War without shooting

As we grow used to headbutts and high salaries in soccer, DJ Taylor looks back at the glory days, encompassed in the spirit of the Corinthians. Review by Fionnbar Callanan

On the CORINTHIAN Spirit: The Decline of Amateurism in Sport. By By DJ Taylor. The Yellow Jersey Press, 2006. ISBN 0224075853,
€14.50

It was a sad coincidence that the editor sent me this book for review within 10 days of the death of Kevin O'Flanagan who, in my opinion, was Ireland's greatest ever sportsman and was one of the last of "the Corinthians".

This missal-sized book of 131 pages is a small but perceptive delight. The author, DJ Taylor, won the Whitbread prize for his biography of Old Etonian cricket-lover George Orwell, but modestly claims that nothing in his life matched his early triumph in a soccer career which ended at the age of 10! His sporting appetite developed indirectly from his father's following of Norwich City FC from the 1920s – well before such luminaries as Delia Smith, Stephen Fry, and John Mills became fans of "the Canaries".

In the 1929 FA Cup, Norwich City beat Chatham 6-1 in the first round; they then beat Newport County 6-0 in the second round to earn a third-round clash with the Corinthians – "an entity apparently composed of civil servants, Lloyd's underwriters and ageing public schoolboys". Before 20,000 spectators – gate receipts £1,591 – the Corinthians won 5-0.

Founded in 1882, the Corinthians were once described as "a team whose commitment to the amateur virtues was such that they disdained to take penalties". In 1939, they amalgamated with "The Casuals" (founded 1883) to form the aptly-named Corinthian-Casuals, a club that still figures prominently in the Isthmian League. The team's rules provide that "its aims are to promote fair play and sportsmanship, to play competitive football at the highest level possible whilst remaining strictly amateur and retaining the ideals of the Corinthian and the Casuals Football Clubs".

Born some 22 years after that Corinthians/Norwich City match, Taylor traces the transformation of English "sport" from its early Victorian days of bare-knuckle boxing, cock-fighting and rat-catching to the end of that era by which time public schools and universities had taken control of, and codified, the various component games.

It's fascinating to read that "between 1845 and 1900 the extent of the Harrow playing fields increased from eight acres to 146". Then came the almost inevitable reaction in which "the public school sportsmen who administered the game found that by the twilight of the Victorian era they had acquired the one thing liable to wrest the game from the hands of the people who had effectively created it – a mass audience".

In discussing the early distinctions between the amateur and professional games, I am sure that Taylor is right when he says: "The Corinthians, to put it starkly, believed that their distinction was innate; that it derived from the kind of people they were and the attitude with which they approached the game came, in fact, from an ethic that in the end had very little to do with sport at all." I doubt that today's Corinthian-Casuals members really share that belief or that it survived much beyond the 1939 amalgamation. And, in my reference to Kevin O'Flanagan, I do not imply that he, in any way, would have shared that belief; he was a true sportsman.

Nowadays, we are shocked at the level of pay of the top professionals and many point to "the good old days" of the 1930s when the average professional soccer player was paid £6 or £7 a week. Taylor points out that, at that time, his father's salary with the Norwich Union Insurance Company was £45 a year.

The book is laced with entertaining anecdotes of sport in public schools, just like in the schoolboy novels of the time like Strickland of the Sixth. Taylor says that, true to type, Strickland later "died on the Normandy beaches, out in the North African desert or along the Burma Railway" but that "his legacy burns on".

Taylor recounts the agonised emergence of professional golf and tennis despite the fact that many of the major sports associations (eg AAA, MCC and LTA) were "effectively controlled by propagandists for amateurism". He welcomes many of the changes coming from the new regime with the comment: "The most obvious point to make about this transformation is that there is no use whatever in complaining about it." This does not stop him indicating a strong dislike for Roman Abramovich and Malcolm Glazer or, even more pointedly, for "cloaca-tongued Wayne [Rooney], simultaneously a footballing genius and the most unappetising teenager ever to have pulled on a Manchester United shirt."

Thinking back on the second-round Portugal-Netherlands World Cup match this year, it is interesting to read the comment of Orwell as quoted by Taylor – "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting." Perhaps Nuremberg was the appropriate venue for the showing of 16 yellow cards and four red cards.