While continental footballers have flowing skills, England’s are tough and physical. A new book says this has a lot to do with Victorian ideas of manliness writes Catherine Etoe

Those Feet, A Sensual History of English Football
by David Winner. Bloomsbury. £14.99

IT is not uncommon for fans to make a connection between masturbation and football.
They usually do it just after the referee has made a decision they aren’t too impressed with.
Yet according to author David Winner in his new book, Those Feet: A Sensual History of Football, self-love was partly why the game was invented in the first place.
The former New Journal feature and sports writer says the game was founded by puritanical Victorians eager to rid their young men of “this horrible thing done in secrecy”. And following his somewhat tongue in cheek line of thought, that is one of the reasons why the English don’t play sexy football. Baffled? You may well be, but anyone familiar with Winner’s last book, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, won’t be surprised by this latest off-the-wall venture.
In Brilliant Orange, Winner reckoned that football in Holland reflected its culture and that was why the Dutch play beautiful football, but never win. “Some of the Amsterdam School of Architecture’s most stylish buildings were better at looking good than at keeping out rainwater (like leaky Dutch defences),” he wrote.
In his latest book, Those Feet, Winner takes an equally original slant as he attempts to work out why the English can’t even manage to play beautiful football, never mind win anything.
“It’s certainly not intended as a conventional history,” he says. “Instead, I started with what I imag-ined to be the defining characteristics of the English style, and worked backwards to try to understand how they got that way.”
So off the Kilburn-based writer trotted to libraries in Holland and Euston Road, where he unearthed some of the most bizarre, but entertaining information on the game published in one book.
He kicks off with the idea that England’s failures on the field are partly due to the emphasis on Victorian ideals of “manliness”.
The idea is that English players boast courage and strength, but they are no match for the delicacy and cleverness of our overseas conquerors.
“England’s failure against Brazil in Japan in 2002 was just one installment in a long-running saga of decent, dull English footballers humiliated by technically superior foreigners,” he says.
And once Winner abandons his overly-long investigation into Victorian prudery, his argument starts to make a little sense. Especially when he goes on to talk about the highly skilled footballers English football has produced. Len ‘Clown Prince of Football’ Shackleton, Rodney Marsh, Alan Hudson and Frank Worthington are just a few mentioned.
Winner says that instead of welcoming those “self taught mavericks”, the establishment shunned them in favour of manly, workmanlike types.
He writes: “Charlie George, for example, who…could pass the ball like Dennis Bergkamp, played only once for England (and was substituted after half an hour). But his Arsenal colleague, the dull, brutal ‘hard man’ Peter Storey played 19 times.”
But times have changed and with the increasing influence from overseas, Winner says English football is at a crossroads.
He writes: “Will it cling to its old unsexy traditions? Or adopt the ways of foreign players and coaches? Or, as seems more likely, integrate both approaches to create some new kind of English player who is vigorous and tough like before but more skillful?”
As you would expect, Winner answers his own question by concluding the chapter with mention of England’s current favourite Wayne Rooney who possesses both manliness and skill.
But that is a cursory glance, because the writer’s interest lies in unearthing the past in a bid to discover why the English lose ugly.
And in Rooney’s team mate Roy Keane (let’s forget for a while that he’s Irish), Winner manages to link both manliness and the past.
Apparently, English football’s toughest nut Keane is not a modern phenomenon.
He first arrived in public consciousness back in 1859 as the manly Royston Keene, hero of Victorian novel Sword and Gown.
In this instance, hard man Royston gallantly leads his men on the field after falling in love with a woman who left him to become a nun.
Scores more edgy Keano characters from the comic books are dragged up in Winner’s bid to “get a sense of British fantasies over the last century and more”.
“Stories are the way we make sense of the world and our place in it…football is one of the stories the English tell themselves in order to know who they are,” he writes. Winner then moves on to 20th-century comics and that old favourite and super Lionheart, Roy of the Rovers.
But a quick digression takes us to 1922 football heroine Ray of the Rovers, who led her department store to Northern Drapers’ Cup Final victory by scoring the winning goal.
“Ray waited until the two girls had almost closed in on her, and then suddenly she stopped and sent a swift, oblique shot that no goalkeeper on earth could have saved except by a fluke,” the Football and Sports Library novelette story goes.
Here Winner really could have explored the sensuality of football by looking at the reason women went on to be banned by the FA from playing.
He doesn’t, but it’s the little known gems that Winner unearths such as this really do make the book.
Like the story of the fan who bought his Wimpey-style home because it was built on the site of Middlesbrough’s old stadium Ayresome Park.
Rob Nichols’ back garden was the edge of the pitch and the house stands where the boys’ enclosure once stood, while inside, the walls are red and carpet turf green. Quite whether Winner pulls his ideas together at the end I’m not sure.
But after taking a walk into the past with him in Those Feet, it is possible to share his personal connection to the book and the stories in it.
He says: “I’ve discovered that things I thought I hated about England and its football – its spirit, its muddy, backward looking battling – were things to which I felt deeply connected.
“I’ve discovered afresh how rich, weird, magnificent and exotic is the football of the country of my birth. And how much I love it.”