednesday did not.
What, then, happened to football around the rest of the country during this time? What changed and where did it happen? Who lived through it and what did they experience? I decided to get out there and talk to the fans and the players, the owners and the managers who were there. I d go to the towns and the cities that their clubs call home: Manchester, Newcastle and Huddersfield; Liverpool and north London. Following the narrative of a football year, the 2017/18 football season, I d visit the stadiums, sit in pubs and cafes, read the books and watch the old footage. I d let the Dictaphone run and run, unpick the past then write it up.
* * * *
For many people in Britain, the 1980s had been a decade of political and social bleakness. A time when things seemed broken and wrong. 1979 had seen Thatcher s election as Conservative Prime Minister and what followed under her leadership proved catastrophic to the lives and livelihoods of millions of people up and down the country. The union movement was crushed, the industries and communities that were built around them decimated, unemployment reached three million. Still, the Iron Lady was re-elected in 1983 and again in 1987 to prolong her controversial reign.
In football, meanwhile, it had been a time of violence, tragedy and decline during which the image of the nation s game lay firmly in the gutter. Despite the achievements of Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa and Liverpool on the European stage (from 1977-82 they won the European Cup every season, three times in Liverpool s case and twice in Forest s), football had big problems. By the 1985/86 season, total Football League attendances had dipped to the lowest on record at 16.4 million (the previous decade the figure had been around ten million higher). Hooliganism was widespread and out of control. In 1985 Luton and Millwall rioted at Kenilworth Road, while in the Midlands one fan had died as Birmingham City and Leeds United hooligans clashed violently at St Andrew s. The grounds were crumbling and in some cases were tragically unsafe. As one damning piece in the Sunday Times would comment around the time, football was a slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people .
May 1985 had seen a fire blaze through an old wooden stand at Bradford City s Valley Parade ground that killed 56 people. Years of debris that had accumulated underneath the stand had caught alight and it had taken only minutes for the fire to rage through. That same month at the dilapidated Heysel Stadium in Brussels, 39 Juventus supporters were killed before the European Cup Final against Liverpool after a wall collapsed following a rush from the Liverpool section. After Heysel, all English clubs were banned from European competition for five years and Liverpool for six.
Then came the darkest day, in 1989, at an FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield, which resulted in 96 football fans losing their lives after they themselves were crushed in the dangerous and overcrowded pens of Hillsborough s Leppings Lane terrace. In the shameful aftermath, the Liverpool supporters were falsely accused of being drunken, ticketless hooligans who were responsible for the disaster. The findings of a subsequent two-year inquest into the disaster laid out the reality, however: culpability lay in the hands of the South Yorkshire Police, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club and Sheffield City Council.
The game was plumbing the depths and things had to change. In 1990, the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the FIFA World Cup took place in Italy (the country that was home to the best football league in the world, Serie A). Italy had the most money, much of which came from wealthy benefactor owners like Silvio Berlusconi of AC Milan and the Agnelli family of Juventus. It had the most astute coaches, like Giovanni Trapattoni at Inter and Arrigo Sacchi at AC Milan, plus the world s greatest players - an eclectic mix of technically gifted Italians and expensively imported overseas stars: Roberto Baggio, Franco Baresi, Roberto Mancini and Gianluca Vialli, Diego Maradona, Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and Marco van B