Days when football was a simple game

Dec 2 2007 by Neil Farrington, Sunday Sun

I GREW up believing football was a simple game.

Jimmy Hill and Match of the Day on a Saturday night, the peerless Brian Moore and his “Big Match” on a Sunday afternoon.

Highlights, highlights and more highlights, so literally never a dull moment.

Only around four times a year – the FA Cup final, European finals and home internationals – did we get to see a live game . . . warts (ie stoppages, time-wasting, long periods of tedium) and all.

Even then, there was precious little of the tactical analysis (that’s ANALysis) which keeps so many former players in work today.

And there seemingly was nothing too scientific going on off the field either.

Back then, you’d hear about the manager and the chairman. One picked the team, the other would buy players.

If the manager (usually wearing an Admiral or Bukta tracksuit) didn’t pick a winning team, the chairman – sheepskin coat, second-hand car lot – was liable to sack him.

I was struck by the memory of those days when Sam Allardyce, the suited and booted manager of Newcastle United, said last Wednesday: “My position is safe if I get results; my position is not safe if I lose football matches.”

Struck by it, because that homespun wisdom sounded out of tune coming from a manager who employs dieticians, sports scientists and shrinks among the biggest backroom staff in Britain, and in a week which proved the game is no longer straightforward, but an irretrievably tangled web.

It began at Derby, where chairman Adam Pearson sacked manager Billy Davies effectively for having got the club promoted.

Pearson then cheerfully admitted Davies would have been the “ideal” man to bring the Rams back up following their inevitable relegation next summer.

But then, this is the Adam Pearson who also says: “I cannot believe this squad isn’t good enough to at least compete in the Premier League. Of course it needs strengthening . . .”

Confused? Only as much as the Liverpool fans who marched in midweek in protest against the prospect of Rafa Benitez getting the bullet because he wants to sign players for nothing in January.

Yes, you read it right. For nothing.

And then we come to the arrests of Harry Redknapp and others connected with Portsmouth.

Regardless of whether anything dodgy has gone on down there, the fact that five people were nicked in what appears to be an investigation into just one transfer is a reminder in itself of modern football’s bloated state.

Bloated, as in stuffed over-full of chancers on the make.

As I say, it was all just players, a manager and a chairman when I grew up.

I don’t recall exactly when the game opened its doors – or rather, the doors of its coffers – to the chief executive and the players’ agent (Peter Storrie and Willie McKay, in the case of Portsmouth).

But I imagine it was a day when fire lit up the sky and brimstone hung on the air . . .

The day football sold its soul.

At least the man in charge of the finest team in the land (though, sadly, not this land’s finest players) retains his scruples and his sanity.

“Rafa Benitez has done remarkably well at Liverpool and what is happening there is not down to sport or to results,” he says.

“It cannot be right that Billy Davies has put the club in a position where they never dreamed of being and, 14 games later, he is sacked,” he adds.

Thank heaven for Arsene Wenger. He may not see a foul committed by any of his players under his nose, but he sees sense.

It’s a shame we’ll never see a return to the days when football was all about, well, football.