FORUM: Illtyd Harrington - ‘As I Please’

Published: 9 December, 2010

A smell of sewage around the beautiful game. . .

IT was a blatant act committed by 22 elderly consenting adults sitting privately within a monument of glass and cold  steel. An event well suited to Zurich: it is a town based on greed and avarice.

Francis Ford Coppola has an assembled cast ready for Godfather IV. The naivety and honesty of Prince William cut no ice and England was humiliated. It has become very clear that FIFA has become an unglorified   cash cow.

I became an early learner 62 years ago when the barons of the Welsh FA visited in style our local team Merthyr Town FC. In the postwar world, I noted their skin had a healthier tone and was in sharp contrast to the pallid, gaunt, features of our supporters, who had endured while these gentlemen had reclined.

Now the game is global and set within a capital and political framework to which even world leaders have to show respect. Sport is now on the floor of the stock exchange rather than on the football pitch. Time to remember that English football is ruled by three bodies: the FA, Barclays Premier League and FIFA. 

The FA was dismissed with contempt last week, but Vladimir Putin, a ruthless intruder, was into a power game in which we weren’t brutal enough. This was an event for thugs.

Although I’ve had several pleasant experiences in football, at an annual dinner of West Ham supporters club I was amazed when Trevor Brooking appeared and presented me with a painting of Whitley Bay for some service 

I had rendered for the game. 

I was unaware of it.

Tom Wilson, a friend, played for Fulham after the war with Jimmy Hill and that generation. One Saturday I went with him and his friend, the late Bobby Robson, for a game at QPR. 

At full time hundreds of home supporters swept towards us across the field. It was reminiscent of the Normandy landings. We were rescued by the vice-chairman to the sanctuary of the boardroom which had tons of scampi and drink to reassure us.

In the course of the conversation he asked why I had been instrumental in stopping a planning proposal from his company. I replied in blunt words. 

Then he confounded me by saying: “My working-class roots are as good as yours.” Standing there with a large cigar, he said: “My great grandfather was Robert Noonan [whose pen name was Robert Tressell] who wrote The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.” We smiled cynically at each other and I said to him: ”Read the bloody thing again.”  We grimaced at each other.

My sporting life continued as a governor of the London marathon. They even honoured me  by asking me to start it in Blackheath in 1985. Sadly I felt morally obliged to resign after six years, joined by the chairman of English Sport. 

I, like many others, experienced the joy of that massive and joyful occasion but I resented the growing commercial pressures and what I regarded as the lack of accountability. I had won the argument about wheelchair entrants and was given a marathon medal as big as a frying pan at a Covent Garden ceremony.

What shook me most at the two FA Cup finals at Wembley that I attended was the compulsory attendance of leading political figures. At one I was placed next to Jim Callaghan and his son. That wary sea dog stayed neutral throughout. 

A friend of mine, normally devoid of emotion when he was practising in the High Court, was quite overcome when he accompanied Tony Blair to a Cup Final. Blair had six motor cycle outriders worthy of the US president. The fans travelled in overcrowded Tubes or legged it for the last few miles.

And now at last FIFA is demanding its unquestionable place in the politics of many countries. Putin has earmarked £18billion for 2018. And beneath the surface commercial pressures are terrifying. 

There’s a smell of gangrene in modern hygiene-conscious Zurich. It calls to mind the awful symbolism of the skiing resort Zermatt a few decades back. Suddenly a major typhoid outbreak occurred terrifying world-class athletes. The city fathers of Zermatt in their greed had neglected the sewerage system.

Football is now looking for an honest plumber or a competent set of builders of sewers.