cad
12-12-2010, 04:52 AM
30 Years Ago
A phone rings in a cold, claustrophobic hotel room in the Polish mining town of Lodz.
It’s London calling, after a delay of an hour, rather than the normal three.
News that John Lennon has been murdered overnight slices through the static.
Russian tanks are massing on the border.
An invasion, designed to ensure the stillbirth of democracy, is apparently imminent.
Poland is threatened with repression, like Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
I’m on the front line of the Cold War, to report a football match.
Thirty years on, that third round UEFA Cup tie between Ipswich Town and Widzew Lodz, has a strange significance.
It is the symbol of a different time, a different world.
Back then, football was a source of inspiration, a vehicle for protest.
Its innocence is beyond comprehension, in an age in which we associate football with corruption, cynicism and cronyism.
Change is inevitable, constant, and horribly revealing.
It was minus 17 on December 10, 1980, when Ipswich went out to protect a 5-0 first leg lead.
The pitch, frozen and covered with compacted snow, was unplayable.
Today, it would cause an international incident. Back then, everyone got on with it.
The Ipswich kit man dislocated his shoulder, twice, ferrying the skips in an ancient van, which had a magnetic attraction to roadside ditches.
The pre-match meal was wild boar casserole. Isotonic drinks were the figment of a marketing man’s imagination.
Most of the Ipswich players, including our very own Terry Butcher, wore woollen tights, mittens, and bobble hats. Kevin Beattie, described by manager Sir Bobby Robson as “the best English-born player I’ve ever seen”, wore a short sleeved shirt.
Modern sports science would have warned him off constant cortisone injections into an arthritic knee, which curtailed his career at 27.
He earned buttons, ended on benefits and nearly drank himself to death.
He was twice the player that John Terry is, on £170,000 a week. Fans, bouncing off each other on steep, unprotected terraces, kept warm by necking litre bottles of vodka.
They sang songs in praise of striking dockworkers in Gdansk, and Lech Walesa, the trade union leader who would become president.
They threw snowballs at sullen soldiers, who were sufficiently peeved to make a show of waving their machine guns. Lodz won 1-0. They had beaten Manchester United and Juventus in the early rounds, an impossibility in these days of Champions League cannon fodder.
Robson, given time to build a club, made the team bus wait for journalists. We all sang Beatles songs on the three hour journey to the airport.
The Cobbold brothers owners with cut-glass accents and formidable thirsts — served Georgian champagne and port.
They famously decreed a crisis at Portman Road involved running out of white wine in the boardroom.
Today the club is in turmoil.
Roy Keane is morphing into Forrest Gump, with press conferences that should be conducted on a psychotherapist’s couch.
Marcus Evans, its secretive owner, has made millions out of the unofficial corporate hospitality industry.
When he suspected cameras were trained on him, at the last home game, he fled in his helicopter before the final whistle.
Ipswich went on to win the Cup in the 1980-81 season, an achievement now out of reach for a provincial club.
Beattie missed the final, and was refused a medal.
It was not until 2008 that Michel Platini, the UEFA president, thought to right an historic wrong.
Imagine.
Football was a game, back then. Now it’s a business.
Can it be reclaimed, wrestled away from the spivs and speculators? Let’s hope so.
You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one!
from Sunday Mirror Sports writer (http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register)Michael Calvin (http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register), (http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register)
sadly I can remember all this . (http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register)
The Beattie and Terry reference hit a nerve , but as they say dont blame the player blame the game ,but someones to blame . (http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register)
To offer Tevez and actually pay Wayne Rooney £250,000 per week to play football is shameful , and disgusting IMHO
(http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register)
A phone rings in a cold, claustrophobic hotel room in the Polish mining town of Lodz.
It’s London calling, after a delay of an hour, rather than the normal three.
News that John Lennon has been murdered overnight slices through the static.
Russian tanks are massing on the border.
An invasion, designed to ensure the stillbirth of democracy, is apparently imminent.
Poland is threatened with repression, like Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
I’m on the front line of the Cold War, to report a football match.
Thirty years on, that third round UEFA Cup tie between Ipswich Town and Widzew Lodz, has a strange significance.
It is the symbol of a different time, a different world.
Back then, football was a source of inspiration, a vehicle for protest.
Its innocence is beyond comprehension, in an age in which we associate football with corruption, cynicism and cronyism.
Change is inevitable, constant, and horribly revealing.
It was minus 17 on December 10, 1980, when Ipswich went out to protect a 5-0 first leg lead.
The pitch, frozen and covered with compacted snow, was unplayable.
Today, it would cause an international incident. Back then, everyone got on with it.
The Ipswich kit man dislocated his shoulder, twice, ferrying the skips in an ancient van, which had a magnetic attraction to roadside ditches.
The pre-match meal was wild boar casserole. Isotonic drinks were the figment of a marketing man’s imagination.
Most of the Ipswich players, including our very own Terry Butcher, wore woollen tights, mittens, and bobble hats. Kevin Beattie, described by manager Sir Bobby Robson as “the best English-born player I’ve ever seen”, wore a short sleeved shirt.
Modern sports science would have warned him off constant cortisone injections into an arthritic knee, which curtailed his career at 27.
He earned buttons, ended on benefits and nearly drank himself to death.
He was twice the player that John Terry is, on £170,000 a week. Fans, bouncing off each other on steep, unprotected terraces, kept warm by necking litre bottles of vodka.
They sang songs in praise of striking dockworkers in Gdansk, and Lech Walesa, the trade union leader who would become president.
They threw snowballs at sullen soldiers, who were sufficiently peeved to make a show of waving their machine guns. Lodz won 1-0. They had beaten Manchester United and Juventus in the early rounds, an impossibility in these days of Champions League cannon fodder.
Robson, given time to build a club, made the team bus wait for journalists. We all sang Beatles songs on the three hour journey to the airport.
The Cobbold brothers owners with cut-glass accents and formidable thirsts — served Georgian champagne and port.
They famously decreed a crisis at Portman Road involved running out of white wine in the boardroom.
Today the club is in turmoil.
Roy Keane is morphing into Forrest Gump, with press conferences that should be conducted on a psychotherapist’s couch.
Marcus Evans, its secretive owner, has made millions out of the unofficial corporate hospitality industry.
When he suspected cameras were trained on him, at the last home game, he fled in his helicopter before the final whistle.
Ipswich went on to win the Cup in the 1980-81 season, an achievement now out of reach for a provincial club.
Beattie missed the final, and was refused a medal.
It was not until 2008 that Michel Platini, the UEFA president, thought to right an historic wrong.
Imagine.
Football was a game, back then. Now it’s a business.
Can it be reclaimed, wrestled away from the spivs and speculators? Let’s hope so.
You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one!
from Sunday Mirror Sports writer (http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register)Michael Calvin (http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register), (http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register)
sadly I can remember all this . (http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register)
The Beattie and Terry reference hit a nerve , but as they say dont blame the player blame the game ,but someones to blame . (http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register)
To offer Tevez and actually pay Wayne Rooney £250,000 per week to play football is shameful , and disgusting IMHO
(http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/profile/?uAction=register)