Thou Shall Not Pass by Leo Moynihan

Author:Leo Moynihan [Moynihan, Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472972927

7

THE DARK ARTS

How Centre-Halves Bend the Rules

It was a rite of passage. A footballing bar mitzvah, if you like. For a certain generation of player, the day your hitherto unmarked face met an opponent’s sly elbow, or the back of your head was introduced to an adversary’s furrowed brow, it meant you had made it and were now very much part of football’s dark and often violent world.

Coaches and their manuals might teach football’s skill set, ways of harnessing a player’s talent and improving the way they play the game, but it was through sheer (and literal) bloody experience that a footballer learnt that much of their time on the football field was going to be spent both giving and taking a certain amount of what can be affectionately known as ‘the rough stuff’.

Football’s dark arts have long been part of our centre-half’s arsenal. Traditionally not the most skilful player on the pitch, a centre-half is in the business of preventing skill. Something has to give and for generations, that prevention came from methods outside of the game’s rule book.

‘I remember my first time,’ says Chris Waddle, a player who while seeking space, could make a centre-half look particularly foolish, and frankly that wouldn’t do. ‘It was in training at Newcastle. I was a young lad, showing off, trying to impress the manager. We had a good centre-half, very typical of the late 1970s. Stuart Boam was his name. Hard. I’m doing all my step-overs and tricks, and crack, I’m on the floor. Stuart is standing over me. “Listen, kid, I get a good bonus if I play Saturday, and you doing all that and taking the piss out of me, making me look silly, might stop that happening. Cut it out.” My lesson was learnt.’

Mark Bright, a player who came up the ranks of lower-league football in the late 1970s before scoring top flight goals at Crystal Palace and Sheffield Wednesday, was used to hard men marking him, but didn’t experience the sneakier side of things until he was marked by Slaven Bilić in the 1990s. ‘Everyone learns them from someone,’ Bright says, ‘and Slaven Bilić was the first player who wrapped his arms around me on a corner. He let go as soon as the ball was cleared. I was shocked. He looked and said, “It’s the Continental way.” I said, “I’ll show you something English in a minute.”’

For today’s footballing public, their eyes aided by cameras at every conceivable angle and fuelled by their demand for fair play (perhaps when it suits their team), the idea of a player punched, pinched, kicked, trod on, spat at or grabbed by the genitals must seem archaic, a leftover from the days when the pitches weren’t green, and the antics that went on them were as dirty as the kits the players wore from the field.

‘My first league game I was marking Joe Jordan at Bristol City,’ recalls ex-Wimbledon centre-half Alan Reeves. ‘First minute, no attempt to get the ball, he just elbowed me in the nose.

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