"When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea" - Eric Cantona
"I'll tell you honestly. I will love it if we beat them, love it" - Kevin Keegan
Fever Pitch:The Rise Of The Premier League (BBC2/iPlayer, originally aired back in August 2021) was a very enjoyable trip down memory lane. It told the story of the formation of and the first seven years of the titular league. Culminating, of course, with a famous night in Barcelona when Manchester Utd staged the mother of all comebacks to defeat Bayern Munich to win both the Champions League trophy and the treble.
A treble that, at the time, felt like it would never be achieved again. But I was watching Fever Pitch in 2023 and football is, in some ways, very different now. Man City won that treble last season and could easily do so again this season. Abu Dhabi own Man City, the Saudis own Newcastle, the World Cup was held in Qatar, and the Saudi Pro League has signed stars of the calibre of Cristiano Ronaldo, Karin Benzema, Neymar, N'Golo Kante, Riyad Mahrez, Sadio Mane, and former LGBTQ+ ally (but no more) Jordan Henderson.
States that execute journalists and criminalise homosexuality are using sport to launder their reputations so regularly and so blatantly there's even a word for it - sportswashing - but that's another story, one about the imperiled future of football, for another time. Fever Pitch was about the nineties and in the nineties I was a lot younger so the main thing I felt watching it was an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for the days when I watched all those games, all those moments, often in pubs with my friends.
Set to a soundtrack of New Order, The Cure, Primal Scream, The Charlatans, Jesus Jones, Simple Minds, The Fall, Blur, The Lightning Seeds, M-People, and, er, Technotronic the story is told by a fairly impressive roll call of talking heads. From the managerial/business end there's David Dein, Martin Edwards, and Kenny Dalglish and then there's a lot of players you'll remember (fondly or not) from the time:-
Alan Shearer, David Beckham, Eric Cantona, Gary Neville, Les Ferdinand, Vinne Jones, David James, Gary Palllister, Peter Schmeichel, Colin Hendry, Paul Parker, Chris Sutton, Graeme Le Saux, Keith Gillespie, Richard Shaw, Ray Parlour, Jamie Redknapp, Paul Merson, Martin Keown, and Jason Wilcox.
I started to think who WASN'T there and made a brief list:- Michael Owen, Andy Cole, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt, Roy Keane, Dennis Bergkamp, Tony Adams, Stan Collymore, Robbie Fowler, Ryan Giggs, Ian Wright, Ryan Giggs (hmm, wonder why not?), Teddy Sheringham, and Patrick Vieira but of course there are many more. It was good that the programme also included the views, and reminisces, of journalists, agents, physios, psychologists, and even Sky TV's head of sport and it was only right and proper that fans, including season ticket holders, got a say in the story as without them there would be no story.
The story began by looking back to the eighties, an era of football hooliganism (including an infamous riot when Luton hosted Millwall in the FA Cup in 1985), bad press, and empty stadiums. The violence and the 'inter city firms' were causing the rest of the fans to lose interest in the game. A game which, according to the Sunday Times, had become " a slum sport watched by slum people in slum stadiums".
The turning point, for me and many others, came with Italia '90. Nessun Dorma, Gazza's tears, Lineker looking towards Bobby Robson and asking him to have a word, Cameroon beating Argentina. It's a tournament I remember so clearly and so fondly. Not so much for the football but for the atmosphere and for the fact that I was twenty-one years old at the time and had a brilliant bunch of mates and a great social life.
25,000,000 people in the UK watched England go out on penalties to West Germany in the semi-final and business minded chairmen like Dein (Arsenal) and Edwards (Man U) sensed it was time for a change so they joined with the chairmen of Liverpool, Everton, and Tottenham (then the big five - and still five of six teams never relegated from the Premier League - the other being Chelsea) and decided to break away from the football league, reinvent themselves, and start again. Year zero.
There was, of course, a lot of resistance but satellite television proved to be their friend. Television, like football, was going through a revolution and Rupert Murdoch's new Sky TV wasn't proving to be much of a success. Movies weren't bringing people over to Sky in significantly large numbers so Murdoch and other Sky bosses wondered if football might do the trick.
The top flight, no longer Division One - now the Premier League, moved to Sky and Murdoch paid a huge amount to make this happen. Fans could no longer watch the games at home and had to either buy a Sky dish or go down the pub to watch football. Most of us went down the pub. Football in pubs now is pretty standard (and a surefire way to ruin some people's pub experience) but before the Premier League you'd be lucky to find a portable TV placed in a small corner of the room.
There were initial teething problems. Getting Undercover to perform their cover of Baker Street on the pitch, having weird giant inflatable sumo wrestlers rolling around, and cheerleaders. This was modelled on the American idea of sport as entertainment. People thought Rupert Murdoch had lost the plot. He hadn't. He soon realised that football fans wanted one thing and one thing only - football. Ok, maybe beer and pies too but Murdoch wasn't gonna provide that.
Another person who many believed had lost the plot was Alex Ferguson, the manager of Man Utd. In the Premiership's first season, he'd been in charge of Man U for six years and they'd not won the title yet (in fact, they hadn't won it since 1967) and the fans were getting restless. In their first game of the new era they lost 2-1 to Sheffield United (two Brian Deane goals) but from there the rest is, of course, history.
Though Man Utd failed to sign Southampton's exciting young forward Alan Shearer (typing that now feels weird) they would still go on to win the Premier League with the key players being Schmeichel, Pallister, Steve Bruce, Denis Irwin, Brian McClair, the Welsh teenager Ryan Giggs, and new signing (from Leeds, a club he'd won the final ever Division One title with) Eric Cantona. Cantona had joined after Dion Dublin (new to the club) had his leg broken following a tackle by Crystal Palace's Eric Young. Incidentally, while looking up how many games Dion Dublin played for Man Utd (12) I noticed Wikipedia has him listed as being 4'4" tall. Hmm!
Shearer eventually left Southampton for, of all teams, Blackburn Rovers, a team who hadn't won anything since 1928. But steel magnate chairman Jack Walker was using his huge wealth to transform the hometown club he loved. His plan was to win the Premier League and money was to be no object.
It didn't happen in that first season. Blackburn finished fourth behind Man Utd, Aston Villa, and Norwich. The year after they came second (Man Utd winning again) but in the '94-'95 season Blackburn (with new signing Chris Sutton joining from Norwich for an English record fee of £5,000,000) finally did it despite losing away to Liverpool on the last day of the season. West Ham keeping Man U to a draw sealed the title by one point. I remember it well. Particularly the Liverpool fans who wanted their own team to lose that day so that Man U wouldn't win the title three years in a row and, perhaps sentimentally, so that (King) Kenny Dalglish could lift the trophy again.
More than anything, the Premier League - and Sky - were the biggest winners. They were coining it in and football was huge again. Soon its biggest star would be Man Utd's young and handsome midfielder David Beckham but he wasn't the only one that helped propel Man Utd back to the top the following two seasons.
Other youngsters like Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt, Gary Neville, Phil Neville, and Keith Gillespie came into the team. Gillespie, however, became something of a makeweight in a deal that saw the prolific striker Andy Cole, completely unexpectedly, leave Newcastle for Man Utd. Soon he'd join a team that already included the likes of Roy Keane, Ryan Giggs, and Lee Sharpe.
The exploitation of the Manchester United brand was going global with t-shirt sales and the far east but not everyone was impressed. After Man U lost their opening match of the '95-'96 season 3-1 to Aston Villa, the pundit Alan Hansen announced, famously, on Match of the Day that "you can't win anything with kids".
But they did. They won a lot with those particular kids. Later that season Man Utd overhauled Newcastle's league lead (and Keegan emotionally responded to Alex Ferguson's mind games with THAT quote) to win the league. But in an age of spiralling wages, Man Utd would soon have an even more deadly rival than Newcastle to contend with.
Despite being one of the founding forces of the Premier League, Arsenal had never been close to winning it. When Arsene Wenger (a complete unknown quality - even to Arsenal's players) arrived in 1996 he took them to third in their first season but, more than that, he transformed the culture, the team, and, ultimately, the results.
He signed players of the quality of Patrick Vieira, Emmanuel Petit, and Marc Overmars while Dennis Bergkamp, Ian Wright, and the solid English defensive line of Tony Adams, Martin Keown, Nigel Winterburn, Lee Dixon, and Martin Keown were already so legendary (1-0 to the Arsenal) that David Seaman, England's first choice keeper, didn't have as much to do as he might have otherwise.
Booze (Arsenal were nothing if not a boozy club, particularly Adams, Ray Parlour, and Paul Merson) was banned and the focus went on drinking water and chewing vegetables. Results came pretty quickly and in 1998 Arsenal won the double. The rivalry between Arsenal and Man U during that era was, for me, the greatest rivalry in Premiership history. Games were fierce. Pubs packed full of people, many neutrals, to watch them.
Arsenal having done the double, Man U wanted revenge and in 1999 they got it. Against a backdrop of Rupert Murdoch, eventually unsuccessfully, trying to buy the club they went on to win the league, the FA Cup, and the Champions League. 1, 2, 3 - the treble. A feat that, surely, nobody would ever repeat and nobody ever did until earlier this year when their city rivals, or City rivals if you prefer, went on to do it.
United winning the treble felt like the end of an era (City winning it feels like the start of an era) but what an era it was. You won't learn much you don't already know by watching Fever Pitch but you'll revisit so many classic moments it'll be a joy. From Vinnie Jones grabbing Gazza's nuts and Chris Waddle's penalty miss on to Robbie Fowler pretending to snort the lines on the pitch and Alan Shearer's £15,000,000 move to Newcastle it's all (well most of it) here.
There's a young(er) Andrew Neil and Huw Edwards, Derek Jameson, the TA RA FERGIE banner, Fergie himself chewing gum, Richard Keys and Andy Grey, Frank Sidebottom running around the pitch like an aeroplane, Brian Kidd's famous celebration when Pallister crossed for Steve Bruce to score (unlikely strike partnership there) and win them the title, Cantona's kung fu kick at Selhurst Park (a subject that was brought up on Question Time and nearly saw Cantona go to prison for), Paul Merson's tears, Paul Merson's rehab, Paul Merson's stories of staying up boozing until 6am and then getting back on it the next day, Beckham scoring from the halfway line, Beckham and Posh Spice becoming mega-celebrities, David James becoming an Armani model, Queen's Roger Taylor helping save Man Utd from carpetbaggers.
The good and the bad but there's also the ugly side of football. The racism which existed in football and society then and still does now (witness the Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party Lee Anderson and his recent "fuck off back to France" rant while gleefully imagining him daring to say that to Eric Cantona), the bananas thrown on pitches, the story about Cantona's 'victim' Matthew Symonds shouting racist abuse at the footballer and having links to the National Front, and even Nike;s sponsoring of an anti-racist initiative was obviously not because of any values they had or didn't have but because football had become a business and they'd spotted an opportunity.
Then there's the oily toe sucking Tory MP David Mellor whose phone-ins were once a source of constant joy because about 50% of callers immediately told him to fuck off. There's players you probably haven't thought much about of late. Players like Henning Berg, Uwe Rosler, Warren Barton, Chris Powell, Remi Garde, Jesper Blomqvist, Keith Curle, Paul Warhurst, and Savo Milosevic.
It's moving to see how the success of Blackburn Rovers transformed an otherwise depressed former mill town and it's sad when it all, quite quickly, starts to go wrong for them. It's sad, too, when Keith Gillespie talks about his gambling addiction (blowing £47,000 in a single day), and it's interesting to hear Graeme Le Saux talk about the homophobia he suffered because, it seems, he read The Guardian.
But it's funny to hear the story of a totally hungover Man Utd team, after a celebratory piss-up at Steve Bruce's place, walking out at Old Trafford (imagine that now) and still managing to win the game 3-1. It was a different age - the Des Lynam era. It wasn't a better age but it was the age in which I was young so I look back on it all (or most of it) very fondly but I came away from Fever Pitch with two conflicting thoughts about the Premier League. I feel the Premier League probably saved football in England and Wales. I also feel it began a process that will ultimately destroy the game in this country. Some people would love it, they'd LOVE IT, if that happened. I wouldn't. But where does capitalism go when there's nothing left to buy?
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