Football will always inspire the pointless invention
From Townsend’s tactics truck to the Tevez snood, the game has a long history of discarded ideas, writes Jim White
n the latest edition of When Saturday Comes magazine, a reader’s letter asks one of the most pressing questions of our time. Peter Lawson wants to know this: whatever happened to the snood? You know that rollover scarf thing that was like the polo neck detached from the rest of a sweater that Carlos Tevez would don the moment the temperature dropped below 25C?
It was all the rage a while back. Now not even Roberto Mancini wears one.
The snood has gone the way of the Robbie Fowler nose clip. Like the patch of Vicks Vaporub that Patrick Vieira used to smear across the front of his shirt, it has been consigned to football history.
But Mr Lawson was pointing to an essential truth: football is littered with innovations that noisily promised to change the game only promptly to disappear. Here are a few others: The George Best boot.
A must-have for every schoolboy in the early Seventies, the boot’s space age difference was that it was laced along the side. Gullible buyers (my parents, after endless badgering from me, among them) were assured that, unencumbered by laces, the smooth frontage would make ball control much easier. It never worked for me (though there may have been reasons for that).
Big Sam’s headset. Borrowed from American football, this ostentatious piece of kit was meant, as he paced the technical area, to keep Sam Allardyce in touch with someone stationed in the stand, who could thus provide him with a different tactical viewpoint of the unfolding goalless draw. Like Google Glasses, any advantage was offset by the wearer looking an absolute prat.
Numbered tags on socks made Leeds’ self-styled hard men look like a bunch of Regency fops
Blades.
Marketed on the insistence they provided firmer grip than studded soles, the bladed boot was swiftly found to be a little too effective. When twisting or turning, player’s feet remained rigidly held in place in the turf, leading to games being soundtracked by the rhythmic snap of ligaments.
3-D television coverage. The once-a-season moment a player kicks the ball directly at the camera did not justify the huge financial lay-out required and the idea was quickly dropped.
Andy Townsend’s Tactics Truck.
Part of ITV’S ill-starred Premier League highlights between 2001-04, so uninspiring was the concept, the highlight was when Townsend’s “tip-top” truck was towed away during a broadcast after parking illegally outside Stamford Bridge.
Numbered tie-ups. Almost as much as he enjoyed giving his players a rigorous soap rub, Don Revie loved an innovation. One was to send his Leeds United players out in the 1973-74 season with little numbered tags dangling from the top of their socks. It made the self-styled hard men of football look like nothing more than a bunch of Regency fops. Not surprisingly the tassels were binned.
Sky’s Fanzone. The idea of pitching two fans from the participating clubs in the commentary box to deliberate over live matches did little more than demonstrate the excellence of professional broadcasters. Overexcitement was the principal delivery mode, not least when a Fulham supporter seemingly self-combusted during a game against Blackburn in 2004. Sky quietly ditched the idea after it became clear that when it came to listening to the partisan shouting at each other, all viewers had to do was switch to Question Time.