22 April, 2021

Football's Hearts & Minds: Bringing Colour to Humdrum Lives

The plans by twelve of the big European football clubs to form a breakaway “super league” have, it seems, gone down the proverbial pan – for now! In my opinion, however, and despite the criticism from fans, players, clubs and politicians, it is only a matter of time until something of that format becomes a reality. Whatever the rights and wrongs (and there were few rights and many wrongs!) of the proposal that Manchester United, Real Madrid and 10 other top clubs were trying to get away with this week at the expense of lesser footballing mortals in the shape of smaller clubs and millions of fans, the fact is that it is now just as easy for a club like Manchester City or Juventus to fly across Europe for a fixture as it is to play in their own country.

Times have changed. Manchester United will be aware of that probably more than any other English club. Sixty three years ago I remember as a child watching in distress as the tragedy of the Munich air disaster unfolded on our little black and white TV screen and my childhood heroes in the Busby Babes – Edwards, Charlton, Colman, Taylor and the rest lay on the snow covered tarmac of Munich airport. United were one of the first English clubs to take tentative steps into European football (against the wishes of the English FA and Football League) in the 50s but today, of course, big clubs fly off on a regular basis to far flung places. It’s all part of the day to day life of the modern club and player but in those far off times it was a rare and special event – and for United a tragic one.

I was thinking of this as I followed the many reports this week about the ill fated and ill thought through European Super League. Today, players live in mansions and behind security walls set apart from the world of paying fans and living a life that players of the Busby Babes era could never have imagined. I often wonder what the “value” and the life style of the late Duncan Edwards would be today had he survived Munich – in my view and the view of many of my generation, Edwards was, and by a long way, the finest English player ever and possibly the finest player ever. Today he would live in a huge mansion and live a life so far removed from that of the fans that it truly would be difficult for us lesser mortals to comprehend.

And as I wonder about all this I remember the story often told by Sir Bobby Charlton which is perhaps worthy of retelling this week when these giant financial enterprises that are the modern football club are accused of greed and forgetting the interests, needs and dreams of their fans.

Sir Matt Busby
Charlton tells the tale of when he joined Manchester United as a young player soon after his seventeenth birthday and arrived at Old Trafford, young, raw, excited and anxious that he could “make it”. Young players like Charlton would be taken onto the car park outside the ground by United Manager Sir Matt Busby and there given a homily on “the duties” of a professional footballer and his expectations for players at Manchester United. Busby would point to the surrounding area of Trafford Park - in those days one of England and indeed Europe’s great industrial landscapes filled with tall factory chimneys belching smoke, heavy engineering factories, cotton mills and warehouses, and a thousand other industrial concerns, and rows of grimy terraced houses where United's fans lived in walking distance from the stadium. Busby would kindly but sternly tell the young player how lucky he was to be starting a career playing football where day in day out he would be doing what he had always dreamed of, and doing what the fans who came to watch on Saturday afternoon would give their right arm to be able to do – to pull on a United shirt and play on the turf of Old Trafford. But, Busby would add, that opportunity that Charlton and his peers were being given came with responsibilities. Players and Manchester United Football Club must, Busby stressed to the young Charlton,  always give something back – that was the price of playing for United. They must provide what he called “the spark”, bring what he called “colour” into the lives of the thousands of men and women who came at the end of each working week to Old Trafford and spent their hard earned wages at the Saturday afternoon turnstiles. It was the players’ and the club’s duty to lighten their humdrum, hard working lives. “People”, Busby would say, “want something to carry them through the next drab and backbreaking week of daily grind and get them away from the dark days of winter”. They wanted, said Busby, “excitement and thrills that would send them home smiling and full of hope and expectation” and it was, the manager went on, “every Manchester United footballer’s duty to always produce as much of that as he could”. Busby knew that a football club is nothing if it does not serve and remember its fans. In short, it’s just a bunch of blokes in their underwear kicking a bag of wind around a field for 90 minutes no more, no less.


The world has come a long way since then – and perhaps not always for the better. It seems in this modern world rather twee and old fashioned to talk as Busby did of things like “duty” – especially with regard to the multi-billion pound world of professional football. The world of “duty” and “responsibility” and of Matt Busby and the young Bobby Charlton  (and me!)  is a long way from today’s billion dollar SKY contracts or the hospitality boxes of our big stadiums. It’s a long way from the mansions of Cheshire wherein reside the star players of the big north western clubs. And it’s a very, very long way from the ill considered and devious plan for a “super league”, seemingly cobbled together on the back of a fag packet by financial whiz kids and absent owners with little or no interest in football – men who live in places far removed from the communities that surround our great stadiums and who see a club like United or City or Chelsea or Spurs or Arsenal, or Liverpool as just an investment that must be maximised and milked. I cannot help adding that in my view, and given their long and proud (and with the Munich tragic) history, Manchester United above all clubs should have understood this. It is to their shame they did not; Busby would have appalled.

I do not believe that any of these far flung owners and merchant bankers, venture capitalists, hedge fund managers and the like could begin to comprehend the sentiments that Sir Matt Busby passed on to all his young charges those many years ago. Maybe we have lost something along the way – I certainly think so.

Now, well into my eighth decade I can look back and thrill, as I did all those years ago at the heroics and great deeds of players and clubs – Charlton’s thunderbolt goals, Edwards’ powerful drives into to the opposition penalty box, Jimmy Greaves and the great Spurs teams of the 1960s, the glories of Arsenal’s illustrious footballing past and the magnificence of the marbled halls of Highbury, Shankley’s great Liverpool sides or, most of all, week after week being privileged to watch the supreme footballer and sportsman the great Tom Finney play at Deepdale for my beloved Preston North End and after the game standing outside the players’ entrance for him and his team mates to come out and sign my autograph book and then as he did so often pat me on the head and ask if I’d enjoyed the game. Those are the things that make football what it is – the “contract” between the club, the players and the fans; Busby understood that well when he gave his little homily to young players, but it seems that today’s club hierarchy at United, City, Spurs, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool did not – it was pound notes that filled their dead, glazed eyes. That was their only criterion for action.

But I wonder, is all lost? Maybe not. I’m sure that my football mad Grandson, Sam, will when he is my age, remember the great footballers of his generation - Kane, Messi, Salah, Rashford, de Bruyne....... – and the great teams of today: Guardiola’s Manchester City, Klopp’s Liverpool, Solskaer’s United and the rest. That is how it should be. And I’m sure that he will remember, as I do now and when he is, like me, a grumpy old man he will recall the “buzz” he felt as he went through the turnstile at his club Reading. He will remember what it felt like and the dreams that one has before each game – and of course the dejection when the result is not what he hoped for. He will remember all this for that is the very essence of the club/fan relationship that Busby spoke of to the young Charlton. And what I also know with absolute certainty is that while names like Kane, Rashford, Klopp, Messi, Guardiola and the rest will stay with my grandson he will, too, fondly look back upon to remember their great footballing deeds.

But there is something else which I am equally sure of.  When my grandson looks back on his lifetime love of football he will not remember the authors of the plan for the “European Super League”. Manchester United’s Ed Woodward and the American owners the Glazer family, Liverpool’s owner American billionaire  John Henry, Spur’s absentee owner Joe Lewis sitting on his Caribbean island, Arsenal’s mysterious and dubious owner the American Stan Kroenke, Real Madrid’s President Florentino Perez Rodriguez, Juventus’ Andrea Agnelli and the rest will all be yesterday’s men – forgotten both in the mind of the football fan and indeed by the world as a whole for they have no claim to our affections; their only claim is to their own wealth not our hearts. And that of course, was at the root of the gross folly that was the European Super League and is something that Matt Busby when he spoke to the young Charlton, Edwards, Best and the rest all those years ago would have  understood very well.


05 April, 2021

"Nothing Is Forever: This Too Shall Pass.

My copy of The Aenied
The ancient 
Persian Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur told the tale of a powerful king who asks his assembled wise men to create a ring that would make him happy when he was sad. After deliberation the sages handed him a simple ring with the Persian words "This too shall pass" etched on it, which had the desired effect to make him happy when he was sad. It also, however, became a curse for whenever he was happy he knew that that too would pass.

We would do well to heed this tale in these momentous and troubling times. In our 21st century  Covid world, where locked down nations, faltering economies, young people missing their education, global warming threatening the planet, inequality, great social movements such as Black Lives Matter, Occupy, Extinction  & Me Too vent their anger, increasing divisiveness permeates our politics, poverty and malnutrition stalk many lands, civil war and strife is present in countries across the world and increasing sabre rattling by the world’s superpowers are witness to the disturbing times in which we live. But we should, too, remember something else: that in the great span of history and of mankind they are but tiny events which will, in the fullness of time, be replaced by other great concerns – but also great joys; as the tale tells us “these too shall pass”.  

I was reminded of this last night as I lay reading in bed. I am currently working my way through the magnificent translation by Princeton Professor Robert Fagles of Roman poet Virgil’s epic work The Aeneid written in about 30 BC and telling the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas and his passionate but ultimately tragic love affair with Dido the beautiful and powerful Queen of Carthage, and his travels and battles to fulfil his destiny, ordained by the Gods, to found the city of Rome and the Roman civilization. The Aeneid was written by Virgil in order that the Romans could celebrate their city’s origins and the creation of their great and mighty Empire in the same way that the Greeks celebrated their civilization through Homer’s poems The Illiad and The Odyssey. It is not overstating the importance of The  Aeneid to say that the great poem has shaped the political and cultural landscape of Europe and the western world as much as the Bible has shaped Europe and the west’s spiritual landscape – and still today it explains much of our current world.

As I read the glorious words of Book 9 of the poem (only three more books to go!) I came across these few lines describing the Rutulian and Etruscan Latium armies flooding out onto the plain where a great battle is to be fought against Aeneas and his invading Trojans:

“.......And next his entire army

Moving out across the plain,

Rich in cavalry, rich in braided cloaks, purple plumed gleaming helmets, bright gold.

A force like the Ganges rising spreading, fed by seven quiet but mighty streams

Or the life giving Nile ebbing back from the plains

To settle down at last in its own bank and bed.........”

 Could it be, I wondered as I read of the great battle that the Virgil and his fellow Romans knew of the existence of the mighty Ganges River in India? Did they ever go to India in those far off days over two millennia ago? I could accept that they knew of the Nile, after all, that mighty river flows into the Mediterranean Sea and the Romans were a Mediterranean people – but India and the Ganges was another thing, a far off world. Did the Roman knowledge and influence spread that far?

But immediately I wondered this I also knew the answer for I was taken back to another wonderful book I read recently, Colin Thubron’s magical and powerful  travel book The Lost Heart of Asia in which he vividly describes the peoples and cultures of that remote region. The city of Merv (once known as Antiochia and one of the largest cities in the world  in ancient times, with a population of over half a million) sits on the Silk Road in Turkmenistan, central Asia. The Silk Road in ancient times brought silk and spices, paper, gunpowder and other exotic items from the East – India & China – and was the route taking gold and silver, wool, animals, pottery and other wares from the west to far away China and India in the east. But, the Silk Road, carried other things; even as early as 300 BC  it took ideas, religion, philosophy and culture from east to west and west to east – and more worryingly it spread diseases across the two continents, most notably the Black Death. Although it is unlikely (but not impossible) that Romans actually ever visited China (and vice versa) those two mighty civilizations  certainly knew of each other’s existence and power; they were ancient trading partners via the myriad of merchants who travelled the Silk Road carrying and trading their wares as they went. The results of those trades eventually ending their journey in the markets of Rome and China’s ancient capital Xi’an

Roman coin found at Merv
In Thubron’s book he records how, on visiting the area around present day Merv, he was struck by the people of the area, many of whom had a very definite olive skinned Mediterranean appearance. He was struck, too, by the number of Latin sounding words in the local vocabulary and even street names frequently had a Latin “feel” about them. He discovered, too, that it was not uncommon for ancient Roman coins to be dug up in the fields and for homes to have shrines dedicated to Gods with clear connections to the Gods of ancient Rome. How could this be, that in place far from Rome, in the heart of what was once the mighty Persian Empire that there is this oasis of Latinate people, artefacts, language and culture amongst the endless deserts, mountains and peoples that dominate central Asia - the lands of those other mighty and feared warrior rulers, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.

The answer was both simple and thought provoking. In 53 BC, at about the time that Virgil was writing his Aeneid the Roman army under Marcus Licinicus fought the great Battle of Carrhae against the armies of the mighty Parthian (later the Persian and then the Iranian) Empire under the command of General Surena. The Romans were routed, even humiliated, and Marcus Licinicus fell in the battle. Thousand of Romans were slain and at the conclusion of the battle over 10,000 of them were taken prisoner and sent as slaves to the city of Merv. It is recorded that to humiliate the Romans even further General Surena ordered that a Roman prisoner be found who looked like the dead Marcus Licinicus and when such a prisoner was found the young Roman soldier was dressed up as a woman and paraded tied to a horse and facing backwards through the streets of Merv as the crowds mocked him. But, those terrible scenes were not quite the end of the story, the world moved on.

The years passed and with each passing year the Roman “slaves” slowly became part of the Merv society: as they diligently fulfilled their slave duties and their knowledge and skills were appreciated and understood by their owners they slowly  but surely were given more freedom from their slavery and they prospered, they married local women, had children, settled down and became part of the life, culture and economy of that great city. Others, on gaining their freedom, moved on travelling further east to China where many settled and prospered in the City of Liqian and yet others took up arms again, but this time in the armies of the Chinese Xiongnu tribes and fought against the Han Dynasty at the Battle of Zhizhi. The result of all this is that still today, those echoes of those far off times  impact on the streets and lives of Merv and its surrounding areas – the past empires, the battles and the killing are long forgotten, “These too have passed”, and are replaced by everyday life of marriage, birth, everyday life and prosperity and death. In short the world moved on. 

In the final few minutes of Shakespeare’s great play The Tempest mighty Prospero reflects the transient and ephemeral nature of mankind and his world by speaking some of the most famous words from all Shakespeare, indeed from all literature, and in doing so he confirms Attar of Nishapurs tale of the ring upon which was etched “This too shall pass”:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep”.

Quite, and today, as I think of the many and worrying present discontents that scream from our 24 hour TV News and are splashed in large print across our newspapers– Covid, divisive politics, global warming and the rest – it is very easy to be worried, angry, upset and fearful of the world in which we live. But we would all be well advised to also be hopeful because for each and every one of us, “These sadnesses, worries and anxieties too shall pass”. Of course, once these have “passed” there will without doubt be others to concern us but as my little brief excursion into ancient history via Virgil’s The Aenied  and Thubron’s wonderful book reminded me we are all just tiny specks in the great sweeping and moving sands of time; the mighty Roman and Persian armies of three millennia ago are long gone, the majestic and once all powerful Empires and Emperors of Rome, Persia, and the rest are swept away, all dust, and the ancient Trojan, Greek and Roman heroes so magnificently described by Virgil are no more. That is the nature of all humanity it is never still, "all things will pass".

Sara Teasdale

A century ago in 1918 during the final months of the 1st World War Europe lay in ruins, there were millions dead and the whole world was reeling from four years of intense trench warfare the like of which the world had never before. It was all witnessed by the young American poet Sara Teasdale who reflected upon her ruined world but also upon its rebirth and the inconsequence of we, mere mortals, in that rebirth. The result was her famous poem of hope There Will Come Soft Rains, a work that perfectly encapsulates the ephemeral world that mankind inhabits. It is, perhaps, apposite for these Spring days of rebirth as we struggle to move forward, remake our post Covid lives, and hope our many present discontents “will pass”. Like the tale told by the Sufi poet, or the rise and fall of great empires such as those recorded by Virgil and Homer, or the story of the once great city of Merv the poem is a fitting reminder in these momentous and worrying times of our transitory world and the transitory lives that we all lead.

There Will Come Soft Rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.