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| Tommy Smith, Liverpool FC |
No matter. He was a sporting hero from a bygone age. Nowadays, given the price of season tickets for the Premier League, fans are not really looking to see local kids playing for their team - they expect to see expensive Brazilians, Spaniards, Africans, Frenchmen, whatever. I suppose it's a bit like other expensive forms of entertainment; I confess that if I spent a lot of money to go to the opera, I'd be disappointed if the cast all came from the streets around my birthplace.
Tommy had serious injury problems toward the end of his career - latterly, he was often able to play only because he was stuffed full of cortisone injections, a practice which would probably have club management gaoled in these more enlightened times. As a result, he could hardly walk in his last few years.
Never mind - he will always be young for those who saw him in his pomp. He will always be the man who headed the goal which put Liverpool ahead in the final of the European Cup (Champions' League), in Rome in 1977, versus Moenchengladbach - the first year Liverpool won the competition.
Thanks, Tommy. Cheers, la.
I remember the night and remember the goal as if it was yesterday, glory days indeed and I would love to have them back again. The lad had well dodgy views on race, mind, from what I've heard; I suppose that in football as in music it doesn't really pay to put one's heroes under too close a scrutiny.
ReplyDelete(I understand also that he absolutely hated Emlyn Hughes and have heard a few entertaining anecdotes on the subject!)
Dodgy views - yes I guess so - he was a creature of another age. We can't condone his views, but it is tricky to judge them by today's standards - it was far longer ago than I sometimes think. My dad used to tell me about the days when they used to board up the shops in Garston on Orange Lodge day, which is hard to visualise now - there aren't any shops in Garston, for a start...
DeleteThere were probably less young men sticking knives in each other than we have at the moment, so everything has it's season, I guess. Didn't they take the captaincy off Tommy and give it to Emlyn? Ouch.
Emlyn made me cringe for years on Question of Sport, but his biggest faux pas was being rude about Everton fans on the Town Hall balcony, when the whole city turned out to see the parade. I don't think any of these guys were noted for intelligence or sensitivity, bless em.
I seem to remember a time when teams could only field one "foreign" player.
ReplyDeleteThey also got very muddy playing and the pitch had no grass by the end of the season.
All my sporting heroes are now old men or gone. Time flies!
Indeed - very true. Old video on TV confirms that the players were all blurred, too. As for grass, for a while Derby County's ground had no grass at the start of the season, either.
DeleteI'll have a beer for Tommy later on - I am reminded that Peter Thomson and Tommy Lawrence died recently, too, so there's no chance of getting the 1960s team together for a charity match.
Interesting - I know nothing of football these days, but remember that 1977 game being on telly, and that goal, and the general warm feeling about the team and Tommy among the public. I'm sure he has a small but positive place in the national memory. Ta ra..
ReplyDelete1977 feels like it should be somewhere at the beginning of some sort of modern era, but it probably wasn't really. There used to be a tradition at the Wembley FA Cup Final that a brass band and some elderly cheerleading idiot would try to get the visiting fans to sing along with "suitable" songs for their region. Northern fans would be expected to go round saying how they were "oop for t' coop", and I recall Liverpool fans being required to join in with "She's a lassie from Lancashire". God save us.
DeleteSince the Cup Final regularly featured provincial fans, I always suspected that the establishment sort of got their own back by humiliating them in this ritual.
All Northerners were required to do, basically, was shut up and behave themselves, keep digging coal, pay their taxes punctually and rush to volunteer for the trenches if there was a war. If they could occasionally provide a little national glory by winning the European Cup that was a bonus.
"She's a lassie from Merseyside" doesn't have quite the same ring to it does it? :-)
DeleteWe still get Abide With Me every year of course, which is a song I've always liked and always wondered where that tradition came from.
As a lad I always remember FA Cup day as kind of the climax of the season, a day of some excitement, especially if the Reds were involved - in 1974 we had street parties after that win over Newcastle. These days the glamour of the cup has dissipated, kick off is now later in the afternoon on a day that is often shared with other matches seen as more important because of the financial prizes involved. All quite sad really.
I don't know about "Abide with Me" - I did some gentle googling and find that it was a favourite of George V, and was first used at the 1927 F A Cup Final. For some reason, I always associate it, along with "Oh God Our Help in Ages Past", as the sort of hymn sailors were supposed to sing as their ship went down - that's not a bad analogy for most Cup Finals I've cared about!
DeleteThe 1974 Final was notable for the fact that Motormouth Malcolm McDonald announced before the game that he was going to score a hat trick, and Tommy Smith never let him in the game at all.
I got a fairly heavy email about Tommy giving racial abuse to Howard Gayle. Obviously a very poor show indeed, but Tommy probably handed out abuse and offensive banter to everyone, and Howard's was obviously going to be racially based. Tommy seems to have lived by the chips on his shoulders - he was driven to succeed because he had to take everyone else down.
What I've read this morning has rather dulled my affection for Tommy, so I'll stop thinking about it now.
Oh dear, sorry to have tarnished your memories! Let's just remember the good times!
DeleteNo problem! :-)
DeleteIn those pre-Instagram days, footballers' private lives and the goings-on at the clubs were just a closed secret. There wasn't an army of parasites living off the tittle-tattle either. I guess that the footballing culture of the 1970s was closer to the builder's yard than to the luxury world the money has brought.
If someone had suggested to Shankly that the club should have a nutritionist or a psychologist they'd have been beaten to death.
Decent gag from radio 4 sports reporter this morning : Tommy came back at halftime with a leg cut open almost it's whole length, and covered in bruises - he didn't even know who it belonged to...
ReplyDeleteExcellent - love it - the football culture in the 1960s and 70s was very aggressive. Under current rules there would have been an awful lot of red cards. The aforementioned McDonald complained that Smith told him he was going to break his ****ing back at the start of the 1974 game, but this was par for the course. In these days when we have professional lip-readers (who understand Portuguese, if required) watching replays of what was said - just in case - it is worth remembering that Jack Charlton and Chopper Harris and all these fine Real Men of yesteryear were foulmouthed and threatening throughout. It was an industrial game, no question. No flinching. And if you get hurt, don't show it - tough is good. Rolling round looking for a dodgy penalty would definitely have been unmanly behaviour.
DeleteRIP Tommy. He was part of the classic Liverpool line-up that will forever be etched upon my memory...as with any kid from the 70s.
ReplyDeleteIt's not the same game now...it'll never have the same characters.
Absolutely. The point is often made that the likes of Tommy could never have got into a modern Premier League team, and that's probably true - on the other hand, Cristiano Ronaldo in the 1970s would have had his leg broken every week. Horses for courses.
DeleteI got a surprising email from Gavin M, of Liverpool, who suggests that Tommy Smith would have been less than thrilled if he had understood the (convoluted) background to his nickname "The Anfield Iron". According to Gavin, the Liverpool fans adapted this from the old Scaffold song, "Thank you very much (for the Aintree Iron)" - Anfield and Aintree both being districts of Liverpool. The origins of the song are not widely understood, since it consisted mostly of private jokes enjoyed by the Scaffold members. The Aintree Iron was a jocular term for Brian Epstein, a local businessman and impresario who managed the Beatles and several other bands. Epstein lived in Aintree, and the "Iron" is rhyming slang (Iron Hoof) meaning homosexual, which Epstein was, very openly. Also, Aintree Iron rhymes with "Brian" - at least it does if you're a Scouser. So it was a private joke. Tommy, I'm sure, would have been horrified. I'm going to have to read that over again...
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