The 40th post on my 40th birthday and a look back at the state of the football world into which I was born. A simpler time I’m sure. Very few major events seem to have occured that year in Ireland, in the south at least. Jack Lynch was in charge. Unemployment in the Republic was just over 8% and rising sharply with around 20% of workers engaged in farming. There were only 35,000 people were in 3rd level education – UCD alone has around 25,000 today. So 1978 wasn’t exactly a year of excitement or joy for Ireland generally. It would be a whole year before the Papal visit dragged a million to the Park and spawned a generation of John-Pauls. It also was 8 years on from Dana’s Eurovision win and another 2 years out from Johnny Logan’s “What’s Another Year?”. Another year without a Eurovision title back then was a feckin’ eternity. And sure no-one had even heard of U2, Where in the World, Andrea Corr, Roddy Doyle, Ted Crilly, Glenroe, Zig or Zag. A grim, grim time indeed.
Football-wise this was the era of John Giles as Ireland player-manager. Having turned the fortunes around somewhat since taking over in 1973, this formerly ramshackle shambles of a national team was taken a bit more seriously by 1978. Unfortunately, the qualification campaign for that year’s World Cup went quite badly, ending with Ireland bottom of a 3-team group behind France and Bulgaria, scoring only twice in the 4 games. The home victory over France provided the only highlight, and more importantly also provided evidence that we were capable of something on our day.
So we sat out the summer of 1978 while Argentina and Mario Kempes lifted the FIFA World Cup. When I think of that World Cup, I think of 3 things – ticker-tape, the magic of Archie Gemmill and then, obviously, Trainspotting…
The Irish campaign for the 1980 European Championships started ok in 1978. A 3-3 draw in Copenhagen was played out in May – just before the World Cup oddly enough – before a 0-0 draw with Northern Ireland in Dublin and 1-1 draw at home to England meant we were still in the group at years end. Then the campaign fell apart with defeats away to Bulgaria, England and Northern Ireland in 1979, punctuated by a 2-0 victory over Denmark and a 3-0 win over Bulgaria, both at home. But the campaign had ended miserably with 3 defeats from 4, leaving us in 3rd place, 8 points behind England and 1 behind Northern Ireland. Giles’ time was up, to be replaced by Eoin Hand who was robbed of qualification in the 1982 campaign – a man whose contribution to building on the work of Giles and handing over a world-class squad to Charlton had been cruelly overlooked until very recently.
In the domestic game, Bohemians won the title by 2 points from Finn Harps, losing only 3 of 30 matches, with my grand-uncle Mick Smyth in goals. Shamrock Rovers won the FAI Cup beating Sligo 1-0 in the final. John Giles was also player-manager in Milltown in a pretty grim period for the club, who failed in their lofty ambitions to build a team and a club to take on Europe. They went into decline but came back spectacularly under Jim Mclaughlin in the mid-80’s before it all went to hell (or Dalymount) in the late 80’s as Glenmalure Park was sold to developers and they started on their arduous journey along the long and winding road to Tallaght.
Across the water, a certain Mr Brian Clough was beginning to throw his weight around. Liverpool, having won the title the two previous seasons, and as reigning European champions, had to make do with second place, as Nottingham Forest – a provincial footballing backwater – took the top spot. Peter Shilton, Martin O’Neill, Garry Birtles, Viv Anderson, Kenny Burns, John Robertson and the aforementioned Archie Gemmill combined and contrived to snatch the title from the formerly imperious Scousers. Then they went and won the European Cup the following year knocking Liverpool out in the first round, and this tiny club went on to win it the year after that again. An incredible feat completely unimaginable today. In fact such an achievement is now impossible. However, this was THE golden era for English football in Europe. Liverpool won it in ’77 and ’78; Forest in ’79 and ’80; Liverpool again in ’81; Villa in 82 and finally Liverpool in 1984. 7 English victories in 8 seasons. Then Heysel happened.
But 1978 also the marked the true beginning of the great Liverpool dynasty. A second consecutive European Cup was enough to hide the disappointment of finishing runners-up in the league. They would reclaim the league title the following season. This was Bob Paisley’s Liverpool, a Liverpool of Souness, McDermott, Dalglish, Clemence, Hughes and Case. An all-conquering side which formed the nucleus of their almost total domination of the 1980’s domestic game. Between 1976 and 1990, they won 10 titles. Only Forest, Everton (twice) and Arsenal interrupted them. They won 2 FA Cups; 4 European Cups (in only 7 years); 1 UEFA Cup and 4 League Cups. 21 trophies in 14 years. And 1978 was one of the peak moments. Until last year only Cloughie’s Forest and AC Milan had retained the European Cup since Liverpool. It’s not done very often anymore.
But to wax lyrical on the good ol days of football without highlighting the cesspits of violence and racism just off the pitch would be a massive oversight. Hooliganism was peaking around 1978 and in March of that year, a massive riot broke out during an FA Cup Quarter Final between Ipswich and Millwall at the Den. From The Ipswich Star comes the following description:
Fighting began on the terraces, spilled out on to the pitch and into the narrow streets around the ground. Bottles, knives, iron bars, fists, boots and concrete slabs rained from the sky. Dozens of innocent people, including many Millwall fans, were injured by the thugs.
Outside in Cold Blow Lane the violence erupted again, Town fans fleeing a raging, ugly mob. Coach windows were broken with the old and the young caught up in the violence. If Millwall’s hooligans wanted to make a statement, then they had done just that – and Ipswich Town fans were the victims.
BBC’s Panorama had visited the Den a few months beforehand. This short clip sums up at least 2 decades of English football:
Racism was also a nasty presence in those days. Monkey chants and bananas were common, as right-wing extremists latched on to the game as a means to their violent and bigoted ends. But 1978 also saw England’s first black international when Viv Anderson lined out against Czechoslovakia. Obviously things have changed radically in that regard since, but it was 15 more years before Paul Ince became the first black captain and the remnants of the deep-seated institutionalised racism in the game is starkly evident from the fact that of the 92 football league clubs, only 5 have Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) managers. There is only 1 in the Premier League, Chris Hughton. He became Ireland’s first black international in 1979, and many would be more than happy to see him become our first black manager at any stage now.
It would be misguided to think that football has shed all of these prejudices and violence. Matchday trouble is still common in and around English and Irish football grounds. The Bohs Rovers rivalry here often explodes onto the terraces and streets – a minority and a small stain on the fanbases but a stain nonetheless. And while you don’t hear monkey chants these days, you still have the remnant racism described above. Homophobia and sexism are still rife, but football grounds are no longer the exclusive domain of the straight male anymore.
So the game has changed more in the last 40 years than the preceding 100. More in the last 20 than the previous 120, and as I watch, read and listen today, the initial boom of the 1990’s as the game became incredibly rich and cleaned up its act in a major way, is giving way again to another boom – the online game – football matches distilled down into a series of GIFs; a player’s abilities assessed by his youtube goal reel; the creeping move away from the team ethic towards individualism as seen in Neymar’s approach to his career; the overbearing media scrutiny; and the proliferation of countless ways in which fans can vent their spleens. Not every voice deserves to be heard.
People of my generation have witnessed these changes first hand. Football on TV has gone from the odd game shown here and there in an atmosphere of menace and dereliction, to as many games as you want shown in an atmosphere of polished hype and comfort. To attend matches now, even in some Irish grounds, is a radically different proposition, and with the redevelopment of Dalymount, 2 tired old grounds will be retired and replaced by something much, much better, shared between the two Northside clubs.
The League of Ireland has practically died and resurrected itself 2 or 3 times in this period as every big club went bust and came back again. I remember Dalyer and the RDS in the late 80’s and 90’s, decent crowds but a sense of futility, especially for Rovers, even in their title-winning season, as they maintained nomadism. The connection of the Irish game to the national team was severed for a generation in the 1980’s, restored only in the last few years as more and more domestic products make a name for themselves on home shores before being picked off by clubs in the UK. The most recent call-up for Enda Stevens is a great example of the hard slog paying off after years having made your name in a very successful Rovers side in the early part of the decade.
But if there’s one thing I’d change straight away in football, it’s the level of dissent which is deemed acceptable. There was a rule – it may still exist – that only the captain could speak to the ref. It was mainly applied in schoolboy football, but I do have memories of seeing skippers pointing to their armbands as they approached the man in black to have a go. Today it is absolutely ridiculous and has been known to be a tactic for a long time, perfected by Ferguson and his Rottweiler Roy over many years. It’s a dreadful stain on the game, along with diving, and it’s one place where we can learn from Rugby. I fear however that due to its box office appeal and the need for a story, it will never be stamped out, even with VAR, which means we will quickly run out of refs. It is simply not worth it.
Another thing I don’t like is the rising persona of the manager and his antics. Mourinho is everything wrong with football in this regard, but Klopp, Guardiola, Allardyce, Pardew et al are not far behind. The staged rage; the constant screaming in the 4th officials face; the mind-games bullshit; the post-match nonsense which shifts blame everywhere but in the mirror. Again, as with most facets of the modern game, Alex Ferguson was akey architect in this. Say something controversial; shift the focus of your failings and those of your players; change the narrative; get away with it. Seems Mourinho may not be that bad a successor after all. But they all do it. We know it’s bullshit, but it perseveres. Content is king – any old irrelevant nonsense gets the clicks.
I wrote about football’s crippling addiction to gambling previously and if there’s one off-the-pitch habit I’d love our game to kick, it’s this. As I said before, the last 40 years has seen so many improvements in the game, but this illness – so skillfully implanted into the game by immoral, rapacious corporations – an illness that is destroying so many lives, is raging through the game, normalising absolutely futile, dangerous behaviour through sponsorship and blanket advertising. Its dirty central presence in the game is as noxious and contemptible as racism was in 1978 and I hope it takes a lot less time to root out. And to those of you who think this is an extreme view, I’m not going to apologise. It’s overbearing presence will be pulled back. It’s only a matter of time. The GAA took a decent stand by banning its sponsorship recently, as did the FA in relation to the England team. I hope it has peaked now and will fall away as the scales fall away from the eyes of its users. It’s not your gambling I have a problem with. It’s the fact that I, and my kids, have no escape from it in the game.
But let’s not end on a rant. Let’s divert to the music of 1978 and the great albums of the year. “Darkness On the Edge of Town” by Bruce Springsteen; “Parallel Lines” by Blondie; “All Mod Cons” by The Jam; “Give Em Enough Rope” by The Clash; “Live and Dangerous” by Thin Lizzy; and “Road to Ruin” by the Ramones. As Punk began to make way for post-punk and the new romantics, followed by a decade of pop and rock excess, this particular gem was #1 in Ireland and the UK exactly 40 years ago. Not a bad song to enter the world to, and one of the most memorable (for many reasons) early examples of the music video. Here’s to 40 more years of football. And Kate Bush!!! Thanks for reading….
A Yard of Grass 