THE LOUTS AREN'T IN THE STANDS ANYMORE, THEY'RE ON THE FIELD:

Bobby Robson and the decline of British decency: He was by all accounts a lovely bloke. But behind the effusive eulogising there lurks a disdain for today’s allegedly crass football fans and players. (Tim Black, 8/03/09, Spiked)

[W]hat has been so striking about the response to Robson’s death is the extent to which it is not just his achievements that are being acknowledged, but the man himself. Patrick Barclay at The Times began his tribute by stating: ‘You cannot talk about Bobby Robson the manager without first talking about Bobby Robson the man.’

Warm, passionate, caring, humble, strong… the adjectives have been plentiful. Above all Robson seems to have been a truly lovely, loveable man - players wanted to play for him, to run, as England defender Terry Butcher put it, through a brick wall for him; others just wanted to make him proud. The Brazilian striker Ronaldo, at his peak the greatest player in the world, called Robson the best manager he ever worked for; Lineker said his relationship with Robson was the most important of his career. And Sven Goran Eriksson, one of his successors as England manager, simply called him ‘one of the kindest people I have met’.

He was also, of course, ‘very endearing, quite comical’, to use the words of Glenn Hoddle, a man not averse himself to the unintentionally comic quip. While at PSV Eindhoven in the early 1990s Robson is reported to have said: ‘I would have given my right arm to be a pianist.’ His ability to forget names was legendary. Upon encountering England captain Bryan Robson in a lift during the 1990 World Cup, he said ‘Hi Bobby’, to which Bryan replied: ‘No, I’m Bryan, you’re Bobby.’

And yet in amongst the praise and affectionate remembrance, there has been something else, too: a barely concealed resentment of the culture associated with modern football. If Robson has been almost sanctified, it has come at the cost of demonising the contemporary footballer. In Mark Austin’s column in the Sunday Mirror, a 60-word piece on Robson still managed to use Robson as a stick with which to berate the present: ‘He had charm and warmth and passion - and there’s not much of that in modern football.’ The Daily Telegraph’s Henry Winter began his tribute with the strangely bitter line ‘Football lost more of its soul yesterday’, before explaining that ‘a sport hardly blessed with statesmen instantly becomes a poorer place’.

The sentiment has been clear. Modern football is too commercial, too grasping, too business-like in its dealings. It has produced ‘blingy, boy-toy obsessed’ players, man-boys more interested in ‘birds, booze and fast cars’ than the game that so enchanted Robson. As Winter notes: ‘There was an old-world dignity to Robson, an individual often bemused by this “bling thing” of the modern game.’ Steven Howard in the Sun was equally aware of Robson’s meaning: ‘Everything about Bobby Robson was a little sepia-tinted, a reminder of the good old days when there was respect and honesty and an eagerness to help one’s fellow man.’ The obituary in The Times was content to allude to the ‘tensions between Robson, the product of a proud, self-disciplined working-class background, and the modern generation of multimillionaire players’.

So the response to Robson’s death has not only appraised the man’s legacy; it has also crystallised a deep ambiguity about football now. Never has the game been more popular, and yet never have those involved been more reviled.

It's ironic that the affluence that has come to soccer in England has made tickets too expensive for the thugs but at the same time made the players into spoiled brats.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 3, 2009 10:19 AM