Cricket’s ongoing red-hot Ashes opera has had the soccer season deferentially tiptoeing into its autumn overtures, but a backlash will be rude and raucous all right, should the England soccer team play as gormlessly in their two forthcoming World Cup qualifiers as they did in the practice match last week, when Denmark disdainfully won by 4–1. Similar slovenly ineptitude against Wales a week today, or four days later against Northern Ireland, and the scorn and ridicule heaped by the London media on soccer’s zillionaires will overwhelm any new tricks even the cricketers can conjure up for its grand finale under the Oval’s gasometers.
Easily England’s best player in the Denmark debacle was the gifted, quarrelsome man-child Rooney at centre-forward. The talented barrel of belligerence might be the nominal No. 9, but Rooney is by no means your actual barnstorming England centre-forward of legend. Alan Shearer was the last of that line, direct inheritor of such knockabout rigour and vigour as Ted Drake, Dixie Dean, Derek Kevan and the peerless Tommy Lawton. Possibly the most resplendent example of the olde-tyme bulldog-bravura breed of English No. 9s is, happily, still with us — and 80 today. Nat Lofthouse scored 30 goals in just 33 games for England, and 285 in 505 matches for Bolton Wanderers. Nat joined his coal-bagger dad down the pit at 15 the day war broke out. He emerged with the peace, grimy but bonnily combative, barn door-broad and fearless, to parade in full pomp around penalty areas the world over, most particularly Burnden Park’s every other Saturday right up to the 1960s.
Bolton play now in a more swish and dinky mod-cons stadium, but when true-great Nat was monarch at splintery Burnden, any smart film director knew Bolton’s ancient paddock was the place to call up the sepia filters richly to imprint the flavours of a century of working man’s weekend freedoms: the steeply raked expanse of flat caps climbing into infinity and the smoggy gloaming at the Railway End; the fevered oohs and aahs, yesses! and noes! despairing and jubilant in turn; the wit; the winter warmth of communal intensity …the whole theatre canopied by the overdosing fug of tobacco smoke.
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