THE SLUM SPORT - what's it all about?

An extract from THE SLUM SPORT, the story of 1985/86.

“Just tell it as it was” - the advice given me by Geoffrey Green, the great journalist of a bygone age, as I was off to cover my first football match for The Times.

Chris Lepkowski has followed that advice with style with this book, The Slum Sport.

The story here covers rather more than just 90 minutes, going back to the days before we had wall-to-wall coverage on TV; plotting the variations football has had with the media and on through many trouble times in the game which in the 1980s was very nearly brought to an end by the unruly crowds and officials of both the game and the government.

Having been around for much of the story, including Heysel, and known most of the many personalities included, I would fully recommend this book. It truly is a cracking read.

Barry Davies MBE

It was early 1985; the day everything changed.

The mother of all TVs had arrived at our West Bromwich home, courtesy of a delivery from the Birmingham department store Lewis’s. A couple of blokes shuffled a huge box into our home, while my dad guided them in, making sure they didn’t brush the wallpaper on their way in.

This was no ordinary or standard television. Sure, it had colour - this was 1985, not 1965 after all - but, no, this thing was like something from another planet; a huge box of electronic tricks produced by a German company called NordMende, a brand so exclusive that only Birmingham’s pre-eminent store would sell it. It took months, if not years, for my working-class parents to save for this electro-wooden beast.

My dad always wanted the best when it came to electronic technology. And he’d clearly succeeded here. The remote control was like a Boeing 747 cockpit, with buttons, switches and functions that I dare not touch for fear of breaking something or blowing the damn thing up. I couldn’t stop looking at it this TV, not least because it took up most of the lounge, but also because it was an item of absolute beauty. It was like having a cinema screen inside our own home.

And there was one thing about this television that changed everything on that day in early 1985: something called Teletext.

Teletext was a broadcast network - launched during the mid-1970s - that transmitted text and basic graphics to the TV, including entire sections devoted to news, TV listings, weather, features and, best of all, sport. It was new to our household, and I was totally across the sports pages, not least the football. It was simple to use; you punched in a number on your remote control, and you’d be taken into a world of information, news and gossip, all presented in the form of four paragraphs. On Saturdays you could follow your team’s progress, with live updates provided from every game. We truly were entering a digital revolution in an analogue age. Over on BBC, the news service was called Ceefax; while ITV’s version was named Oracle (until the early 90s). It was like the Internet, some 25 years before the Internet was invented, but without the faff of needing Wi-Fi. It was this Teletext function – under a setting that simply read ‘Text’ - that would go onto shape my craving for football and eventually lead to a career in journalism.

From this moment forward, a random day in 1985, I would no longer come home from school and instinctively turn on Children’s BBC or the ITV. I would rush home and, before anything else, press that ‘Text’ button and punch in ‘140’, the number for the Football page on ITV’s Oracle. And once I’d done that, I’d head straight for ‘302’ on Ceefax, over on BBC.

From now on my post-school and pre-homework activities would centre on the latest transfer gossip, finding out which manager had been sacked by his club, and the ongoing injury saga of any given journeyman.

Four decades on, I’m still fascinated by these same subjects. I was not only becoming a football fan, but also a huge nerd of the beautiful game. Not that football was particularly beautiful back in 1985. I remember watching the 1985 FA Cup Final between Manchester United and Everton – the first final I’d sat and watched throughout - and being bewitched by the bend on Norman Whiteside’s winning goal, before rushing home from a karate lesson just a week or so later to stare at the TV in a bewildered state as football fans turned Heysel into a battleground. It was that same month that I sat in silence with my parents as tragic news rolled in from Bradford City, with local bulletins reporting a death at Birmingham City. Football was not supposed to be like this.

My parents took a very pragmatic view of my growing love for the sport.

My mum, being a devout Catholic, wasn’t keen that my hero of the time, Bryan Robson, wore a shirt carrying a logo depicting a red devil on his Manchester United shirt.

My dad enjoyed watching football on TV, but there was no way he was about to take me to watch a game down The Hawthorns. Firstly, he didn’t think it was a place for a nine-year-old given the hooliganism and, let’s face it, the potential compromise to our wellbeing.

My dad was never keen on large crowds. Given that Albion had an average of just under 14,000 people in 1984/85, rattling around inside a 30,000-capacity stadium, there was an obvious punchline there… Nevertheless, live football would have to wait.

And, so, on August 17, 1985, I was looking forward to settling into what would be my first real football season, albeit as a television viewer. Every Saturday would now no longer end with a re-run of Magnum with Tom Selleck, or Hill Street Blues over on that somewhat edgy Channel 4, but with Jimmy Hill presenting coverage from White Hart Lane, Goodison Park or Vicarage Road. It didn’t really matter – I just craved football.

Sundays? Well, that would be the weekly and compulsory morning jaunt to the Polish church in Birmingham, where I would daydream my way through mass wondering whether Gary Lineker would open his account for Everton, or Manchester United could win the League, or the Albion could finally challenge the big clubs. The great thing about Sunday mornings back then is knowing we had The Big Match with Brian Moore to look forward to on the Sunday afternoon, or maybe Jimmy Hill and his Match of The Day, over on the BBC. And then it hit me: there was no domestic football on TV. Nothing. Save for a measly highlights package of the Charity Shield, the previous weekend, there was barely any football on television from August until the end of December, all because they couldn’t agree a rights package. I will go on to talk about this in more detail…

On the opening Saturday of that season, I can remember exactly where I was: with my parents visiting my uncle and cousins in Leamington Spa. While everyone sat in the garden on a glorious summer’s day, I sneaked back inside to tune into Grandstand and watched as the results came in. Manchester United thrashed Aston Villa, Spurs walloped Watford, Liverpool beat Arsenal. West Brom drew against Oxford - disappointing, but better times would surely follow.

The hugely anticipated showcasing of League tables on Grandstand - but ONLY after three games had been completed - was soundtracked initially by Jan Hammer’s theme tune of the popular US cop show Miami Vice, before Bruce Hornsby’s The Way It Is became the staple.

To this day, that song reminds me of late Saturday afternoons, staring at League tables on the TV, while listening to presenters Des Lynam, Bob Wilson or Steve Rider reminding me of ‘yet another defeat for West Brom…’

Elsewhere, I would reconcile the lack of football on TV by swapping my weekly purchase of comics for Match and Shoot! magazines. If football wasn’t going to entertain me on TV, I’d have to consume it in different ways. And, of course, I had my daily fix of Teletext. I didn’t know it at the time, but my own personal saturation of football was to shape my life and career. (Coincidentally, some 25-years later, I spent several months as a freelance journalist writing Ceefax sports stories for the BBC). And then there were the Panini Football 86 stickers, where I’d be forever hoping to swap my Guinness-embossed Gary Waddock, of QPR, for Aston Villa’s Mita-sponsored Mark Walters or a team photo of Second Division Crystal Palace. Both were proving tough ones to track down.

When soccer finally did reappear, we were treated to occasional late-night Saturday scheduling of Match of The Day on BBC – if I was allowed to stay up – or on a Sunday, nestled somewhere just after the EastEnders omnibus. There was also The Big Match over on ITV, just after Weekend World - with its fantastic Nantucket Sleighride theme tune, as produced by US rockers Mountain - and before the early-evening speedboat hopefuls competed for the top prize on Bullseye. January 1986 was when it really kicked in; finally, we could watch some football.

My weekends became enhanced with TV coverage featuring those beautiful adidas-manufactured Manchester United shirts with those white shoulder flashes; the Avco-sponsored West Ham kit worn by Frank McAvennie; that iconic if somewhat divisive Le Coq Sportif-produced Everton jersey with its white ‘bib’; an orange ball rolling across snow-covered pitches during January/February 1986; that huge expanse of car parking space behind the goals at a half-full Stamford Bridge; Oxford United milking the moment at Wembley; Kenny Dalglish creating history with a tiny Crown Paints sponsor brushed across Liverpool’s TV-friendly adidas shirts. This is my montage of 1985/86.

I won’t give away too many more spoilers, but 1985/86 was exactly the season football needed after the horrors of the previous campaign. We had a final weekend championship dice between three clubs. We had an underdog winning one of the major trophies. We had a couple of new competitions. We had some near misses at both ends of the table. We had some stories of despair (and eventual hope). We had some record-breakers. We had some tales of utter mediocrity. There were some bumps during this campaign. It wasn’t all entertaining football, with some big stories – including tragedy and, inevitably, politics – dominating throughout this most difficult of seasons.

It was a season when so much focus was on a game that had some making up to do, much of it through its own doing.

I wasn’t to necessarily know this as child, back in the summer of 1985, but liking football was not something you bragged about. Sure, at school, most of us loved it. But in the adult world, football was something you shied away from, something that ended conversations rather than started them.

In August 1985 football was kicking off in such a bad place that few people – beyond your matchday regulars – would admit to liking the sport.

Much like the miner’s strike, which ended earlier in 1985, football was something that repulsed the state, could provoke unnecessary brutal force from police, and was generally frowned upon by anyone who wasn’t at the bottom of the food chain. The politicians hated it, the law enforcers fought against it, the middle-class abhorred it. By the mid-1980s, football’s cultural touch points were the far right, pitched battles, hooliganism, and a political class that conceptualised the game as a form of disorganised and dysfunctional rebellion.

Outside the often-maligned working classes, people who loved the game treated it as a grubby secret, not to be mentioned in polite company. People were turning to other sports for their entertainment. Football would, thankfully, change during the 1990s. The Fever Pitch-inspired genre of football would gather momentum after Italia 90 and through the creation of the glossy, shiny new Premier League in 1992. The ripples of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 also prompted change off the field. No longer would we tolerate supporters being treated like cattle and herded into cages.

If the 1990s were the new wave of football, the mid-1980s were more like its punk era.

Football fanzines became an alternative voice to self-aware supporters fed up of being tarnished as far right nutjobs. Like-minded empathetic folks, rather than fight each other on crumbling terraces, joined forces to rally against ID membership cards, the demonisation of football fans, and even the installation of extreme measures. You’ll read more about Ken Bates and his love for draconian measures in the book…

Change took a while. The 1990s are a story for someone else, for another book. This is a story of 1985/86. I am not going to bore you with too many statistics. There are websites that tell you how many people watched Oxford vs Newcastle on March 19, for instance. Nor am I going to get hung up on tactics or data-driven information. This is not a game-by-game analysis of a football season. These are anecdotes and stories, from those who lived and kicked every ball, or were close enough to do so from a dug-out or commentary booth.

This is a 12-month period of the football calendar that relies on some archive but, more so, first-person accounts of those who were there. Had these people not agreed to speak to me, there would be no book.

Each chapter is named after a song released during the 1985/86 period. These songs may have deep-rooted or symbolic meanings that have nothing to do with the football or narrative of the chapter. That’s fine. I merely chose each song because the title itself seemed appropriate - it is no deeper than that. Some of the songs I don’t even like – sorry Billy Ocean, Owen Paul and Queen – but I just thought the titles worked. My entire writing of this book was done against the backdrop of music from this era. If you’re going to immerse yourself in a particular year or two then you need the appropriate soundtrack to put yourself back in that era.

For 200+ pages I wanted to be that nine-year-old who finally hit double figures in December 1985.

The title The Slum Sport comes from an infamous Sunday Times editorial posted on the day after the Bradford fire disaster. “…A slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people…”

I make no apologies for trying to capture where football was back then. There are tough subjects tackled within this book, from people who were there. I will give a proper thank you to those who helped at the end of this book.

I hope you enjoy the journey through a football season that will mean so many different things, to so many people.

To order the book, please go to: THE SLUM SPORT - Story of 1985/86

Or, for a personalised author-signed copy, please contact me at chrislepkowski@yahoo.co.uk