SPECTATOR SPORT
Frankly, he hasn't got it
Simon Barnes
THERE is a line I remember from the play Pravda. It helps if you read it in an insane cod-Afrikaans accent and with all the spit- ting fury Anthony Hopkins is capable of, but it's a good line even when spoken nor- mally: 'Why make good newspapers, when bad newspapers make more money. . . ' pause for the licking of lizard-like lips . . and are so much easier?'
Never mind about newspapers, literature is news that stays news, said Ezra Pound. But the Pravda law is as true of books about sport as it is about newspapers. Why doesn't one pay me £250,000 for the serial rights of one of my books? After all, I'm quite confident that I am capable of writing a dreadfully bad book, one filled with half- truth, shibboleth, compromise and slipshod prose.
But then no one is going to pluck out an extract and put it in the Sun under the headline `Gazza trashed my room'. We have only read the pre-publication stuff in the Sun so far, but the world of football is being rocked to its foundations by the latest oeu- vre of Glenn Hoddle, the England football coach. It is called something like A la recherche du World Cup perdu — actually it is Glenn Hoddle: The 1998 World Cup Story. The book has been celebrated as 'too honest'. It tells tales out of school, breaks the seal of the confessional — and is still an absolute masterpiece of dullness. This is because it is written in the specialised lan- guage of footballese, a Creole based on the ancient tongues of journalese and football- speak. In football-speak, if you have a crap f—ing game, the bastard gives you a bol- locking. In footballese, if you put up a lack- lustre performance, the boss will give you a right rollicking. It begins there: the very heart of the language is the evasion of truth, and that evasion permeates every part of every book written in footballese.
Gazza's trouble, I learn, is that 'he has to learn to shut out private things, to put them in a box and only open that box at the right time, otherwise they sap his energy'. Hoddle is revealed to us as Lao Tzu speaking in tongues, or at least in footballese.
And what he says of the actual football is — well, let the man speak for himself: 'I've taken penalties in cup finals and that walk to the spot, with millions of eyes on you, is what hits you. When you run up and the goal suddenly starts shrinking, then you know you are in trouble. You don't know how you are going to feel until that moment. Frankly, you've either got it or you haven't.'
This explains why Hoddle was able to pick two out of five penalty-takers who haven't got it. On to a bit more saleable sniping at the players, all in it-hurts-me-more-than-it- hurts-you vein, and then we come to the core of the thing. Yes, Hoddle realises now that his biggest mistake was not taking his favourite faith healer, Eileen Drewery, to the World Cup: 'She would have brought us that extra 20 per cent.' You can't argue with facts like that; she'd have scored against Argentina all right.
There are people who feel that Hoddle should be sacked as coach because he has broken trust and given away what should remain secret. I think he should be sacked on purely literary grounds. How can some- one give away so many secrets and still fail to reveal any truths whatsoever?
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