Get It On – How The ‘70s Rocked Football by John Spurling
There is a small but significant demographic that will love this book. Fortunately, most of those people are the male members who read this blog. However, to check if you will enjoy Spurling’s excellently researched history of football in this country in the 1970s, consider the following. Football mavericks: Stan Bowles, Alan Hudson and Frank Worthington. The football tragedians: the champagne and dolly bird crash of George Best; and the self-inflicted downfalls of Ramsey and Revie. The glorious underdog stories: Ronnie Radford’s rocket on a mud heap; Montgomery’s miracle save to win the cup against the Leeds juggernaut; and Nottingham Forest’s wholly unexpected rise to European dominance. Then there’s Shankley’s fatal error to retire far too early and when his bluff was called, his transformation from king of the kop to unwanted ghost at the feast. The BBC documentary about Millwall’s three terrifying groups of hooligans that laid bare the scourge of the beautiful game but which went unheeded until multiple disasters in the 1980s, wholly predictable, changed everything. Football’s move into the media mainstream: Clough’s rise, fall and rise, self-analysed during his Parky chat show appearances; the 1970 ITV World Cup Panel – cigar-chomping, big-collared, medallion wearing, unreconstructed macho characters all; Keegan’s marketing ubiquity. And talking of Keegan and Supermac, the invariably ill-fated performance of booze addled footballers on the BBC’s Superstars show.
These are just a very few of the events that Spurling looks at in this book, always placing them in the socio-historical, cultural and political context of the period. There are probably more disasters and disappointments than footballing triumphs as befits a period where it wasn’t only the England football team that was falling behind their European neighbours. And yet there is a joy and vivacity in the memories rekindled and the characters that he recalls in all their 70s pomp. Spurling is a well-respected sports journalist and has access to all the big stars from the period. He did his research for the book over a couple of decades and so there are excellent insights from, among others, Best, Ball and Jackie Charlton, who are no longer with us. We get the definitive accounts of the famous stories – George, where did it all go wrong? – but also less familiar insights into tactics, training and the game’s characters. I didn’t know, for example, that Emlyn Hughes and Tommy Smith had a bitter feud for several years and refused to speak with one another despite being at the defensive heart of one of Liverpool’s most successful teams.
An extremely readable and joyful book which is clear-eyed about the venalities and absurdities of football in the 1970s. The thing is, though, all Spurling’s interviewees own up to their faults and even when they have ended up in a bad place, they regret nothing. What a time to live through – bang a gong indeed!