Football all over the country will suffer if we hound out the FA blazers
The combined age of the two men in league against progress at the Football Association is 152. So there has been a lot of talk about dinosaurs and backwoodsmen and the need for the organisation to reform. Then again, someone has to put the nets up on Sunday morning.
Not literally, of course. Nobody sends an 82-year-old up a ladder. But, make no mistake, for many among the FA Council that is where it started. Making sure the fixtures were completed in Under-11 Division 8 east, booking the referees for the games no-one watches, handing prizes no-one cares about to footballers nobody knows.
The sort of servants who perform these thankless tasks longest and with greatest dedication tend to be those that end up sitting on the FA Council. Like Ron Barston, for instance.
An FA life vice-president, Barston is a former policeman who put in a shift of extraordinary endurance at the Leicestershire and Rutland FA. Not much glamour in Leicestershire and Rutland. And not much credit, either. Yet without men like Barston, football beyond the professional big leagues would wither and die.
his ally at the FA Council is Richard Tur, chairman of Oxford University FA. Much fun is being had with university toffs having a say in football matters, but the OUFA has been going since 1872, making it older than every professional football club in the country bar Notts County, Stoke City, Nottingham Forest, Chesterfield, Sheffield Wednesday and Reading.
And while you may mistakenly regard the word ‘soccer’ as a dreadful Americanism, it was an Oxford student, Charles Wreford Brown, who coined it, and his university that thought they were playing it when they reached the second FA Cup final in 1873.
And while that might not place them on the cutting edge of innovation now, Oxford University claim an FA Council place because they helped create the game we know.
equally, if it is truly independent voices the FA seek, who better than a 70-year- old senior law lecturer from Oriel College, like Tur? he can pretty much be relied upon not to consider The Brand above all, or factor the media and Twitter into every decision.
What men like Tur and Barston do is sit in dull committee rooms having dull meetings about dull subjects that just happen to keep the game going. Referees, finance, what the modern world considers small beer compared to big issues such as sexism, racism and homophobia.
Yet if your goalkeeper harbours outdated attitudes towards the gay community, it’s a great pity and you may wish to introduce him to the 21st century, but the game will go on. If nobody arranges a referee, however, you’re stuffed.
So these old fossils don’t like it when people come into the FA new, and decide that half a century of service counts for nothing. And, in the circumstances, neither would you.
After a lifetime of anonymity beyond the minutes of long-forgotten meetings, Barston and Tur have made the news by complaining that FA Board member heather Rabbatts has breached the code of conduct over eva Carneiro.
It is a ridiculous objection, one that will surely merit little consideration — but it has taken on greater significance as the embodiment of reactionary thought in football.
This is why the blazers should be excluded, is the argument. But that isn’t right — for what would replace them is as bad, if not worse.
Barston and Tur were upset because Rabbatts broke ranks on the Carneiro investigation. Rabbatts thought the FA should have done more to protect Chelsea’s club doctor and voiced ‘major concerns’ over the disciplinary process that exonerated manager Jose Mourinho.
Barston and Tur thought her outspokenness inappropriate and saw the opportunity to challenge chairman Greg Dyke, who wants to curb the powers of the FA Council. Two complaints are enough to trigger a probe.
Already accused of failing to protect Carneiro, the FA are now under fire for investigating Rabbatts, a Jamaican-born woman and as such unique in FA circles. If the head of the FA’s inclusion advisory panel ends up in the dock for speaking her mind, what hope is there?
The councillors would appear to have overplayed their hand here. Rabbatts was entitled to her opinion and her views as a woman in a male- dominated sport are relevant and should not go unheard.
Yet if this is the catalyst for the break-up of the FA Council, the game will be poorer for it. If we look at football’s modernisers, are they really any better? Do we want every judgment call to end up on the desk of David Gill, the man who drove the FA’s premature endorsement of Michel Platini as FIFA president?
LeT’S
say that Barston or Tur described homosexuality as ‘detestable unto the Lord’. One imagines no amount of fine deeds in Rutland could compensate for that.
Yet Michael Johnson, the former Birmingham City and Derby County player, did and was still appointed to the Inclusion Advisory Board by Rabbatts. When he resigned, after the scandal broke, Rabbatts described the issue as ‘ unfortunate’, endorsed his ‘vital expertise’ and added she would continue consulting him on a regular basis.
edward Lord, another Inclusion Advisory Board member, was forced out in 2013 following a vote of no confidence after successive breaches of protocol due to public statements. Now there’s an irony. Let’s not pretend they are the kings and queens of governance, these new folk.
Dyke recently told an interviewer that the secret of his success was having so much money that he didn’t care what anyone thought. he possessed what is euphemistically known as f*** off money. But the problem with people with f*** off money is
that when you remind them the dogs’ mess needs clearing from the pitch by 8am on Sunday morning, they are likely to tell you to f*** off.
Dyke and his cohorts can stick a finger in the air and guess how the media will react to the latest back-page crisis — Rabbatts told him she was going to go public with her thoughts on Carneiro, and he supported her, probably because he could see this helped with damage limitation around the FA’s inertia — but they offer little to the grass roots beyond soundbites.
Dyke’s first big idea — the introduction of Premier League B teams in the Football League — would have killed football’s traditional pyramid. And if that is what he knows of Leagues One and Two, can you imagine how much thought he gives to 50 leagues below?
Of course the FA needs new ideas and fresh minds. More women and administrators with an ethnic background would not go amiss, either. Yet the blazers do important work, too. And if we are talking true independence, what epitomises it more than a random collection of civilians from county associations and organisations as disparate as the English Schools, the Amateur Football Alliance and the RAF?
Barston and Tur need to be put back in their box and told Rabbatts has no case to answer. The great reformers should first be made to sweat two years of small stuff in counties like Rutland and report back on what they have learned.
And then we carry on with football’s business as before because that way your league gets organised, your referee turns up on time, someone picks up the dogs’ mess and, for the most part, it works.