When football had soul and humility

BLINK and you may have missed it on television, but at the end of the FA Cup Final last Saturday, Chelsea captain, John Terry, was pictured shaking hands with Fabrice Muamba on his way to holding aloft the famous trophy.

Terry, followed by Frank Lampard along with a succession of Chelsea players, warmly embraced and spoke to the Bolton Wanderers footballer who, just weeks earlier, had been lying critically ill at a London hospital after collapsing during a Premiership match.

The unbelievable outpouring of compassion and care shown towards the unfortunate Muamba by players and supporters from all shades of football was heart-warming and benevolent, yet it was also at odds with the ugly side which, at times, the professional game seems to represent.

As a piece of entertainment, the professional game is right up there. Skill levels are supreme, the quality of football sits at an unparalleled and unprecedented level. 

Yet the pay-off is that professional football is also a sport riddled with arrogant, millionaire footballers whose foul-mouthed pitch side tirades require few lip-reading skills, and whose propensity to play the game without honour betrays a spirit of the game where it once mattered.  

Equally, watch any television close-ups of some of the fans, spittle spewing from their mouths, fists thumping at rivals supporters, players, the referee - it borders on the moronic and pathetic. 

So like Jekyll and Hyde, these same upstanding citizens bowed their heads in sombre silence, put partisanship to one side, to describe football as a force for good in coming together for Fabrice Muamba. 

To me, this banal behaviour bordered as hypocritical, as if football was playing its credibility card.

Football lost all credibility the day it sold its soul and traditions to commercial television. How can the FA Cup Final be relegated to a 5.15pm sideshow on a Saturday afternoon following a programme of league football where key relegation and promotion issues were being decided?

Remember when FA Cup Final day was a day when football stopped and everyone's day was shaped around three 'o clock kick-off at Wembley Stadium's Twin Towers – the long TV lead-in from early morning with “FA Cup It's A Knockout”, interviews from the team hotels, cameras on board the team coaches, all the previews and goals, celebrity chats, Goal of the Season, the players walking out on the pitch, “Abide With Me” and then the final itself with David Coleman, John Motson, or if you fancied the simultaneous ITV offering, Brian Moore?!

I've just finished reading a book called “Steak...Diana Ross – Diary of a Football Nobody” by David McVay. He was a journeyman defender who played for unfashionable Notts County during the 1970s. The Magpies were my team, lumbering around at the time in the old Division 4, before eventually working their way up to the nose-bleeding heights of Division 1 guided by the irrepressible Scot, Jimmy Sirrell and later Howard Wilkinson.

The book is not a ghosted autobiography written by one of the Premiership fancy dans after a career spanning the life cycle of a rabbit. 

Instead, McVay's delightful book is a gentle jaunt through life as a footballer when the game was so much simpler, and poorer. It unstrips some of the legends who I grew up with and idolised; Don Masson, Brian Stubbs, Steve Carter, Les Bradd, Eric Probert and Arthur Mann. Their photos, cut from the pages of the Nottingham Evening Post, along with the match reports remain glued in scrapbooks hidden somewhere in my loft.

McVay's book tells of players' nights out after games, their madcap antics in training and even before matches. The played hard, and enjoyed life too – mainly Woodbines and Shipstones Ale! McVay was paid a paltry £25 a week and £40 a point, and drove around in a battered K-reg Fiat 218. No quarter was given in matches, or even in training at times, especially if one of the young apprentices tried to show up one of the pros, but there was a humility about the players and a depth to the game.

These players connected with their community and understood how it felt to go to work on a Monday morning after a team's loss on the Saturday – which was a frequent occurrence for County fans. They also respected their rivals as the book details how closely the Forest and County players got on even though the Reds from across the Trent were always regarded as the illustrious cousins.

Of course, football wasn't so wonderful then. Hooliganism, poor stadia, boggy grounds, hardly any live football on TV – just Match of the Day or the Big Match on a Sunday – and often the quality of football wasn't that great. But the atmosphere at grounds was generally rustic, and the pie and chips tasted bloody great. There was a charming innocence about football in the 1970s.

There is much to praise the modern game for, notably the rapid medical attention which Fabrice Muamba received at White Hart Lane which saved his life and the excellent stadia we now enjoy at top dollar prices.

However, football has lost its soul and will sadly never regain it.