Lost in France: The Story of England's 1998 World Cup Campaign. Mark Palmer
playing days with Spurs. On one occasion he had hobbled into the Drewerys’ house complaining of a torn muscle. When Eileen offered healing Hoddle turned it down, but she went ahead and performed ‘absent healing’, and the next day his muscle was dramatically improved. Two decades later, Mrs Drewery was to become the Mother Superior of the England football team.
Hoddle said nothing for the next three days before breaking his silence in a TV interview shown on Grandstand at lunchtime on Saturday. He was sparing with the details. ‘It has been a very difficult week for me,’ he said. ‘Obviously there have been some ups and downs, but I have had to detach certain things and put them away and it’s all been a bit stressful.’
England’s plucky performance on the pitch in Rome was nothing to the bulldog spirit deployed at home by the FA, high on the adrenalin of victory, or perhaps just basking in the relief of qualifying for a World Cup for the first time in eight years. The Italians were given no quarter. Davies led the charge. After touching down at Luton airport, he was driven straight to Burnham Beeches Hotel, where he had a shower, glanced at the Sunday papers, picked up his car and headed for the BBC to tell David Frost all about it. David Mellor, the newly appointed chairman of the Football Task Force, was also in the studio and quickly teamed up with Davies to deliver a scathing attack on the Italian security operation. Mellor raised his truncheon with additional venom because his seventeen-year-old son, Anthony, had been at the game and had given his father a first-hand account, which Mellor Junior followed up in a letter to The Times. It was precisely the sort of testimony the FA were keen to encourage:
Sir, Along with a few thousand other England fans, I arrived at the Olympic Stadium in Rome at about 6.15 pm on Saturday and was subjected to a rigorous search, with everything from belts to keys to coins to lighters being confiscated. Inside was chaos. We had tickets for the ‘official’ section but were sent to an area for which these were not valid, so the police (there were no stewards) told us to sit wherever we wished … Forty seconds after kick-off the Italians started to throw full water bottles, coins and other objects into our stand. The English could not have thrown anything back – everything had been confiscated. The Italian police did not react to the missiles being lobbed into our area, yet when the English started to return the rubbish thrown at them, the police started a baton charge … The behaviour of both the Italian fans and the police was disgraceful. The latter seemed to bear a grudge against every English fan – their attacks on us were both bizarre and terrifying. English fans certainly retaliated and some threw seats at the police in the stadium; but rather than instilling fear and anger, surely the police should have protected and helped innocent fans in such a situation.
Yours faithfully,
Anthony Mellor
The Times printed a second, shorter, letter just beneath it which made a different but equally valid point:
Sir, As an Irish resident in Rome for the past three years, I am surprised by how press reaction to Saturday’s match has concentrated on the heavy-handedness of the Italian police. From Friday night until kick-off I saw many groups of English fans parading around the centre of Rome, shouting abuse at locals, especially women, and in some cases throwing bottles and other implements at mopeds, cars, police and in one case smashing the window of a bar. All this in the capital city of the country which was the main victim of the Heysel disaster in 1985.
I have never seen anything like this behaviour in Rome, even though many European teams play here on a regular basis. When will the FA learn that the root of the problem still lies with their fans and not the authorities of the other countries? I believe that the French authorities will react in the same way at the World Cup finals next year unless the English fans can prove that they can act in a civilised manner.
Yours etc,
Ronan Donoghue
For the next two weeks you could hardly turn on the television without seeing a clip of English fans being bashed by Italian riot police. It was either that or the trial of teenager Louise Woodward, both cases in which objectivity got lost in the swelter of debate. The FA’s hastily drafted report returned a guilty verdict on all counts, concluding that the police had been variously inefficient, provocative and brutal.
The Italians struck back – none more so than dear old, roly-poly Giancarlo Gavarotti who, in a Gazetta dello Sport editorial, described English supporters as ‘vomit on the beautiful face of Rome’. Verbal warfare continued until FIFA eventually came out with its own inconclusive but predictable conclusion: both sides were to blame. As a result, England and Italy would each be fined for contributing to what FIFA described as the ‘deplorable’ events in Rome. It was a vintage example of fence-sitting, complete with the tamest of warnings that a repeat of such behaviour, either by England fans or Italian police, would result in ‘a lot stiffer punishments’.
Sepp Blatter, the FIFA General Secretary, who did not wish to fall out with England or Italy since he was hoping to win their vote as successor to Joao Havelange, the FIFA President, made things charmingly clear. ‘While FIFA did not have authority over the police forces, the methods used by the police should be better adapted to the specific requirements of football,’ he said, scrubbing the whitewash from his suit as he spoke.
Woodward was freed on the day Hoddle’s England players voluntarily put themselves under lock and key at the team hotel in Berkshire in preparation for the Cameroon game, the first of a series of friendlies during which the players would strut their stuff in front of the coach in the hope of securing a place in the final squad of twenty-two, to be announced on 2 June. It was to be a long and tense and at times tedious beauty contest, with some contestants dropping out of the reckoning and one refusing to take part altogether. Others were to claw their way on to the catwalk at the last minute.
This is what Phil Neville had to say about it: ‘There are only four players that you can look at and safely say that only injuries could keep them out of the final squad, and they are David Seaman, Paul Gascoigne, Paul Ince and Alan Shearer. For the rest of us, the fight is on. We’ve qualified for the finals but this is where the pressure really starts. I think we’re all worried about whether we will make it to France. I’m thinking about it every time I go on to the training field with England and it’s going to get worse.
‘You look at every training session as a step nearer the World Cup, and if you play and perform well you think of that as another step forward. At the moment I’d say my main rivals for the wing-back places are Graeme Le Saux and Andy Hinchcliffe. Then there’s David Beckham if I’m pushing for a place on the right.’
The last time Cameroon came to London, in 1991, the so-called Lions of Africa refused to leave their hotel until they were paid £2,000 each in cash. On this occasion, the FA guaranteed around £150,000 to the Cameroon FA, plus a share of the TV rights. The lions were tamed in an instant.
Hoddle’s squad included the rehabilitated Rio Ferdinand and Chris Sutton, Blackburn’s top scorer. Both had been called up for the first time. A seventeen-year-old called Michael Owen was also there – on work experience from Liverpool FC, where he was taking the Kop by storm. I had seen him on the first day of the season when Liverpool played Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park, and I noticed before the kick-off that Hoddle was sitting a couple of rows behind me. Halfway through the second half, Owen was fouled in the penalty area and the referee pointed to the spot. Owen didn’t bother to look across to the bench or consult his captain. He simply picked up the ball, placed it on the small white circle and whacked it past the goalkeeper.
After the first day’s training session at Bisham Abbey, someone thoughtfully passed Rio Ferdinand a glass of orange juice, and he managed a knowing smile. ‘You can’t call me an alcoholic. I don’t need counselling or anything,’ said Ferdinand, who had just turned nineteen. ‘Glenn told me I would get another chance. He stood by me. He’s an honest person and I have to be honest with him now. Everything he has said to me has made a difference. He has told me how to conduct myself off the pitch and what he’s told me has stayed in. What happened with Tony Adams was more of a conversation really. I just found that I was sitting next to him on the bus and we started talking. He simply told me what had happened to him. The truth is that I don’t really drink.’
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