State of the Art

John Lanchester

  • Manchester United: The Betrayal of a Legend by Michael Crick and David Smith
    Pelham, 246 pp, £14.95, May 1989, ISBN 0 7207 1783 3
  • Football in its Place: An Environmental Psychology of Football Grounds by David Canter, Miriam Comber and David Uzzell
    Routledge, 173 pp, £10.95, May 1989, ISBN 0 415 01240 6

The broad distinction among English football teams is between hearties and aesthetes. The aesthetes have, fortunately, tended to carry off the main footballing prizes – certainly they look set to do so this year, in the persons of Liverpool Football Club – but the hearties dominate numerically, and set the tone of most of the matches to be seen anywhere in the country on a Saturday afternoon. Hearties subscribe to two tenets, both of which have their origins in a characteristic national turning-away and turning-inwards. The first hearty tenet is called work-rate. Since the early Fifties it has been clear that England was not as good at football as it once thought it was: the traumatic 1950 World Cup defeat at the hands of the USA made this apparent, and it was emphatically rubbed in by the two cataclysmic losses to the Hungarians, 6-3 at Wembley in 1953 and 7-1 in Budapest in 1954.

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[*] From Only a Game?, Dunphy’s embittered and revealing account of his last season as a Millwall player, recently reprinted (Penguin, 224 pp., £5.95, 1987, 0 14 0102 906).

[†] The Book of Football Quotations by Peter Ball and Phil Shaw has, among other good things, a fine collection of Dochertyisms (Century Hutchinson, 272 pp., £5.95, 1986, 0 09 166161 7).