Film and TV
THE ENGLISH GAME
(Netflix)
Liverpool? Man City? Arsenal? No, no and no. The only English football club I support these days is Darwen FC.
True, the Lancashire-based club folded in 2009 and before that played in the ninth tier of English football. But their 1870s glory days live on in the new Netflix period drama, The English Game. Created by Julian Fellowes, who wrote the screenplay for Gosford Park and created Downton Abbey, it’s set in the moment when football transitioned from an aristocratic old boys’ game to the sport of the people.
The series follows two clubs at opposite ends of the class system: Old Etonians, led by Lord Arthur Kinnaird who, with his nicelytailored suit, wavy hair and well-groomed beard, looks like a model from a modern-day Barkers catalogue. Then there’s Darwen, a team of mill workers run by mill owner Mr Walsh, whose lank, greasy hair and scraggly beard makes him look like, well, a modernday football manager.
Darwen have drawn Old Etonians in the quarter-finals of the 1879 FA Cup, and to help them beat the posh scum, Mr Walsh has paid a couple of Scottish guns to join the team from Glasgow. Fergus Suter, in many ways the 1870s’ Messi, is widely acknowledged as the first professional football player; his mate Jimmy Love appears to have mostly come along for moral support.
No one is very happy about this arrangement. Darwen players bristle with resentment and worry the team will be disqualified if word gets out that Walsh is paying players; Kinnaird and the Old Etonians are ready to kick up a fuss with the Football Association should they happen to lose. But Walsh, who’s convinced himself he’s performing a social service (“the game feeds the soul”, goes one rousing speech, “when they have nothing else”), is undeterred.
Fair enough, the locals do love their footy. They even manage to get live score updates of the quarter-final from Eton, which seems historically improbable. The game is a belter — Darwen are run off the park in the first half, but at the interval, Walsh makes Suter the captain, and he gives the team a complete tactical overhaul in about 10 seconds flat. The lads come storming back in the second half, and a stunning volley from the captain levels the score in the dying minutes.
Extra time, surely? They’ve got them on the ropes. But Kinnaird’s not having it — by the letter of the law, Darwen have to come back and replay the match next week.
A lot can happen in a week. Romance blossoms for the two Scottish rogues back in Lancashire, while Kinnaird’s wife, in some ways the original WAG, tells him off for shouting about football at a dinner party.
“This game brings out the worst in you,” she chides, “it makes you childish and defensive and petulant”. Some things never change.
There’s also, quite literally, trouble-at-mill. Financial trouble, which means the replay may have to be forfeited. Please, no. Let us have this historically murky but dramatically satisfying version of the 1879 FA Cup, if nothing else.