Football in the memory

 For most children in Britain, a question that follows ‘What is your earliest memory?’ is ‘What is the first match you remember?’ For some people, the two are inseparable. For most, unless memory is pushed back by a very significant match, the earliest game falls around the seventh birthday.

I would like to think I remember the 1978 World Cup, but in reality, there is no clarity there for me. The only thing that triggers synapses in the European Cup Final of the same year is the fact that the game started in spring sunlight and darkness soon fell around Wembley. I may have been sent to bed soon after kick-off, only to wake the next morning to the news of the result.

However, I do remember the 1981 League Cup Final and European Cup Final with crystal clarity. They happened in the spring that I was seven.

This memory prompted me to ponder how far back the living football memory can reach in the UK. My father remembers the 1953 FA Cup Final, the first he saw on a television. He will be eighty next year. There will be one hundred-year-old fans out there somewhere with clear memories of a game at the age of six or seven, so perhaps football’s living memory in 2022 extends back as far as the last year of the 1920s. As every year passes, those who witnessed football from that time slip away and the earliest remembered games creep forward. In the next few years, perhaps, there might be nobody left who remembers a pre-war game.

All this became relevant in recent weeks when I began compiling a list in my head of the greatest player in every position that I had ever known. It is a bread-and-butter staple of the football fan in idle moments. In times when your team is failing miserably, it provides reassurance. It is deeply nostalgic, dependent on age, and endlessly amusing as you can use so many parameters to frame your choices.

As messages flew back and forth between London and Perth, Western Australia, where my co-conspirator is based, it soon became clear that there were at least three different team sheets being compiled. Firstly, there was a team of players that have played in your lifetime. For any reasonable discussion (and definitely those fuelled by alcohol consumption) this limitation is important to maintain some sense of reality. No matter how well versed the ardent football fan might be after viewing hours of video footage, it is really difficult to honestly judge players who were active before you were born. It can be a real problem for some people, especially those in their forties and fifties, such were the long shadows cast, for example, by the Busby Babes, the Boys of 66 or the great Brazilian team of Pele and his golden shirted brothers.

For the record, I did compile a fantasy list of players born and active in any era, largely because I feel strongly that Pele should not be excluded from any selection. This, however, was reasonably rejected on grounds that we can’t ever really know what it was like to watch them. The total number of minutes of footage of Sir Stanley Matthews might only amount to five or six hours. So aside from the first list of players active in your life, the secondary list, though more fun, really might as well be an act of fantasy.

There was a third list going on at the same time of favourite players, which was even more outrageous that the fantasy time-travel line-up.

The thing to learn from all this guesswork that became clear to me is that a greatest team for a person born in 1987 will be wildly different to someone born in 1973. Growing up when I did, my team sheet was populated by British players on the early 1980s, with a smattering of Germans and Italians. It dawned on me that the great Barcelona and Real Madrid sides of the new century had completely passed me by. I had not even paid much attention to the late 1990s, despite Manchester United having a side containing the likes of Cantona and Scholes. By contrast, the team sheet of my slightly younger friend contained a more cosmopolitan mix of southern Europeans, and a greater depth of appreciation of the vast choice and diversity of wonderful footballers there have been since I stopped paying attention quite so much.

The two of us, digesting these differences, also realised that there are adults now who remember no football from the Twentieth Century whatsoever. My nephew, recently turned eighteen, is fantastically knowledgeable about football today and understands positions and tactics far more than I ever did. He has no knowledge though of what it was like to watch Zinedine Zidane command a football pitch, because he wasn’t born when it was happening.

Modern broadcasters were castigated for years for airbrushing out of history any achievements that happened Before The Premier League. In the early years of the Premier League, this was with justification, as there was a rich and recent history that was being ignored. However, all that history is more than thirty years ago. For the twelve-year-old football fan, it really is ancient history. A whole generation of football fans have grown up under my nose who only remember the Premier League, and think the League Championship is something that Norwich win every other season. If I slip up and call Europe’s second competition the UEFA Cup, I am met with blank stares. And they are not wrong. Football, like all history, edges ever on. It will not wait for me. Or you. Or even the little boy in London wearing a Ronaldo shirt, and regarding him as a miraculous old man.

Football before the Second World War has become the football of prehistory. It is understood, there is documentary evidence that it happened, but nobody is alive that can tell you what it was like.

Football from the fifties to the seventies, the era of huge nostalgia, is rapidly joining that previous era in a compartmentalised box opened only by the very old, who wish to breath the air of their youth briefly one more time.

And the eighties? You have to be nearly fifty to remember it all, so it too will quite soon be a time that is only referenced to explain why Nottingham Forest have two stars on their badge.

Don’t be sad. The techno gods will not be deleting YouTube any time soon.