Pete Davies wrote a fantastic book in 1990.
I hope somebody writes one as good about this World Cup.
If you missed All Played Out, you missed a classic, a landmark among English football books. I’ve recently been re-reading it because it’s the best way for me to get into Germany 2006.
Pete Davies was a young novelist who was allowed access all areas with the England team after taking a vow of silence. He could see everything and hear everything but he could not say anything or write anything until his book came out. Pete used that privilege to write a non-fiction monster that had the scope of a Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson.
All Played Out was our new journalism, an Englishman’s Fear and Loathing at Italia ’90.
A 16-team World Cup is a football-mad country was always gonna be more intense and involving than USA 94, and Pete got lucky with the tears of Gazza (which gave him the cover for his book), the penalties of Lineker, the laconic humour of Waddle, and, of course, the Germany semi-final drama watched by 30 million Brits.
His thesis was that the World Cup took place in a parallel universe called Planet Football.
So in one way I didn’t go to Italy at all. I got there and found that the country had turned into a logo, and the game into a cross between epic saga, operatic flourish, organised intelligence, and sheer brute war.
But then, Planet Football – it’s a place where the simple dreams of boys kicking ball between coats on the ground are force-nurtured, under floodlights and cameras, to the most mutant and enormous dimensions.
The harvest of this strange place, this sporting greenhouse, is soul food for billions – a kind of particle accelerator for the emotions of the world. People hunch intent with their drinks before jabbering screens in Dublin and Douala, Moscow and Medellin, Sao Paulo and Seoul. They watch the dramas far away ; their spirits go speeding down the tunnel of the game and, smashing, release subatomic primal frenzies of hope, joy and despair and despair in to the streets of the world.
And the genius of the book was that it combined the disparate elements so cleverly : the fans, the hacks, the team, the dodderng old blazers of the FA.
Pete sat round the hotel and the pool, talking tactics with Butcher, Waddle and Lineker, got sunstroke on the beach, conveyed the aggro suffered by fans who were tear-gassed and batoned into the stadium and then staggered out to find no buses to take them to their campsites 40 km away.
He admitted that writing match reports very quickly is difficult. He says, “I tried it myself a few times, I tried to write accurate accounts of a game or two that quickly -and most of what I came up with was dogshit.”
He quotes Peter Beardsley on Bobby Robson : “I’m surprised he’s not in a box. With gold handles. Feller’s just took so much stick it’s unbelievable – but he comes back for more. And that’s why we love him.”
Mark Wright recalled Germany ’88, where England flopped, and said Ruud Gullit was the quickest player he had ever played against. “From standing start to top speed, he’s unbelievable. He’s an athlete. And Van Basten ain’t slow either.”
At that time I was writing for The Scotsman and I knew Bobby Robson and covered all his Wembley games for eight years and attended every after-match press conference. This was before mobiles and laptops, so when the daily reporters dashed upstairs to file their copy, some of us used to stay there talking to Bobby for quite a while and then we would walk through to the banqueting hall with him.
A friendly, helpful, passionate Geordie, wearing his heart on his sleeve, willing to talk candidly, willing, above all, to do what Graham Taylor never did : share it with us. Nobody had ever told Bobby to do that, he did it instinctively. Bobby shared his England team with us, talking about each player in detail, what he wanted from each player, how each player could improve. I loved the guy, even though he picked some stupid England teams.
Being outside the press box and the routine and the etiquette, Pete Davies brought a fresh eye to the whole circus. His feelings were more “Crikey!” and “Gosh!” and “Wow!”, more like a fan’s reaction. He was not inhibited by decades of writing to a formula, not jaded like the hacks he mingled with, and not subject to the demands of a yob sports editor.
He came home from Italy and banged out his book in 49 days for autumn publication by Heineman, using a tabloidy fanzine prose that retained the colour, detail and feeling of the moment, and he nailed down scene after scene with deadly skill and sly humour.
Writing from the middle of a maelstrom, Davies was a perceptive fan who knew going in that a fan’s life at a World Cup is an emotional, turbulent journey, a thrilling rollercoaster ride.
He described reporters I knew, like Bob Harris, and admitted he had made a faux pas at an early press conference. Pete had asked a question and, even worse, asked a question which changed the subject (something I often did), so the hacks complained to FA press officer David Bloomfield about him because they were pursuing what they call “a line.”
I kept quiet after that, and let them get on with it. And now, said Harris, I was ‘all right’.
He’s a loud Brummie who wears luminous and amazing blazers, and owns some lunatic quantity of pairs of glasses, sixty or seventy – one pair in particular, the frames every colour of the rainbow and then some, and sort of spangly with it, with BH monogrammed in silver on one lens…………
Harris said Gazza’d asked him after the Denmark game how he reckoned he’d done. Ay-ay, thinks Harris, he’s not spoken to me in ages.
“You did all right,” says Harris, “just keep it going.”
“You’re a fucking cunt,” says Gazza, “and I’m not talking to you ever again.”