Time and tide

During my summer holiday, I have had several conversations, some late into the night, with my father-in-law. They follow familiar patterns, and usually end with observations relating to the eccentric behaviour of London-born footballers of yesteryear. My father-in-law was raised in West London and saw many of them play in the 1960s, so takes more than a passing interest in the mortality of his contemporaries. He is now over seventy himself and despite being calm about the passing of the years I can tell he gives it some thought. Our conclusion, especially when yet another seventy-something Fulham or QPR star has joined The Football Team In The Sky, is that professional footballers do not make old bones.

We muse on why that might be. For some, it is obvious, and many knew themselves – Johan Cruiyff’s fondness for cigarettes throughout the 1970s, George Best’s desire to drink all the beer in Western Europe, Robin Friday’s love for drugs of all kinds.

Over time I decided to look more deeply into this idea, to see if there really is a link between the lifestyles and health of professional footballers and the amount of time that they can expect to spend in happy retirement. Of course, I ought to have approached the whole thing in a scientific way, define what I was looking for or trying to prove, and compare to men of the same age and social background. As I am basically a sloppy person and prefer to sit nostalgically reading line-ups from the past, I did not of this. My wife looked at my scribblings and immediately shot my logic full of holes. She is good at that. I decided to plough on regardless and present a few facts about footballers, deceased and living.

I am far too lazy to be rigorous and collect reams of information. I did think that I ought to start by looking at FA Cup Final winning teams, to see who is still alive and who has now passed on, but even that seemed a bit too much like hard work. Instead, I looked at the two teams in each World Cup Final.

What I discovered neither proves nor disproves any theory. It is not even very scientific. However, it is, for football geeks, quite interesting.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that there is now nobody left alive who played in the early finals of 1930, 1934 and 1938. To play in 1938, the absolute latest that a player could have been born is 1920 – and he would therefore be 98 now (in the summer of 2018). So, like the Magnificent Seven (all deceased), there is no one left who can give a first-hand account of the joys and sadness of the pre-war World Cup Finals. Or what it was like to stand next to Steve McQueen on set and shoot the breeze.

The first World Cup Final after the Second World War did not happen until 1950. There was supposed to be a tournament in 1946, but nobody could summon the enthusiasm a few short months after the end of the war. A logical thing might have been to re-start in 1948, but that would have meant that the tournament always clashed with the Summer Olympics, so that wasn’t going to happen either.

Surely, I thought, there must be one or two old boys who were on the pitch on the fateful day when Uruguay so spectacularly and shockingly ruined Brazil’s party.

For the uninitiated, the final pool match of the 1950 tournament was almost a final as the winners would top the group and win the World Championship. So confident were the Brazilians that all the street parties were organised before the game. When Uruguay won, and therefore pipped them to the Cup, Brazil fell into a sort of national mourning for eight years. There is even a common phrase in Brazil, Maracanazo, to describe the numbing disappointment of defeat. The game was at home, there were 200 000 people in the Maracana. It’s hard to imagine a parallel situation today.

Is there anyone left to tell the story?

Not one. All twenty-two players have now gone. These players, some born in the mid-1920s, would all be in their nineties now.

The last to pass away, ironically, was the ultimate party-pooper, Alcide Ghiggia, who scored the goal to snatch the Cup away from Brazil. He did so on 16^th July 1950. A second irony is that his time finally came on 16^th July 2015, exactly 65 years after his most glorious day.

The match, and its aftermath, created decades of animosity between Brazil and Uruguay, and whilst the Uruguay players became national heroes you can imagine that they were never very popular when returning to Brazil in subsequent years.

As a happy postscript, the Brazilian Football Federation, now five World Titles to the good and the wounds of 1950 almost forgotten, invited Ghiggia back to the Maracana in 2009 to have his feet immortalised in the Walk of Fame. He graciously accepted.

All those who experienced the drama of 1950, at least on the field, are now gone. It’s not surprising really, considering the fact that the referee, Englishman George Reader, was born in 1896.

My search continued. In 1954 West Germany beat the Marvellous Magyars in Switzerland. At last there are old men to talk about. Of the twenty-two who ended the game, just one is left. Playing on 4^th July 1954 was Horst Eckel (born 1932).

None of this proves anything about how long footballers live compared to people born around the same time, by the way, but it’s still interesting to know. All the Hungarian team, blessed with so many talents, are now gone.

By 1958, though, there is something to say. The men of 1958 were born between 1925 and 1940, so you would expect plenty of them to be alive. Add to that the fact that some idea about sports medicine and keeping healthy was beginning to creep into football by the end of the fifties, you’d expect that the Grim Reaper had not done much business. It is shocking, therefore, to find out that of Brazil’s first World Champions, only two are still alive: Pele (born 1940) and Mário Zagallo (born 1931). Shockingly, many died in the 1970s and 1980s, in early to late middle age. The Swedes, who I had assumed might have had slightly easier lives and perhaps better healthcare, fared little better – only three still alive (Börjesson, Hamrin and Simonsson). Owing to his age, Börjesson is the oldest living World Cup Finalist - he was born in 1929, before Horst Eckel of the 1954 final.

I know quite a few men who were the right age to play in the 1958 World Cup Final – many still loudly proclaim that they should have been selected (despite being neither Brazilian or Swedish), and all are still alive.

Four years later and it is still quite a sad tale. 1962 seems more recent that it actually is, perhaps because of the cultural impact of the Beatles, the events of the early sixties and so on. Fifty-six years is a long time. Of the victorious Brazilians, only two are left (Zagallo again and Amarildo, who replaced the injured Pele), and there are three Czechs or Slovaks – Jelínek, Scherer and Kadraba. I find the 1962 survivors the most startling, with a total of only five. If I was going to be at all scientific, I would start to look at life expectancy of men in Brazil. If the national team is anything to go by, I might have a theory.

It is in 1966 that mortality and nature take a turn for the more optimistic. From England’s finest hour, eight players remain. We have only lost Bobby Moore and Alan Ball, and Ray Wilson just this year. It is a similar story for the West Germans, as Haller and Emmerich have now passed away. All are near contemporaries of my parents, and many seem to be enjoying a happy and fulfilled retirement.

So what does all this mean? Well, the march of time indicates that for those playing in 1966, something drastic is going to happen over the next four years. I suppose that all of us, football nostalgists or not, must steel ourselves for the strong possibility that the next four or five years will be filled with many sadnesses and goodbyes. Such is the power on our imaginations of the Boys of 66 that this is not going to be an easy process.

Perhaps the good vibes created by the England side this year will finally bear fruit in 2022 and create new history.

The Old Ways

The Old Ways – A Journey On Foot by Robert MacFarlane

It is quite rare that I read a book that immediately goes into my top-ten list of favourite non-fiction.

I came to Robert MacFarlane’s book after watching a TV documentary that he wrote about Nan Shepherd, the Patron Saint of the Cairngorms. I immediately read ‘The Living Mountain’ by Shepherd, and then by chance found a copy, brand new, of ‘The Old Ways’ in a charity shop. Being a romantic I liked the strange chance that led me to picking it up, and the many worlds that it opened up for me.

It’s as if Robert MacFarlane knows all the interesting, quirky and windswept landscapes that I love so much, has already visited them all, and tied it all up in one book.

This book is also a field guide for all the influences that can shape a person and their view of the world into one of affection, wisdom, and the love of walking. Whitman is here, Emerson, John Masefield, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and George Borrow. There are many side-roads that can be explored. An example is George Borrow. As a student I passed George Borrow Road in Norwich, and never gave it a second thought. In these pages the author describes Borrow, his life, and who he influenced.

Throughout, I kept thinking about the inheritance of great thinkers from one generation to the next, a little like the line of descent of eastern wisdom. At the end of Robert MacFarlane’s line of inheritance is Edward Thomas, the walker, writer, poet and soldier who died at Arras in 1917.

But to describe The Old Ways as a book about people doesn’t even get close to why it is magnificent. It is primarily a book about landscapes. MacFarlane senses that our long link to the earth beneath our feet is metaphorically and literally being eroded, and when the link is broken we stand to lose so much. He writes with beauty and care about how the ancient people of The British Isles tended their landscape, took care over the paths that run through it and over it, and how their lives contributed to it and it to them. From Neolithic times, when people first made an impression on the landscape through barrows, chalk cuts, pathways and stones, we have shaped the landscape and it has shaped us. With hundreds of carefully crafted examples, the author leads the reader through a series of landscapes and reminds him or her what is special and distinct. It is a major piece of great writing, and had me reaching for other books to learn more. We are connected by our footfall, and it is this that is the centre of Robert MacFarlane’s meditation.

The message, perhaps, is that we understand our land through physical movement across it. If we cut that link, how can we understand, and how can we think?

Pathways do not just exist on land. I enjoyed the writing about the sea-ways that until recent times were a very important part of the lives of so many people. There are chapters about the far north, the lost people who lived around the sea instead of around the land. We now look inwards to our road and rail networks – something that people in previous centuries would not understand. Instead, they considered the sea, and its relative ease of movement, to be at the centre of things. We are an island people, after all.

This book is primarily about the British Isles, but there are other adventures as well. There is a chapter about Ramallah, and how walking there is becoming a political act. There is also a section about the graceful and dangerous Minya Konka in Tibet.

It is when the writer returns to Britain and the land of Edward Thomas that the book makes most of the link between person and place. It is clear that Thomas is a hero. After reading this book, I felt compelled to add a little chapter of my own by making a detour in Northern France. With significant difficulty I managed to find Thomas’ grave at Agny, just south of Arras. As the book is so much about being out in the landscape, I decided to follow the advice.

This is a magnificent book. It takes some reflection and digestion. Read it, and start following some paths of your own that you have been putting off for so long. Leave the car at home.

A walk through grief

In a rather miraculous way, I have charted a path through life that has been remarkably untouched by grief. I am in my early forties, so have experienced the loss of all my grandparents, and one work colleague was killed in a car accident ten years ago. Apart from that, I have lived quite a charmed life.

My parents are both well and physically fit in their mid-seventies, and whilst I have thought about the crippling grief that the loss of a parent will involve, I have been quite the emotional cripple and not spent time looking at it face on.

This summer, one quiet Sunday afternoon, my wife walked down the garden in tears to tell me that my best friend had died suddenly in his sleep. He was forty-two, cycled many miles each week, played five-a-side football and had a better diet than me. Here was grief, fresh and brutal, with no warning at all.

My wife and I went through the process of saying goodbye to my best friend together – he was, after all, a best friend of hers as well. We booked a strange hotel, agonised over which funeral clothes still fitted, made the terribly difficult phone call to his father, and travelled to the north for the service. In the absence of a sibling I gave a speech at the funeral. All too quickly, we were back on the train to London and he had physically vanished from our lives.

I found it odd, and my wife noticed, that I appeared not to grieve. She was worried. At what point, she asked, was the explosion of grief going to happen, and how much clearing up was going to be needed when it did?

It began thinking about grief, its many forms, and how we all cope differently with the events leading up to and closing the death of a loved one.

I came to the conclusion that I am what I might term an alcohol griever. In traditional English male fashion, I bury my grief deeply (just about every internet article tells me that this is NOT the thing to do) and it bubbles to the surface in unguarded moments, lubricated by Pale Ale or Rioja. There is a brief, maudlin and uncomfortable ten minutes and then the emotion moves on, as my corrupted senses move to the next room in my head, and I find myself empty and in need of nostalgia.

Will I ever grieve properly? I doubt it. What worries me is that I might appear somehow heartless for this way of carrying on. I really am not. I miss my best friend terribly and think about him every day. I often check my instant messenger and read the last thing he typed to me. But as far as public shows of emotion go, I doubt that there will be any, and there definitely won’t be a gut-spilling on social media.

I thought about how others grieve. I think that the way we say goodbye to people works rather badly.

There is an awkwardness in Christian ceremonies because in most cases many of the mourners do not believe in the Christian promise of resurrection. Even in a very believing community, the hit-rate of cast-iron believers isn’t going to be more than eighty percent. What that means is for all the hope and joy of returning to God, there will be a fifth of people keeping quiet, doubting it all, and despairing quite a lot at the helplessness of the situation. That’s where you are going to get real emotion, genuine grief, and sadness.

There is also the uncomfortable feeling that many who claim to be believers have only come back into a church because it is The Right Thing To Do, and haven’t been to church on a Sunday for many years.

And there are the others who don’t know the words to the hymns, are intimidated by the ceremony, and wish that there was a chance to play a Robbie Williams track.

The flip side, which is the case for the majority in the UK, is a secular service in a crematorium. It is shorn of many of the traditions of the Christian way of doing things, which people have been used to for a thousand years, and what is left is a strange amalgam of different practices. We have music, but it is often something that the family of the deceased thought he or she would like. We have speeches, bravely made by family and friends, none of whom are experienced in public speaking. Rather like a children’s school play, the audience is not going to grumble and goodwill carries them through. And then there in The Poem. If all else, when my time comes, please spare the mourners The Poem. It is lovingly crafted, usually by someone who is writing poetry for the first time since he or she was in a Junior School. It has painful rhyming couplets (because it always has to rhyme) and contains syrupy observations meant for the only person that cannot hear them. Also, there is no good rhyme for the word ‘football’.

So with a hotch-potch of different little tributes, we are sent on our way, and in the UK that means a button pressed, the closing of the curtain, and a tinny reproduction of ‘My Way’. How can that help anyone come to terms with the loss of someone dear to them?

I feel that the process of grieving in the UK is somewhat out of kilter. It doesn’t help people who want to come to terms with loss.

I think what actually happens is we don’t have the opportunity to grieve properly for those we love, so we head to the media for a suitable replacement activity. Newspapers are still sold on the back of the emotion surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. When any footballer dies, there are black armbands at every fixture and a minute’s silence before every game. Is any of this emotion genuine, or are people just using the event of a famous death to transfer private grief?

How touched are we really, for example, by the death of a 1970s celebrity, and how many of us are scared to say that we really don’t care that much, because we fear a social media backlash from the Emotional Police?

The passing of David Bowie was a good example. I am sure that for his family, his loss is awful, just as it would be for any of us. By all accounts he was a marvellous husband, father and friend. But what I fear happened was that the journalists who produce much of the content we read (many of whom were teenagers in the 70s) saw it as a great opportunity for a public mourning. I have no problem with that as it is, but I don’t think everybody should be obliged to join in. What if you didn’t like Bowie’s music? Were you obliged, as everyone else was, to post that poignant lyric, just to seem normal? It’s not normal. It’s ghoulish.

The internet has spawned a lot of this, which is a digital extension of the ‘Happy 40^th Birthday, Mike!’ signs you used to see posted on roundabouts in the 1980s. (Remember them?) It is a sign that people need to be seen to be feeling something, and everyone else has to know about it. An emotion is not real and validated unless everyone else can see it.

Are we really that emotionally immature?

I return to my own emotional constipation. I did do a couple of things to express my grief, and to attempt to help others see how much my dear friend meant. I bought a football shirt, and told only my wife, two old college friends and my friend’s sons the significance of the choice of colour. It was a private and closed expression of loss.

I also wrote to his father and his wife. The cards didn’t make much sense, but I hope they helped them a little.

And finally, in a few quiet moments, I shared stories with my wife about our three way shared past. We laughed and were sad.

None of it was shared on Facebook. My friend would have appreciated that.