Final Third! by John Smith

Author:John Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

9.

Coming Over Here

‘Manly Musks’

THE FLIPSIDE of all those intrepid travellers that leave these shores and try their luck abroad, are, of course, those that make the reverse journey to try their luck here. What started as a trickle, eventually became a flood in the baggy-shirted nineties and now the British game has become a glorious global village where we have had the fortune to witness the tactical and conditioning advances introduced by elite coaches from around the globe and appreciate some of the greatest players of all time playing on our doorstep such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Thierry Henry and Oumar Niasse.

Arsène Wenger is one of those great innovators, changing the English game when he arrived amid a chorus of derisive shouts of ‘Arsène Who?’ in 1996; but what we didn’t know was that he already had the place in his heart from childhood. In his recent autobiography My Life in Red and White (so called because all of the teams he was associated with played in those colours, and because he spent three summer seasons as a Butlin’s Redcoat),93 Wenger remembers that in his childhood he would watch the FA Cup Final and be in awe of Wembley: ‘Television was still in black and white in those days but the ball stood out brightly against the grass pitch that looked so beautiful.’ He almost brings a tear to the eye as he calls it ‘a dazzling memory: for me, it is the definitive image of football’. Imagine his pride when years later he got to lead his side out at the cathedral of football, again and again. The idea of the hallowed Wembley turf certainly gets overplayed, but here’s a small boy from Alsace giving weight to the idea that it is somehow magical.

Given how privileged people like Wenger feel to become a part of the fabric of our game, you might expect everyone to welcome our foreign cousins with open arms. However, with the exception of Phil Neville, who is described by brother Gary as ‘foreign daft’,94

it isn’t always the case. Rather than seeing an influx of new ideas as a universally positive development, there are, believe it or not, some dissenting voices.

Neil Warnock maintains that ‘you’ve got to keep a certain amount of English players’, while Graeme Souness broadens the remit slightly, saying, ‘We have to retain our Britishness,’ before going into a reverie about how we all ‘like to see young fit men challenging each other physically’ as if he’s talking about the beach volleyball scene in Top Gun.95 He no doubt means good, honest, straight up and down, nine to five, pie and a pint, side-parted, British, young, fit men, though. David Batty complains dismissively that his Newcastle side signed ‘mainly foreigners I had never heard of’, which seems more like his problem than theirs, and David Seaman remembers being ‘less than impressed’ by a similar rash of signings at Arsenal, even if they eventually carried him to immortality. Terry Dyson grumbles that modern players ‘do not have English as their native tongue’.

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