| | <*dv_1*>Here we go, here we go, here we go... | Not many people have a kind word to say about the 80s. They are a decade it seems that we would all care to forget. The 50s, 60s and 70s are all remembered in misty eyed sepia tones and over the years have gained various degrees of hip quotient. Revisionist accounts proliferate, airbrushing out uncomfortable truths. Successfully repackaged for public consumption, even the eyewitnesses to those decades conspire in the propagation of the myths. Elderly relatives will confide that "Of course the 60s weren't really like that", yet the pervading myth of these decades is never seriously challenged. The 80s though, seem to be a decade about which no self delusion is permitted. The music, the politics, the fashions have all helped contribute to the decade's pariah status. For most the 80s remain a revival too far.
<*dv_2*> So it should come as no surprise that football during the 80s is widely held to be the worst in living memory. The prevalence of long ball, crumbling stadiums, violence on the terraces, Bradford, Heysel, Hillsborough. Stuck between the hype of the Premiership in the 90s and the retro glamour of the 70s, the 80s look like some sort of bastard offspring which everyone would prefer to forget. However on closer inspection and for those of us who were there, the 80s are without doubt the last great decade of English football.
For an era which is so frequently derided for it stylistic and tactical bankruptcy, it seems hard to understand why more British players played abroad than at any other time. Blisset, Brady, Hodde, Hately, Mariner, Souness, Jordan, MacAnally, Rush, Waddle, Ray Wilkins and even his brother Dean all had spells abroad. Admittedly they were not all success stories. But foreign clubs are hardly beating at the door of clubs today looking to take British players abroad. You can point to the inflated prices of domestic talent, but Italian and Spanish transfer fees are larger than anything yet paid by a club in this country. Before the ban on participation, British teams dominated European club football. Not only was it British teams, but teams filled with British players. Not the cosmopolitan pot pouri of today's line ups.
<*dv_0*> The 80s seem even better when you contrast the automotons of the current game against those of the 1980s vintage. In the 80s no Sunday tabloid was complete without the nightclub exploits of Charlie Nicholas or Frank "Wez's der burds?" MacAvennie, blonde on one arm, bottle of bubbly under the other. Today we get the near terminal dullness of Alan Shearer and Michael Owen. Survivors of that last great decade such as Gascoigne, Adams and Merson have been forced by the sanitary requirements of the 90s to seek salvation with confessions of their excess. But is wasn't just the players. Managers were better too. Brian Clough had yet to descend into parody and Tommy Docherty and Malcolm Allison were still regularly employed by league clubs. Compare them to the bank manager dourness of Wenger, Raneri and co. Whilst the interest and coverage of football today has never been so great, the fact remains that all this attention is focused on a game which is only a pale shadow of its true golden age the 1980s. Yet for all this there does remain one indefensible area of 80s football. One at which no redeeming argument can hope to be advanced. 80s football songs. They were awful, and remain so to this day. | | | | |
