One Night in Turin by Pete Davies

Author:Pete Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446443033
Publisher: Random House

12 John Barnes

The trouble with Barnesy

John Barnes wears Diadora – they pay him to – and he looks good in it. But then, he’d probably look good in oily rags and a tarpaulin.

No other England player has the easy glamour of John Barnes. It’s not that he’s uniquely more skilled – Chris Waddle or Paul Gascoigne can each, in their way, be equally electric. But no one else is bewitching like John Barnes – no one else has his lazy pace and grace. And when John Barnes moves – when he approaches his man, then elegantly slips him and speeds away like he did it without a thought, like it came as easy as stepping out in the morning to pick up the milk – that’s what the people come to see.

He has a way of running with the ball that makes it seem like gravity’s not a problem to him in the way it is to ordinary mortals; a flying, dancing lilt in his stride suggests he can go this way, or that way, and either way it doesn’t matter, you’ll still be there when he’s gone. So defenders tumble before him; he induces a bodily panic, they buckle at the waist and backtrack frantically, bent double, their arms spread wide trying to fill the chasms of space he opens all around them – because he makes room where there isn’t any, and that’s what the people come to see.

And yet, and yet … Diadora had a poster in Italy of a naked man caught in a strikingly athletic lunge for a high ball. The slogan was, ‘Cover Yourself In Glory’. And covering himself in glory is something that John Barnes, with England, has never really done.

He went into the World Cup voted England’s Footballer of the Year (by the Football Writers’ Association) for the second year running. And he went into it with fifty-three caps – but only ten goals.

The finest of those came when he was twenty years old, in the Maracana stadium in Rio in 1984. He went on his invisible wings of grace and pace past one man, then another; he cut in, lacing his weightless, drifting way into the area – he slipped a third man, and stroked it away … he left you, and them, stunned with disbelieving admiration. He’d gone with England into one of the great temples of world football – and scored a goal worthy of Pele at his best.

Not everyone liked it. A fistful of NF thugs followed England on that tour – and though we’d won 2–0, these people (who took the same flight as the squad from Montevideo to Santiago, and barracked Barnes all the way) said the score was only 1–0, because ‘Nig goals don’t count’.

Fully paid-up members of the human race, however, saw in that goal one of the brightest England hopes of all time. And although since then, as Robson said, we were ‘still waiting’ for John Barnes – still waiting, six years on – he nevertheless went to Italy as one of the great prospects of Italia ’90.

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