The story goes like this. In 1955, Chelsea were chasing an unexpected league title when they lost a crucial home game, 6-5 to Manchester United. Manager Ted Drake, devastated at a result that could have cost Chelsea their first trophy never mind championship, took a phone call later that evening from the club’s chief scout. He expected the scout to be equally disappointed about the result, but instead the man on the other end of the phone was elated.
The reason?
That afternoon he had discovered Chelsea’s future, the best player the club would ever produce: Jimmy Greaves.
There was a similar feeling at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday evening, where Chelsea fans emerged from the ground in extraordinarily good spirits despite witnessing a 4-3 defeat to Newcastle United.
The reason?
A 17-year-old called Josh McEachran, who came on when Chelsea were 3-1 down with 30 minutes remaining and went to give a display of such confidence and string-pulling panache that some older fans were saying it was the best debut from a youth player since Osgood’s, while others were comparing him with Cruyff and Xavi.
Well, perhaps. It’s important not to get too carried away. Recent Twitter antihero Leon Knight was described as the ‘new Zola’ in the 1990s and he’s now agitating for a move to Rushden & Diamonds. But when you see a performance of this maturity from a 17-year-old making his home debut for a team that is 3-1 down and playing with ten men, well, you are entitled to dream, aren’t you?
A few years ago, during a BBC attempt to find the nation’s best sitcom, Armando Ianucci was asked to make the case for ‘Yes, Minister’. In the excellent documentary that followed, Ianucci discovered that one of the reasons ‘Yes, Minister’ holds up so well is that the creators went back over the news archives for the past 50 years and analysed what stories recurred, and than based their episodes around these themes – the special relationship, the EU, expenses and honours scandals, arts funding, civil service waste. Hence it still seems fresh and relevent today.
Ianucci went on to nick this idea wholesale for ‘The Thick Of It’.
You can very easily do the same thing when writing about English football. When I was researching a piece on 40 years of London football for Time Out‘s (very fine) ‘London Calling’ book, I discovered familiar arguments being made twenty or thirty years ago.
‘Football has been taken away from its natural community, commercialised and given the worst trappings of Hollywood by the mediam,’ wrote Peter Ball in 1974. What would he make of it now?
The same writer than analysed the national team’s failings in 1980 and surmised that ‘The English game does not enhance the development of technique, nor of flair players, who tend to be regarded with suspicion.’
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I was reminded of this when I was handed half-a-dozen old newspapers from 1973, covering the aftermath of England’s infamous World Cup failure at the hands of Poland. England had followed up that result with a 1-0 defeat at Wembley against Italy in November, prompting some very familiar comments in the papers.
‘Now England need a substitute for Alf’, said the Daily Mail (and press nerds will be interested to note that the hated ‘Now’ to pad out a headline was already in use at this time).
Alf Ramsey was quoted as saying the result was ‘unbelievable’ and insisting that ‘only the Press asks me if I want to resign. It is none of their business.’
On it goes. He told London’s Evening News that ‘soccer must change at club level if England are to show more skill in internationals’ and pointed out that ‘people say we need more skill, but this has been said for years’. Alan Hardaker, secretary of the Football League, was ready with the platitudes, ‘We must all buckle down to the job in hand. To strengthen our game at domestic level and through that our standing at national level.’
Even the Italian manager, Ferruccio Valcareggio, had a view we can recognise: ‘You must have flair and only Osgood appeared to have this.’
But the press weren’t interested in excuses, they wanted blood. And they got it. Ramsey lasted one more game, a 0-0 draw against Portugal, before he was sacked. Astonishingly, England’s internationals didn’t suddenly develop greater flair and technique as a consequence.
And who scored the crucial goal for Italy that night in November? Do I really need to say? Arrivederci Fabio, it was always going to end this way, eventually.
Seeing Mesut Ozil dismantle England so deliciously yesterday reminded me of one of the first times I felt those confusing stirrings of desire towards another man. His name was Georghe Hagi, and after watching this in 1994, I was smitten.
‘Soccer is a sport perfectly designed to reinforce a tragic view of the universe, because basically it is a long series of frustrations leading up to near certain heartbreak.’
Since reading this post by Rob Smyth in the Guardian, I’ve been thinking about some really depressing Chelsea matches I’ve witnessed. Because, why not? So here they are wrist-slashing reverse order.
6 First Divison play-off, 1988: Chelsea 1 Middlesbrough 0
The only Chelsea game that has made me cry. We were playing Second Division Middlesbrough for the right to play First Division football in 1988-89 (despite having been second in October) and were 2-0 down from the first leg. Gordon Durie gave us an early lead, but we lost on aggregate and the crowd rioted, as was the fashion at the time. The play-off system was changed shortly afterwards and Chelsea therefore became the only team to ever get relegated from the top flight through the play-offs, an honour we can place alongside being the first team to refuse to play in the European Cup and the first team to be created purely as a commercial means to fill an empty ground. It’s all history, you know.
5 Premier League, 1996: Coventry 1 Chelsea 0
A meaningless game, but typical pre-(and post-) Mourinho Chelsea. The week before we had tortured Middlesbrough 5-0 with a staggering performance of perpetual motion and effortless beauty, inspired by the man-god Ruud Gullit. Thousands of Chelsea fans made the trip to Cov for what we imagined would be a repeat performance from a vibrant, thrilling, all-conquering Chelsea. We flopped. Gullit made one sublime pass to Paul Furlong, who fell over. Same old Chelsea.
4 Champions League semi-final, 2009: Chelsea 1 Barcelona 1
Because it stank but also because we outplayed the best team in Europe with a performance that for many reasons will never be fully appreciated for its brilliance and intelligence. Only placed this low to reflect the contempt with which one should regard the rich man’s roulette that is the vile, venal, corrupt and corrupting Champions League.
3 Premier league, 1997: Chelsea 2 Arsenal 3
No, not the Kanu game. By then I was used to seeing Chelsea capsize against Arsenal, and in many ways it was an honour to witness such an extraordinary individual performance. Four times I’ve seen Chelsea take a 2-0 lead against Arsenal but not win the game; four times I’ve seen their full-backs belt last-minute howitzers past our hapless keepers. These memories of dominance and submission can never be erased. This game was a cracker and we looked like we were hanging on for a deserved point when Nigel Winterburn let rip in the 89th minute and scored the best goal of his life. It hurt. I mean, at least Kanu was a great player.
2 League Cup semi-final 2002: Spurs 5 Chelsea 1
It was once said that the only predictable thing about Chelsea was their unpredictability; later this was changed to the only predictable thing about Chelsea is that they will beat Spurs. Before this game, we hadn’t lost to Tottenham since 1990 when Lineker scored a last-minute winner at the Bridge. Since then we’d beaten them by every score from 6-1 to 1-0, and before this semi-final second leg were 2-1 up from the first leg. At White Hart Lane, we were smashed, humiliated, gutted, hung out to dry. The only redeeming features were that Spurs still managed to lose the final and later that season we went on to beat them 4-0, twice, in the same week that I, erm, got together with the delightful Ms GreatWen. Karma.
1 FA Cup quarter-final: Sunderland 2 Chelsea 1
This is the game that festers in the darkest place of my soul. It is the one moment when I considered renouncing my club and football in the conviction that I had been duped into backing a complete stinker, a club that would never come close to winning a trophy in my lifetime. This game is the reason that even now when I consider a potential cup draw, I always wish for the game that will hurt least to lose, rather than the one that will be most enjoyable to win. As a Chelsea fan, I live in constant fear because of games like this.
This was one of those seasons when all the good teams except a so-so Liverpool had been knocked out the cup. Chelsea were drawn against Second Division Sunderland and, stupidly, we felt we had a good chance of getting to the final, or at least the semis, for the first time since 1970.
In the first leg in London, we took the lead but tension mounted. At Chelsea in those days the crowd’s terror was so intense that they would actually turn off the scoreboard with ten minutes to go so nobody knew when the final whistle was coming. Imagine that!
On this occasion, it didn’t matter whether the scoreboard was on or off; everybody was terrified. Sunderland won a free kick, the Shed shat themselves, so did the players, the ball was knocked long, bounced around a bit and John Byrne scored. Replay.
But we could still do it. We went up to Sunderland and battered them, hit the bar, hit the post, their keeper stopped everything and they scored. Despair! Worse was to come. Dennis Wise equalised with five minutes to go. Hope! Then Sunderland won a last-minute corner in front of a delirious away end and a forgettable centre-back in red-and-white stripes hammered home an unstoppable header from about 300 yards out.
Watch this video and you can just hear in the background, somewhere in Sutton in fact, a small boy’s heart breaking in two.
That was it. The best chance Chelsea had of reaching a semi in my lifetime, and they’d blown it. Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United fans won’t get it, but every other football fan in the country knows what I mean when I say that in this exact moment, I was convinced I would never see Chelsea win a sausage. Not een half a sausage. Not the discarded package that the sausages came in.
And the memory of this match has never left me. It made the demon-blitzing FA Cup win in 1997 so exhilarating, but it’s still there, trapped in my heart, my throat, my guts, waiting to get me every time I’m considering taking any kind of success for granted.
And I think it’s the reason why Chelsea will never be a big club, at least not as long as my generation, who witnessed this sort of hope-decimating match with mundane regularity, goes to games.
We know how easy it is to fail, what disappointment really tastes like, how fruitless hope is, and we are terrified that we are just a couple of poor signings away from a return to the days of Andy Myers, Ian Porterfield and Gareth Hall. You can smell it in the crowd at the Bridge when Chelsea go 1-0 down against a crap team, or are leading 1-0 with minutes to go, or are taking part in a penalty shoot-out. Big clubs don’t have this fear, it’s not in their genes, but it’s very much a part of my Chelsea and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Yesterday I attended my first England game for more than a decade. I first gave up England in 1990, shortly after Chris Waddle belted the bar over the crossbar against Germany and I realised that I already had one useless team in my life and didn’t need another.
Nevertheless in 1996 I found myself at Wembley for England v Holland, one of the iconic England games of my generation simply for the fact it epitomised the ambition England will never satisfactorily deliver on. Pathetically, the one thing I can remember is that I refused to celebrate any goal scored by Tottenham’s Teddy Sheringham, so in my mind England won 2-1 rather than 4-1, meaning Scotland should have qualified for the next round instead of Holland, something that UEFA to their eternal discredit chose to ignore despite my send them repeated letters pointing out the error.
Interest sort of reignited, I decided to go to Paris to watch England v Brazil in Le Tournoi, a friendly tournament involving England, France and Brazil. Big mistake. I have never spent 90 minutes in the company of a more unpleasant group of men, and I’ve been to Millwall-Chelsea. It was if you took the worst one per cent of supporters from every club in the country and decanted them all in the Parc Des Princes stand, with ten cans of Special Brew, subsidised lobotomies and shirt-drenching humidity. The casual racism and sexism, the witlessness, the stupidity, the ugliness – my god, it was hideous. So that was it: by the time England played Scotland in the play-off for the 2000 European Championships, I was cheering for the other side.
But there I was last night at Wembley watching England v Egypt. Why? Well, partly because I am slightly Egyptian. My mother was born in Alexandria but because her family could trace their ancestry back to Malta they held British passports even though they’d lived in Egypt for at least three generations and none of them could speak English. In 1956, when Britain attempted to reclaim the Suez Canal, her family were told they had to get out or nationalise, so they came to England, living in a former German POW camp in Yorkshire before settling in Tooting. Thanks to silly old Eden and Nasser, the strong man of Egypt, I came to exist. It doesn’t make me Egyptian at all really, but it’s a nice story.
So, notwithstanding my deep personal connection to the two teams, I was not looking forward to the game. And for the first twenty minutes, it was much as I expected. There were crap jokes about suicide bombers, the customary booing of one sacrificial lamb (currently John Terry) and the terrible band playing terrible songs. England fans will perhaps always represent the very worst aspects of football support from any era, and, in the modern fashion, this lot had all the passion and originality of people watching a pantomime.
Then Egypt took the lead. I tried not to snicker.
But, slowly, things improved. The crowd stopped booing Terry and he put in his best performance for a month; SWP made the correct decision with the ball, twice; and there was Wayne Rooney.
One of the reasons I go to football is for that one moment each game when a footballer does something that makes me gasp and think ‘did he really just do that?’. Rooney provided that moment last night, bring down a high ball on the near touchline with a soft touch that stopped the ball with a smidgen of back spin and gave him, what, half-a-second, perhaps less, than he should have had. It was a more important moment than any of the goals, because it emphasised just what a marvellous player Wayne Rooney is, and how important he is to an England team that is otherwise horribly workmanlike. Think back to that 1990 World Cup squad and England had players like Beardsley, Waddle, Barnes, Steven and Gascoigne (plus Hoddle left at home); this team only has Rooney. Capello can mould them into a strong unit, but only Rooney will make anybody coo.
So not all bad then, and unlike some people, I really am looking forward to the World Cup, perhaps because I still don’t care how England perform. As for last night, Tottenham’s Crouch scored twice, SWP got another so England drew 1-1, an entirely appropriate sharing of honours for us Anglo-Egyptian mongrels, who went home happy.
London's football territories as seen by 'The Soccer Tribe'
The short answer is that you can’t . London’s football rivalries are as impenetrable as Jamie Carragher’s accent. They do not obey the strict rules of geography, they shift over time as relegations dent ambition or minor grudges get blown out of shape, and even at the same club, different supporters will have different rivals, some reflecting age, others temperament.
Take Chelsea. Chelsea are based in south-west London, just a mile away from Fulham – the two clubs share a postcode and after many years apart have now shared a division for the best part of a decade. But while Fulham hate Chelsea, I have never met a Chelsea fan who considers Fulham their rivals. How can they? Fulham are lovely, probably the cutest club in England. Every time I look at Roy Hodgson, I want to tickle him.
Other Chelsea fans, those with loftier ambitions, choose to hate Arsenal, the biggest and most successful club in London by far. A third batch, the type with scary faces and nicknames like ‘Doom’, go for West Ham, that den of resentment and blown dreams along the District Line, for reasons that have much to do with certain off-pitch incidents that have taken place over the years in pubs and stations all over London. But also because Chelsea and West Ham share certain psychological frailties that bigger clubs like Spurs and Arsenal do not understand.
Most London clubs have similarly confused rivalries. Arsenal are the most straightforward – they hate Spurs. And Spurs hate them, although some Spurs fans have a marked dislike for Chelsea, who have all but usurped their place as the second biggest club in London and aren’t shy to remind them of it.
Rounding off London’s distinctive strain of anti-Spurs feeling, West Ham also hate Tottenham – like Chelsea, they know Arsenal are untouchable at the top of the London pyramid, but feel Spurs are gettable. But West Ham fans also hate Chelsea and Millwall. Now Millwall hate West Ham, but Charlton hate Millwall. Charlton also hate Crystal Palace, who hate Brighton, which really screws things up. Nobody really knows who Leyton Orient hate – although Wiki says Southend.
You might think that’s already quite enough hate for one post – in fact, you might even be wondering why we should discuss hate at all – but it gets even more confusing over in West London. Fulham’s Fayed-inspired rise through the divisions has seen them mount a stepladder of hate – first Brentford, then QPR, now Chelsea. QPR have made a similar trip in the opposite direction, but while they refuse to get involved in any sort of rivalry with Brentford, they haven’t got much choice because nobody else will pay them the slightest bit of attention.
And we haven’t even started on non-league clubs yet.
It’s a soap opera, isn’t it?
Why all the hate? Well, most football fans are aware that their chosen club is unlikely to win anything in any given season, so if they ‘unsupport’ (a term conceived by When Saturday Comes many years ago) another club, preferably a local rival, they can take vicarious satisfaction when they lose. It’s a form of hedge betting and means that even though Spurs haven’t won anything substantial for decades and regularly get beaten by Arsenal, they can take tremendous pleasure in each and every defeat experienced by their bigger rivals.
The Great Wen 