Search the Community

And Sami unhappy! What's going on with these guys? DANIEL AGGER KOP MISERY | Sport|Football | News Of The World

& Paul Nixon. The 80s in perspective December 29 1989 | Football | The Guardian The 80s in perspective December 29 1989David Lacey looks back on a decayed 10 years of portent, smugness and tragedy David Lacey The Guardian, Monday July 15 2002 Article history The Eighties have asked more questions about the right of professional football to exist as a mass spectator sport than any other decade. This is because 10 years that have brought the game Maradona, Gullit and Barnes, the enduring excellence of Liverpool and the resurgence of Arsenal, have also produced Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough. Football will remember the Eighties as the decade when the fans died. The last 10 years have seen fundamental changes in the way the English game is run and watched, if not the manner in which most of it is played, but the fact that so many spectators have been killed in such avoidable circumstances makes this the most sorrowful, shameful period in soccer history. A lot of the old assumptions have evaporated. The game has fallen so low in public esteem that the Government can force spectators to carry identity cards without considering the scheme a political risk, the very opposite in fact. A decade which began with one footballer, Charlie George, fined in a magistrates' court for assaulting a press photographer during a game has demonstrated that players are not above the law even when their misconduct occurs within the confines of a match. The FA, moreover, is now ready to hold directors and managers responsible for the conduct of their teams. In the Eighties English football, denuded of all but a few stars, reached out for TV satellites instead. In order to woo the corporate entertainers it installed luxurious executive boxes at many grounds and left the true fans out in the cold. In the Eighties televised football went live and sponsorship took off - first the League-Milk-Littlewoods Cup, then the Canon-Today-Barclays Football League. But hundreds of spectators went dead - 56 burned at Bradford City, 39 killed at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels when a wall collapsed as Juventus supporters fled from Liverpool fans, and 95 crushed at Hillsborough in a hooligan-proof death trap. The tragedies of the Eighties were by no means confined to England or games involving English clubs. Earlier this year the Soviet Union revealed the full extent of the incident which occurred at the Lenin Stadium in 1982 when 340 people were killed during a Uefa Cup match between Moscow Spartak and the Dutch club Haarlem. In a terrible re-enactment of the 1971 Ibrox disaster, departing fans turned back when Spartak scored in the last minute and the victims died in the ensuing crush. Today's Ibrox stadium, the only major club ground in Britain which fully meets modern requirements of safety and comfort, is the result of Rangers realising their responsibilities to spectators and having the means to put their ideas into practice. It is another indictment of the English game that the country cannot entertain serious thoughts of staging another World Cup because there is no stadium, until Wembley completes its all-seater transformation, which meets Fifa standards. Lord Justice Taylor's interim report on Hillsborough was for the most part a damning indictment of the police who were on duty that day. His full report, due in the New Year, will go much further and should provide English football with a working document about how it should conduct itself going into the next century. Since the inertia, the narrowness of vision and smug introspection which led to Bradford and Hillsborough had their roots in the last century, this would be no small step forward. Yet English football is notorious for ignoring sound advice. Early in the decade a second Chester report reiterated the call of the first for the League to be restructured and rationalised, but the only idea that won immediate approval was for clubs to keep their own gate receipts, thus ensuring that the rich few became richer while the less well-off majority had to tag along and be grateful for their reduced share of an expanding cake of TV fees and sponsorship money. The league has yet to be reorganised in the Chester image. The First Division has been reduced by two clubs and the Second enlarged by the same number. In the case of the First Division this was always going to be a meaningless cosmetic unless the gaps in the fixture list were filled by something more significant than the Zenith Data Systems Cup. Reducing the size of the First Division and then playing the sort of TV-oriented junk matches in which Arsenal and Rangers were involved recently can only demean the game. Football is receiving more money from television than ever before but the arrangement is already betraying Faustian undertones. Seven years after regularly going "live", the League finds itself tossed this way and that by the commercial whims of the TV companies. So much so that one of the top fixtures of the season, Liverpool against Manchester United, is not only wrenched from a natural spot in the fixture list on a Saturday in September and shoved in two days before Christmas but broadcast as a delayed transmission so as not to disturb Saint and Greavsie and the rest of the twaddle. Why all the fuss about going live if TV is prepared to treat the game in such cavalier fashion? At this most critical period in soccer's history the pace should be set by men of vision rather than men of television. Yet despite the setbacks the game's appeal has endured. Between 1980 and 1986 annual League attendances fell by more than eight million. Now they are back towards 20 million. This is a paradox, since the spectacle has if anything deteriorated. Liverpool, Arsenal, Everton, Spurs, Nottingham Forest and Norwich have enhanced the Eighties in their various ways but overall it has been a decade of declining playing standards with a poverty of innovative styles. For the First Division, the decade hinged on Heysel and the subsequent Uefa ban. This not only cut off a valuable source of income but denied players important experience in Europe which may have depressing consequences in next summer's World Cup. The better League players have gone abroad to get that experience, as well as the sort of money they could not hope to earn even with the wealthiest clubs here. The better foreign players, moreover, are less inclined to play in little England. A decade which began with Ardiles and Villa, Muhren and Thijssen enriching the League programme is ending with a less exotic assortment of Scandinavians, Icelanders and the odd Ukrainian. As a result, much of English football has remained tactically sterile. In Italy next summer England will hope to achieve success through a system which belongs to the Sixties rather than the Nineties. Three points for a win has produced more positive play by away teams, more interesting League tables, but not better football. The League is lead-based with a gold tip. Muscular power and athleticism are being employed to disguise the shortcomings of touch and the sort of mental agility that the Dutch, the French and the Danes have brought to the game during the decade. Yet an Eighties cast-list for English football is hardly lacking in colour or variety: Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa, Robert Maxwell and Elton John, Ken Bates and Vinny Jones, Graham Taylor and Terry Venables, Bobby Robson and his Spitting Image, Bryan Robson and his breaks and strains, Saint and Greavesie, John Barnes, Kenny Dalglish, George Graham, Kevin Moran, the first man sent off in a FA Cup final, and Brian Clough, the first manager to deal personally with invading fans. There were also the Roxbys, Irene and Norman, Middlesbrough season-ticket holders who died outside Ayresome Park in January 1980 when a pillar and gate fell on them as they were leaving the ground. Middlesbrough did not have a safety certificate but the club said this was a mere detail because all the requirements on safety had been met and more besides. Some eye-witnesses accused visiting Manchester United supporters of rushing the gate at the end of the game, but United fans said the surge had been caused by an excited police horse. The decade was only 12 days old when this tragedy occurred. As we now know, the Eighties remembered all the excuses but ignored the portents. The Roxbys were the first of the many.