Gary Lineker on Italia ’90
GARY LINEKER on when England went to the World Cup with fans, the Press and even the Government on their backs, but with a little help from The Sound of Music changed football in this country for ever
GARY LINEKER is not sure which of his team-mates it was, sitting near the back of the England team bus, who first uttered the words which built into a song and rose to a crescendo, ringing out down the aisle in a way which somehow encapsulated the esprit de corps England possessed that summer.
‘It was Chris Waddle, I think,’ he says. ‘Or maybe Gazza started it. It began quietly. And then others joined in and suddenly it took off and started rippling down the bus.
‘Doe, a deer...’ — those were the words that always started it off. It seems safe to assume the lyrics were rendered more colourful in places before the last line — ‘…that will bring us back to doe’.
But the most remarkable aspect of how the spirit of Julie Andrews and The Sound of
Music took England to the World Cup semi-final in Turin is that few, outside that band of brothers, seem to know about it.
In all the many thousands of words chronicling and dissecting that campaign, which began 30 years ago this week, Do-Re-Mi has never once been mentioned.
It’s hard to avoid the impression that’s just how the players wanted it. ‘The country and the Press were on Bobby Robson’s back at that time,’ says Lineker, from his home which has become one of the backdrops of the lockdown as Match of the Day has innovated so effectively. ‘That generated a togetherness among us towards Bobby. It was us against the world.’
The history of England at World Cups is littered with the controversies which fill the interminable vacuum of the build-up, though few quite like the one which engulfed Robson back then. Informed by the FA that his contract would not be extended beyond 1991, he had, not unreasonably, already taken a job at PSV Eindhoven. But word seeped out before the tournament and he faced an onslaught.
The Today newspaper said in previous centuries a man who committed such treachery would have been sent to the Tower. Robson, a face like thunder as he faced a battery of flashbulbs, interrupted FA chief Graham Kelly to declare the reports ‘garbage’ even before questions had begun at the ensuing press conference.
‘We were totally aware of it and saw the headlines in the papers — nobody could really understand it,’ reflects Lineker. ‘It’s how it was and how it still is. If England didn’t do well, it was seen as a crime.’
It is Lineker’s broader discussion of football’s late-1980s backdrop, though, which creates a deeper sense of the more profound challenge England took into that campaign. On the afternoon of April 15, 1989, he was preparing for Barcelona’s evening game against Real Valladolid.
‘I was in my hotel room in Barcelona,’ he says. ‘The Hillsborough story was breaking on Spanish TV. There were pictures, mainly stills with a reporter at the stadium, but it was clear something terrible was happening. It was then I started calling home.’
The disaster, at a treacherously inadequate stadium where policing preparations were criminally poor, accentuated the negative football narrative being promoted by Margaret Thatcher and her ministers at that time. The hooliganism which had beset England games in qualifying left her Sports Minister Colin Moynihan visibly seething as he told TV crews he was ready to pull the team out of the tournament.
Robson’s players were corralled in Sardinia — at the Is Molas resort near Cagliari — so their feared travelling fans could be kept away from the mainland.
Lineker remembers playing for England at a half-deserted Wembley in the 1980s. There were crowds of just 21,000 and 27,000 respectively for Italia ’90 warm-up games against Czechoslovakia and Denmark — and a record low of 15,000 the year before.
‘We would get bigger crowds in club football than international football,’ he says. And Wembley made it look even sparser. No one rated England much at that point.
‘We were all aware of the stuff going on. There had been a lot of hooliganism at that point. The Government were very antifootball. Some things don’t seem to have changed. We just wanted to get cracking that summer. It was good to get out of the country. Once you were in Italy, you were cocooned and had no awareness. The build-up wasn’t promising.’
The negativity towards the team was not universal, though the suggestion of journalist Hugh McIlvanney that some of Robson’s more far-fetched detractors be taken to a ‘padded room’ did seem a minority view.
By THE time reports surfaced of Isabella Ciaravolo, a 27-year-old singer recruited as an Italia ’ 90 ‘ hostess’, being expelled from England’s Sardinian base amid rumours of ‘high jinks’, relations between players and the Press had descended into open warfare.
Steve McMahon ripped up British papers in full view of the cameras. Paul Gascoigne threw a glass of water at Paul Parker for having the temerity to speak to a reporter.
Lineker does not recall the McMahon moment, but he does remember the relationship. ‘We were certainly not speaking to them,’ says Lineker. ‘Sports reporters can give an opinion and, three weeks later, be proved wrong and they can switch. Pundits and players can’t do that because it gets bounced back to you. you get used to that.
‘But for us, it was the best atmosphere I’d known with England. The 1986 World Cup was good but this was even better. There were also the characters we had: Gazza, Waddle, McMahon — all great characters.’
Robson’s open, liberal kind of management made all the difference and his eccentricities, not least getting players’ names mixed up at times — actually helped.
Lineker recalls the time, on the England bench, when the substitutes looked at each other in bemusement after Robson had issued the instruction: ‘Garth — warm up.’ Lineker says: ‘We wondered what Bobby could possibly be talking about. Then I realised he meant me: Garth Lineker.’
Robson always confused Parker with Danny Wallace and, bafflingly, Kenny Sansom with Derek Statham. Peter Shilton became known universally as ‘Shilly’ after Robson used the term. And in a moment of peak confusion, he addressed Bryan Robson as Bobby. ‘No, you’re Bobby, I’m Bryan,’ responded the captain, deadpan.
‘There was a humour and he would accept that humour at his expense, too,’ adds Lineker. ‘He was a very articulate man, very educated and knowledgeable about all aspects of life. As a coach, it was fairly basic with him, but as a man-manager and leader he was superb. He knew how to get the best out of individuals. He was fiercely loyal, too. It’s so easy with England to be influenced by TV and the Press but he could never be moved by those outside influences.’
The group stage did not start well. The 1-1 draw against Jack Charlton’s Republic of Ireland was such a brutal, unattractive game that one English back page pleaded: ‘Bring ’em Home’. La Gazzetta dello Sport offered: ‘No football please, we’re English!’
It was perhaps a mercy that what Lineker has since described as his ‘digestive troubles’ that night were not known about and not reported on. That’s to say, the meal on the eve of the match that caused him gastric problems which he was reluctant to tell England’s medical team about, for fear of being left out of the team. What ensued is the only known example of an England player being caught short on the pitch.
Team-mates such as McMahon describe how the episode enhanced the mood in the camp. So did the players’ race night at the Is Molas which did not end well for ‘bookies’ Lineker and Shilton, aka ‘Honest Links and Shilts’. The players had been given advance sight of the race videos.
And of course, says Lineker, there was the indefatigable Gascoigne, always ready to lighten the mood and never more so than in the second group game, against Holland, when he signalled his arrival on the world stage with the supreme confidence to pull Ruud Gullit’s dreadlocks. ‘Paul was very hyper,’ says Lineker. ‘He didn’t sleep much! But he’s intelligent. He’s not daft. And he was such a presence that night.’
THE pressure was rarefied against the Dutch because Robson had also made the audacious move of dropping England’s 4-4-2 in favour of a sweeper system. On the ITV pre-match build-up, Jimmy Greaves said he could not see it working.
‘There were rumours of this being a result of player power (after the Ireland game),’ says Lineker. ‘Totally fabricated. Bobby asked Bryan Robson, Peter Shilton, Terry Butcher and me what we thought. We were all positive.
‘The idea was it would give us more flexibility and make us less predictable. And it changed the tone. We were suddenly outnumbering teams in midfield.’
An injury to Bryan Robson ended his tournament but it was also the night Lineker sustained a toe injury which, though few knew it, made kicking a football painful for the rest of the tournament.
‘It might have been that someone stamped on it in a collision,’ he says. ‘It was smashed up. The toe nail was black and I was on painkillers. But to be honest, once the adrenalin kicks in, you’re all right. I had to rest it but I still did penalty practice.’
That routine would, of course, assume significance later, after England had beaten Egypt to qualify for the knockout stages and taken extra-time to progress past Belgium and Cameroon, with Lineker’s two penalties eliminating the African nation.
It is sometimes forgotten that for the legendary semi-final against West Germany in Turin, Robson turned to the sweeper
system again. ‘ the midfield three were David Platt, Waddle and Gascoigne,’ reflects lineker. ‘ there’s no defender in that midfield. Where’s the holding player!
‘We were fortunate to have Des Walker (in central defence) — the best man-marker in world football, who had Jurgen Klinsmann in his pocket. It was brave of Bobby to play that system against the best side in world football. But he was flexible. He shifted back to 4-4-2 (after 70 minutes) when trevor Steven came on for terry Butcher.’
lineker’s equaliser arrived 11 minutes later, but nine minutes into extra time came the booking which delivered one of england’s most iconic moments.
DID Robson and his coaching staff register and acknowledge him after he mouthed, ‘Have a word with him’, as Gascoigne was crushed by the realisation that there would be no final for him?
‘Definitely,’ says lineker. ‘the bench could not have been more than 15 yards away. I saw his bottom lip going and a tear in his eye and I had a bit of concern for him — but to be honest I was thinking about wanting to get to the final. I wanted them to make sure he was OK for us in the game.
‘And to be fair, he was. He recovered from that in the remaining extra-time.’
Gascoigne should have been the fifth penalty-taker but was in ‘no fit state’, says lineker, whose memories of those moments before the spot-kicks include seeing Waddle reluctantly put up his hand to be the standin no 5. lineker, who scored with the first kick, had prepared for a moment like this.
‘I hit 30 to 50 penalties after training,’ he says. ‘I had no goalkeeper. I didn’t want my confidence destroying. So I just had someone behind the goal stopping the ball. no one else was practising penalties.’
It was a quiet kind of devastation after misses from Stuart Pearce and Waddle had consigned england to defeat.
‘Bobby just walked around and put his arm around people,’ says lineker. ‘It was a much quieter dressing room than after the defeat by Argentina in 1986.’
He and Robson also knew the purgatory of watching the final in Rome, as part of the ItV commentary team, lay ahead. ‘I knew at that stage I wanted to go into tV, so I’d committed to it,’ says lineker. ‘It helped that Bobby and I got on so well. We would probably have talked cricket quite a lot.’ Robson clearly never forgot lineker was a talented cricketer before his football days.
the tournament changed the national view of football, lineker feels. ‘It didn’t seem to be a purely working-class sport any more,’ he says. ‘ Women had fallen in love with the game, too. When I walked out at White Hart lane with Gazza at the start of the next season, there was an incredible reception. Wherever you went, people were gushing. everything was different. Hooliganism faded away. It was a watershed moment for football.’
long before such consolations and reflections, there was the long, slow drive out of turin’s Stadio delle Alpi when, with the wounds of that semi-final defeat still raw, that song struck up as usual.
‘It started rippling down the bus again,’ says lineker, his voice betraying the faintest hint of emotion as he relates it, all these years on. ‘It was quite emotional, really.’
‘GARTH...H WARM UP!’ WE WONDERED WHAT BOBBY COULD BE TALKING ABOUT. THEN I REALISED HE MEANT ME: GARTH LINEKER’