Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football
Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football
Author: David Winner (Usually dispatched within 24 hours)
This is very uncharitable but …This is very uncharitable but …
I stuggled through to page 34 where the author claims Rodney Marsh played in the 1966 World Cup final (apologies to the under-30s, but he didn’t, and any football fan of that era could tell you the eleven who did) and then I decided to give up.
For the first 33 pages, I read an account of how English football was all about strength and manliness and avoiding skill, in contrast to Argentinian and lots of other football, which is all about skill, and I was starting to think why am I reading these clichés?
And then I read that if only Alan Hudson and Stan Bowles had played more for England the national team would have won more, and then that Alf Ramsey was ‘old school’ - in fact he wasn’t, his way of playing was new.
And then, get this, that Johnny Giles was a hard man who threatened the break Rodney Marsh’s leg …. Whereas Marsh, in fact, once admitted he deliberately broke another player’s leg.
Coming next - I cheated and looked at the next chapter - was an attempt to say Roy Keane was like an English Boy’s Own character. Go to Cork and say that, mate.
The moral of this story is not to buy books about football written by ‘writers’, people from cultural studies faculties or people who usually write about Victorian ’social theory’.