Corinthian Spirit may be old but has much to admire
Football club’s traditional values of gentlemanly decency are celebrated in a BT documentary, writes Alan Tyers
Made up of officer-class chaps, as they were, no club suffered more losses during the Great War
The Manchester United Way, the Tottenham Way, the West Ham Way. Many teams, with various degrees of selfaggrandisement, have declared that there is something beautiful and unique about how they play the game.
One might add in the Barcelona Way, the Juventus Way and – circa their 1996 “Spice Boys” FA Cup final single – the variant “Liverpool Groove”, as in “pass and move, it’s the Liverpool groove”.
All these ways, and groove, seem to amount to the same thing: winning by playing nice football. No doubt every country has a variant: the Ulaanbaatar United Way, the Internazionale Chad Way. Even in Scotland, or so a search engine reveals, there is a Heart of Midlothian Way, which is presumably where you pelt the opposing manager with coins.
Admirable Ways most of these may be, but none of them holds a candle to the ethos associated with one particular outfit in the seventh-tier Isthmian League Premier Division. I speak, of course, of Corinthian-casuals FC, whose “Corinthian Spirit” has been a byword for fair play, decency and doing it for the love of the game since the 1880s.
A BT Sport documentary this week tells the story of Corinthian FC: formed in 1882, the amateur club, once the finest football team in England. They twice contributed all 11 players to the national side, beat Manchester United 11-3 and defeated the Preston North End Invincibles. They would neither score penalties nor attempt to save one – because a gentleman would never commit a deliberate foul on an opponent. Their gentleman amateur ethos was typified by polymath players such as CB Fry, Charles Aubrey Smith and Max Woosnam.
Short of a fixture, they gave a game to a schoolboy called Charles Miller, who then returned to the family business in Brazil and introduced the game to that country. Corinthians toured South America, and in 1894, inspired five Sao Paulo railway workers to form a team of their own. The name they chose was Corinthians. Sport Club Corinthians Paulista became a South American powerhouse and won the 2012 Fifa Club World Cup when they beat Chelsea.
For their English amateur forerunners, however, progress has not been so smooth. Made up of officer-class, first-over-the-top chaps as they were, no club suffered more losses during the Great War, and the 1936 burning-down of their ground, the Crystal Palace, left them homeless. They merged with another amateur side, Casuals, and now play their football in the less romantic surroundings of Tolworth, in suburban south-west London. They still, unlike the other clubs in their league, make no payment to either players or staff.
The documentary, a lovely, thoughtful piece, meets the non-league stalwarts keeping the Corinthian flame alive, with worries about how the club will pay the electricity bill as much of a headache as the form of the left-back. But then a glorious intervention arrives in the shape of an invitation to play a friendly match in Sao Paulo and pass the hat around.
It is against, of course, Sport Club Corinthians Paulista, to mark the opening of the Brazilian giants’ new ground where the Tolworth decorators and schoolteachers are welcomed as if they were the Beatles and David Beckham rolled into one.
“We are different in size, but same in heart,” says one Brazilian fan. How nice, and how rare to see football remember its Corinthian spirit.
Brothers In Football, Saturday, 9pm, BT Sport 1