“The point about football in Britain is that it is not just a sport people take to, like cricket or tennis or running long distances. It is inherent in the people. It is built into the urban psyche, as much a common experience to our children as are uncles and school. It is not a phenomenon; it is an everyday matter. There is more eccentricity in deliberately disregarding it than in devoting a life to it. It has more significance in the national character than theatre has. Its sudden withdrawal from the people would bring deeper disconsolation than to deprive them of television. The way we play the game, organize it and reward it reflects the kind of community we are.

No player, manager, director or fan who understands football, either through his intellect or his nerve ends, ever repeats that nonsense trotted out mindlessly by the fearful every now and again which pleads “After all its only a game”. It has not been only a game for eighty years: not since the working classes saw in it an escape route out of drudgery and claimed it as their own. What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others: it engages the personality. It has conflict and beauty, and when those two qualities are present together in something offered for public appraisal they represent much of what I understand to be art. The people own this art in the way they can never own any form of music, theatre, literature or religion because they cannot be fooled in it as they can in these other things, where intention can be deliberately obscured and method hidden beyond their grasp. Football does not ask for faith; it compels examination. Phoney footballers are simply booted aside. The crowds can be vindictive and brutal, but they can seldom be deceived. They know their football intuitively, as they know about their families.”

Who wrote this, Patrick Barclay?, Jose Mourinho, Carlton Palmer?. No. It was written in 1968 by Arthur Hopcraft in his seminal book on football, “The Football Man”. You would think that 40 years on we could expect better quality written and discussed on football than the dross and drivel we are served up, particularly by Aunty on a Saturday night. When Sidenetting’s 7 team accumulator comes in we will buy 20 copies of the book and send them to Lord Lineker to distribute amongst the pundits, along with a dictionary, so for the next 2 months he can repeat to them ad nauseam the definitions of the words “insight”, “original” and “perceptive”.

Hopcraft’s book has been reissued this year and is a cracking read, his chapter on meeting a young George Best in retrospect shows remarkable understanding of a complex personality. An excellent way to top up your footy fix in the lead up to the World Cup.