The Mail on Sunday

Get It On: How The Seventies Rocked Football

Jon Spurling Biteback £20 )))))

- Jim White

There is no sport as addicted to nostalgia as football. The game, it has long been the consensus of those whose memories grow foggier by the day, was better then, in an era when men were men, kicked five bells out of each other and then repaired together to the pub to drink 18 pints. We recall the characters, the clashes, the colour and tell ourselves it was a better time.

Convenient­ly forgetting the rubbish pitches, the slum stadia, the relentless threat of attendant violence.

Jon Spurling is a superb navigator through those memories, recalling the times without hint of rose-coloured spectacles. The 1970s, as he recalls it here, is not some different place but one strikingly similar to our own time in its complexiti­es and variations and personal struggles. It is a refreshing football history, too, that puts the game in context, recalling the role it played in politics, fashion, the wider culture. He writes beautifull­y of how Harold Wilson was obsessed with timing his elections around the performanc­e of the England team in World Cups, of Alf Ramsey’s confusion when faced with young men embracing the new hedonism, and of the fan who went to watch a match and ended up with a dart embedded in his nose.

But what makes this such a compelling read is that Spurling, as he admits in his preface, has been working on the book for more than 20 years.

He has long been interviewi­ng those involved, getting their first-hand accounts. In one chapter we hear the successive opinions of Alan Ball, Peter Osgood, Frank Worthingto­n and George Best (above), all of them now long dead. Not by trawling the cuttings library for quotes we have read so often; here are original, never heard before accounts. It is like the most poignant literary seance, our lost heroes apparently addressing us from beyond the grave.

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