John Redwood

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EVENING POST - Team Sports

I like team sports, and admire those who play them to a high standard. I looked forward to the World Cup to show us a magnificent month of the beautiful game. Instead, it degenerated into a sequence of professional fouls, unpleasant jibes, and the infamy for both Rooney and Zidane of exit from their team’s most important game on a red card.

The whole competition was full of the deepest irony. Italy’s winning team returned home to see which of their great clubs are demoted for cheating in their domestic contest. The footballer of the Competition award went to the man who was sent off for head butting an opponent in the final. The England management kept telling us our team would pull together and play well once Rooney was fit enough to play a full ninety minutes, only for Rooney to use his foot to damage another player so the referee intervened to prevent him playing to full time. In the opening rounds time after time we saw energetic young national sides made up of players from junior leagues in the rich west make the greats from the overpaid superleagues look quite ordinary.

Football will take solace in the palace full of money the competition has generated from TV rights and from sponsorship. The losing players will return to their big money clubs and plan another year hauling in the cash. The managers of the game will not decide on reform.

To me, football is ripe for change whilst it still commands the attention and the financial clout it currently enjoys. Cricket has had to change and adapt, as it has found a diminishing audience for the five day game where not enough happens over by over for the casual spectator. As someone who admires the serious struggle of a five day test and can find a succession of dot balls fascinating as neither batsman nor bowler can break through, I fully understand why to most it is not much better than watching paint dry. As a result cricket has come up with an astonishing new game, 20/20. In a breathless three hours people will see around 450 runs and 15 or 20 different batsmen. The other day a single batsman set a new record of hitting 141 runs himself in the available 120 balls for his team. It is quite unlike any team sport, offering far more action. It makes the few runs in baseball or even half a dozen tries in a good rugby game look positively dull.

Football, by contrast, offered us maybe 2 goals over one and half hours or two hours with extra time in the typical world cup contest. It’s absurd offside rule meant that many times when a good attack had been built up play had to be stopped because the attacker had pressed ahead a pace too far for the pernickety rule. Referees, unlike rugby referees who constantly advise players how to stay within the rules, acted like grumpy headmasters blowing the whistle after most heavy challenges. Sometimes players deserved to be stopped because they deliberately tripped the man who had got the better of them, or they used their arms to bring the ball under control.

Football has two great advantages in the UK. It is easy to practise at a low level, as all you need is some open ground and a ball. It remains the one team sport that most state schools offer, giving us a far greater choice of player than we have for cricket and rugby. However, there is no heaven sent reason why football has to stay popular with the audience. The tickets are now very dear to go the ground of a major club, and the shirts and other trappings are expensive. If football does not lift its game, it could be outpaced by more interesting and better behaved sports.

So what should the beautiful game do to earn its description? It could make games more interesting by abolishing the offside rule, and giving attackers more chance of scoring, so we enjoy more goals. It should tell referees to keep the game flowing wherever possible, playing an advantage rule more often. It should limit the number of foreign players that any given English club can employ, to give more scope for local talent and to provide some limit to the sky high transfer fees. It should introduce a cap on players wages to introduce some reality into the fantasy world of current pay and fees. It should encourage clubs to sell cheaper family tickets for people wishing to come as regular supporters en famille. The new England manager should stop relying on the talisman of one or two favoured players, and start to build a squad who play regularly together, know what positions they are going to play in and settle down with a formation they all think works for them.

The nation feels let down by the World Cup. Many talented players failed to deliver the fine free flowing attacking football we have seen on many occasions from Chelsea , Arsenal and other leading clubs. I felt fans had paid a small fortune for the England management and players, only to see it all fall apart when it mattered. Football is big business. It has to remember that the fans and TV audiences pay the bills, and they expect to be entertained, even if we cannot always win. As a spectator you like to think your team might win, and know that if they lose they have given their all and behaved to a good sporting standard. Before tripping the next man or head butting another opponent, players should remember it is only a game, and there are rules for good reasons.