For those that wan't have seen it.....interview in The Observer Sport

When Bobby Robson started out, England ruled the world and players earned #10 a week. Fifty years on, and having witnessed a football revolution, he talks about Figo, the trouble with foreigners, and why English players drink too much

John Carlin Sunday August 6, 2000

Bobby Robson is caught offside by the news that this coming season will mark his half century in professional football.

He frowns hard, his eyes searching this way and that. "Well, yeah, yeah..." he says, with a scratch of the head. "I suppose you're right. Yeah. I began playing at Fulham in 1950. So, yeah, yeah, that's right. Fifty years..."

Robson pauses to reflect on this remarkable accomplishment for, maybe, four seconds, then erases the subject from his mind."OK," he says. "So what is it you want to talk about then?"

The grand old man of English football (he is 67) does not, by nature, dwell on things past, on his England career as player and manager, on the trophies he has accumulated as a coach in English, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish football. He is far too consumed by the here and now. By the task at hand at the latest club to hire him, the club he supported as child, Newcastle United.

A couple of hours earlier, he is inside St James' Park, on the terraces behind one of the goals, utterly absorbed by the stealthy upward movement of a hydraulic crane. "Look at that, eh? Will you look at that!" Robson stares, eyes wide with wonder, as the giant mechanism eases its trunk up towards the stadium roof. Blessed with a range of expression and breadth of gesticulation that Kenneth Branagh would be pressed to match, Robson is the most enthusiastic man in football. Age cannot wither the passion for life, for football, of the most successful England manager since Sir Alf Ramsey.

Nor can a stiff leg. Less than 24 hours earlier surgeons had pulled out half the cartilage in his left knee. When he thinks about it, or when he stands up after sitting still for a while, he grimaces in pain. But he doesn't think about it very much. What is it we're going to talk about, then?

The evolution of the game, how coaches, tactics, players have changed; about the things that have stayed the same. He nods, and his face becomes a picture of concentration. And he talks for the next three hours.

The Fifties

Coaching didn't exist when Robson, aged 17, started playing professionally for Fulham, then one of the leading English clubs. Preparation for a First Division match consisted, he says, of "Five, Four, Three, Two, One - run five laps, walk one, run four, walk one, and so on. We'd ask, 'Can we have a ball for training?' And the reply would come: 'What do you want a ball for? You'll get one on Saturday. That was the way it was in every club."

And team talks? What was his manager, Bill Dodgin, telling them? "Very little. We'd be up against, say, Man United and you'd just play your natural game. The manager picked a team, he had this 'WM' formation, told each player where to go. 'You can head the ball so you play centre half,' and so on. We might be losing at half-time and he'd say nothing tactical. More like, 'What d'you make that mistake for? How could you miss that one?".

The WM formation? Robson grabs a pen and paper. "Everybody in England used it. No one imagined you could play any other way. I mean, the war had only ended five years earlier..."

He begins to draw dots. "You had two wingers and a centre forward, two inside forwards, two midfielders, a centre half and two full backs." He makes a dot for each position, then joins the dots, five in the shape of a W, five in a superimposed M (try it at home, it sort of works).

Today the WM might be called a 5-3-2, or a 3-2-3-2. In those days maths was not the strong point of the game's cognoscenti.

Robson identifies the moment he realised English football was, tactically at least, in the dark ages. He was at Wembley in 1953 and watched the Hungarians put six past England. "You might think now that our tactics, or lack of them, were a bit crude, but we still reckoned we were the best in the world. And then the Hungarians beat us 6-3. First time England had ever been beaten at home. I'll never forget it. Near-post crosses, far-post crosses, two wingers working in tandem, the double centre forward." And the Hungarians did know their maths.

"Oh yeah. They put a player there," (he marks dots on paper again) "they put two against the centre half, four defenders against three attackers - they played 4-2-4. We'd never seen anything like that! And then they'd switch to 4-4-2. They hammered us! Because against our old WM their system did us in. But also - ah! - what play!"

Robson starts waving his arms around, eyes like a madman. He waxes so lyrical he starts to sound, and look, like Hamlet on a roll. "Their touch, their passing, their spinning, their dribbling ability, their crossing, the overlapping play of the two full-backs! And the support play - one man on the ball and always two to give it to. Their football was scintillating. It had width, it had depth. It was compact. It moved like a train."

Robson accepted an offer to take lessons in a revolutionary new discipline at the London Football Coaches' Association. "Don Howe, Ron Greenwood, Jimmy Hill came along too, all of us interested in coaching, all of us having seen the Hungarians take the game to a higher plane, wanting England to play at that level."

If the tactics were unrecognisable to today's players, so too were the finances. "I was paid #7 a week in the winter, #6 in the summer. I was a young boy of 17 but even the maximum salary at that time - I think I'm right in saying this - was #10 in the winter and #8 in the summer.

"So if you were Stanley Matthews or Tom Finney, the best in the game, that's all you could earn. Plus a bonus, set by the FA, of #2 for a win and #1 for a draw. Which meant that, other than your personal motivation, there was little financial incentive to do better because, however great you were, nobody paid you any more money."

What was more, the conditions of employment amounted to a form of slave labour. "Yeah. Slave labour. The clubs retained the players' registration as professionals. You could not leave without their permission. If you wanted a transfer and the club denied it you could do nothing about it. If you insisted on leaving they could put you out of the game, they froze you out of football, until you eventually came back to them begging."

The fans were different, too. "No hassle, no punch-ups, no blasphemy. Not even chants, songs." No 'there's only one Bobby Robson!'? "Oh no, no. None of that. Even after I played my first games for England I could walk down Putney High Street without anybody recognising me. "

The Sixties

Football in England made "a huge leap", Robson says, between 1950 and 1966. Two critical developments set the stage for England's World Cup victory: the abolition of the maximum wage, and the dramatic evolution of coaching.

"In 1960 the maximum wage went up to #20. But the players weren't satisfied. We asked for #5 a week more. The clubs, the FA said no. So we went on strike. That was in 61-62. Jimmy Hill, who was very eloquent, was our spokesman. We went all the way. And we won. Johnny Haynes became the first #100 a week player - five times the previous salary! Nobody could believe it! Suddenly there was a financial incentive to become a better player."

Ramsey plotted England's World Cup triumph but the man Robson credits with having laid the foundations is Ramsey's predecessor, Walter Winterbottom.

"Walter did more than anyone to to modernise English football. Now it wasn't 'what do you want a ball for?' any more. Walter understood that if you didn't train with the ball in the week when it came to Saturday you wouldn't know what do with it. So under his guidance, planned training, varied training, shooting practice, crossing practice all became part of the game. All clubs now were looking for training grounds. Before, they trained inside the stadium, ran around the block. Hardly surprisingly, pace went up, skill went up."

Robson's first glimpse - and glimpse is the word - of the Brazilian phenomenon came during a World Cup game in 1958. "I played for England there, at inside right. It was the hardest football I've ever played in my life. It was at a pace I'd never known, against a class of player I'd never seen on the same pitch. They had a lightness we did not have, an exquisite touch. Somehow, we drew that game 0-0. Pele came into the side in the next match, at 17. That was it. That was the year Brazilian football exploded on the world scene. Fabulous!"

If the game became more beautiful, it was also in good measure because of the change in the characteristics of the ball. "It was lighter, weatherproof. When I started we had this leather ball that absorbed water. It was like heading a bloody cannonball. Kicking it more than 60 metres was a terrific feat. Now with the new ball, which is basically the one we use today, you could ping it 60 yards with precision. Pinging wasn't an option in the 1950s."

Football not only became a better spectacle, with the 1966 victory the game acquired a new fascination in England. "People think football was always as popular in England as it is today. Well it wasn't. After the '66 World Cup the game's popularity shot up. Attendances the following season were dramatically higher. And now you had a huge demand for televised football. Players suddenly became instantly recognisable on the streets, to become celebrities in their own right - George Best was the first of his kind in England. And there was a terrific spin-off commercially. The textile trade took off - shirts, scarves, merchandise. In the Fifties football had been a game. In the Sixties it was becoming an industry."

The Seventies

After the defeat by West Germany in the 1970 World Cup, the national side had a run of abysmal failure despite a generation of wonderfully skilful English players. "Yeah. Yeah. You had Hudson, Osgood, Bowles, Marsh, Tony Currie. The sort of talent you were more used to seeing on the continent. But they didn't get a regular run in the England set-up. Maybe some of those players lacked a bit of behavioural attitude, of discipline." Unable to afford to bring such players to Ipswich, Robson instead initiated a revolution. In 1978 he brought two of the first foreign (or rather non-British or Irish) players into the English game - the Dutchmen Arnold Muhren and Frans Thijssen.

Why? "We'd become a bit stereotyped. We got the ball from the back to the forwards very quickly and did not play through the midfield very much. And so we lost the ball too much. If you over-hit or under-hit, you lost the ball. The long ball is the best ball in the game if it's spot-on (Hoddle was the great long-ball player in those days). But you only get seven or eight of those precision long balls in a match. You can't get 30. The percentage returns of the long-ball game are not good.

"So we had to bring in a change. To play through the midfield, not bypassing it. Play it in stages, shorten our game. We looked and looked but I could not find the player I needed in England - the best ones were in the big clubs. So we went abroad and I found two, the two Dutchmen.

"The Holland team that made the World Cup final in 1974 and 1978 didn't win but they were the Hungarians of the Seventies. They brought the game to a new level, a new tactical plane. They played without a centre forward, remember? Cruyff and Neeskens sat back, and the two opposing centre halves didn't know who to mark."

That was the team that invented total football. "Yeah. And you know what total football is? Every player in the team is a footballer. Every player - the centre half, the full backs - could dribble, pass, control it. Everyone played like an inside forward. Everyone could keep possession. The Dutch then were like the Hungarians because you could say there was a before and an after. They set a new standard. And the starting point was that they kept possession, rarely lost it.

The danger with that game is that you sometimes overplay, end up after nine passes where you began. But the good Dutch teams had the players to add penetration to possession. That's the secret of any team: play to the players' strengths. They didn't have any great headers of the ball, so they played ground football, which was a great, great game to watch."

The Eighties

The Eighties was a decade of new ideas. Of constantly changing patterns of play.

"For example, a coach would see the other team play 4-2-4 and he'd shift to 4-3-3 to dominate the midfield and create some space. A lot of teams shifted to 4-3-3. So then others said, OK, now we'll go to 4-4-2. You play three in midfield, we'll play four. Always what you're doing is trying to have a spare man, to create numerical superiority. That's the point. And now teams play five in midfield, 3-5-2. But there comes a time when you can't change any more. You can't put six in midfield, because there's no space. There are only four or five realistic systems. But the main thing is to be able to adapt the system to your players."

Tactically, the team Robson most admired during his England reign was France. "Funny that. It was not so long before that we thought of France as a poor footballing nation. We played them in my first game as an England player. I scored twice and we won 4-0. But look at that team, so unlucky not to win the 1982 World Cup. What the coach [Michel Hidalgo] did was really imaginative. He played with one winger, one front player, and no player on the right at all."

Robson grabs his pen and paper again and starts furiously drawing arrows, more dots."The team was built on the midfield trio of Platini, Giresse and Tigana. Platini, who could thread the ball through the eye of a needle, was in the hole, looking for the counter-attack, doing next to no defensive work. When France regained the ball they passed it to him. Behind Platini was little Giresse, knitting the midfield with the back four. Tigana had amazing pace and endurance. He did not operate wide, but he worked the right channel up and down. What you had here was a clever coach who was aware of his weaknesses and found a way of playing that suited his players, while at the same time causing confusion in the opposing team. I mean, what do you say to those two guys playing on the right in the other team who have no one to mark? No one mastered that problem."

Hidalgo, in other words, got the best out of his best players and made a virtue of his deficiencies. Did his wit offer any lessons to the current England side, whose lament is the absence of left-sided players? Robson does not rise to the bait. "Mmm," he says. "Mmm, What you do, is you get by. You find a way to get by."

Robson did a lot more than get by when he was England coach. But did he impose a discernible, Bobby Robson system of play on his teams? He pauses to reflect. "Well, look," he says,"first of all I always liked wingers. Later at Barcelona, for example, I played with Figo on the right and Luis Enrique on the left. I think that when you're in trouble the easiest, safest, thing is to pass it wide. Then, as to what you do with it, I was lucky to have players like Barnes and Waddle, and Kenny Sansom coming up from left back.

"What maybe set my team apart from other England teams was that we played ground football. We had to. Beardsley and Lineker were this high." He gestures with his hand at chest height. "I couldn't hit the high ball down the middle, or long crosses to the back post. As for the system, it was 4-2-4 or 4-4-2 - the two are basically interchangeable - because that is the system we most play in England.

"But you*ve got to be flexible at the highest level. And if in a World Cup we came across opposing strikers who might be too good, we brought in a sweeper - Mark Wright - to drop off and play behind everybody." Try as Robson does to impose some science on the game, there is always the luck factor. "Yeah, sure, yeah," says Robson, who was knocked out of one World Cup by the 'hand of God', another by penalties.

"You can't buy critical decisions that go against you. Or players that under-perform, way below their level in club football." Whereupon, for the first time, he ventures a criticism of the current England team. "Look at Dennis Wise, who is a little hubbub of a player for Chelsea but played so poorly for England in Euro 2000.

"He played nowhere near his club form, like several others. This is what you find as England coach. That there are players who don't cope with the pressure. Who can handle things in their own sitting room, but can't handle going to meet the Queen at the palace. You've got to find out about those players, because they'll let you down. They'll crumble on the day. They'll shirk the responsibility. They'll disappear."

The best example Robson came across of a player who did not shirk his responsibility, ever, was Bryan Robson. "He could play anywhere in the world at the same level, whether it was the Azteca Stadium or Crewe Alexandra. The world stage did not frighten him. Nothing did."

The Nineties

The football industry, fattened by all the money television poured in, became fully globalised. Players, and coaches no longer felt any constraint to play their football in the land where they were born. Robson offers a perfect illustration of the trend.

Upon leaving the England job in 1990 he headed to PSV Eindhoven, setting off on a pilgrimage that took him to Lisbon, to Porto, to Barcelona and back to PSV, before returning home to take over the Newcastle job from Ruud Gullit at the end of 1999. Why all this movement?

"There are three reasons, basically. One is money. Two, experience. And three, success. I went abroad to get an education, but I also doubled the salary I had as England manager."

What did he learn in Holland? "That the possession game comes first, penetration later. That passing well is the key." Why can't the English do this? "It's because we believe in the tennis game of football. We believe in getting the ball forward and getting it forward early. So we think the first pass must be a front pass. It's not on abroad, is it? What you see is that they get in a difficult position, a cul-de-sac, and so what do they do? They bring it back, play it square, start again. We don't do that." But the English understand this is how the game should be played, don't they? "I suppose so. The problem, maybe, is that we need the confidence and we lack the skill factor."

Which is why, following Robson's old Arnold Muhren principle, English managers look abroad. "You'll never get a Newcastle team with 11 Geordies now. The best you can do is retain a British nucleus. I am trying to do that at Newcastle. But beyond that, you're dreaming." But is this new reality good for the game? "Well, we're getting used to it now, but it's bad for the national side, no doubt about it. We've even got, disastrously, some clubs whose reserves are full of foreigners, so where is the English player getting a chance?" Yet Robson has just bought two Argentines. "Well, yeah," he shrugs, chuckling. "I am a hypocrite. But I am trying like everybody else to get success. It's a Catch 22, but I like everybody else have to start buying foreign players. And we'll do so till the country starts producing good ones of its own."

What did he find had changed for the better when he returned to English football? "A lot. Much greater professionalism. More attention to diets, to getting just the right protein and carbohydrate intake at just the right time. More scientific monitoring of fitness levels. Greater seriousness from the players, greater awareness that their careers are short and they had better look after their bodies."

That said, Robson was shocked to discover how deep the English culture of drunkenness remained, not just among the fans, but among the top players. "You try to stop them from drinking alcohol but they still like a drink, more in England than in any other country I know. In Portugal they never drank, in Barcelona they never drank. It's a cultural thing. It's been in the game a long time, and the young players come in, meet it, get the swing of it, and become the same. Not every player, but there is far too much drinking of alcohol in English football, far too many players getting drunk at weekends."

What's changed in 50 years

What strikes Robson is how dramatically the manager's job has evolved. "You've got to be so meticulous in your preparations. There's a lot more one-to-ones with players, analysing their games, trying to personalise their coaching to make them better players - which is now what the coach's job is supposed to be, in large measure. As for team talks, the sorts of things I'd say in my Ipswich days were much more general. Like, 'they take the long throw, watch out for the long throw.' That's not sufficient now. Now I say that for the long throw I want you in front of that player, and you get behind him and, between the two of you, sandwich him in."

At Barcelona, where he had difficulty with the language, he used flip charts to explain tactics. He liked the system, and uses it still. "I spend about 90 minutes preparing the charts, about 16 pages in all." Using the wall of his lounge, he acts out the part of a coach with his flip-chart. "I mark down each player for each particular duty: for an attacking corner and defensive corner; how to line up against a lateral free-kick, where precisely each player should stand; how far back or forward the last line of defence should be, depending on the angle of approach of the ball. I have a separate sketch for each permutation."

The key question is whether all these sophistications have improved the quality of the game.

"Oh yes. Yes. Absolutely. I remember Walter Winterbottom telling me, when I played midfield for England, that a midfield player does about 6,000 yards in a match - 2,000 yards of that in sprint form, and another 4,000 in checking and going back and covering. Today it's about 10,000 metres, so that's nearly 5,000 yards more per match. If you'd said to me back in the Fifties that I'd have to run 5,000 yards more I would have told you it was not possible. So, for instance, you were the full back then, the message from the manager was, 'Don't you ever cross that halfway line! Your job is to defend!' Now look at the overlapping full back, look at Lizarazu, Roberto Carlos, Thuram - the ground they cover! "As the game has got faster the technique has gone up. Because before you had time to get it down, look up. Before, if your first touch was bad and the ball bounced three or four yards, it was still your ball. Today, if you've miscontrolled it, you've lost it. Now the moment you get the ball there is someone at you. The pressure on the ball has increased manyfold. So, yes, the quality of skill has got dramatically better."

Is it possible to compare teams today with teams when he began? "Certainly. I can tell you without a shred of doubt: a good team today would murder a good team of the Fifties. A good game today is a much better game to watch than a good game in the Fifties or Sixties. Because the game has been progressing all the time."

On the other hand, the great players then, subjected to present conditions, would be great today. "If Matthews or Finney played today they*d be fitter and faster and still brilliant. George Best would be George Best today. He'd probably be better."

Perhaps the most obvious difference is in the incomes and lifestyles of the players. "You can say that again! A professional who plays eight years today, if he is sensible, can avoid the need to ever work again. In my day you assumed you'd have to go back to work. That was why my parents insisted I finish my electrician's apprenticeship before I took up the game. We absolutely assumed that was what I'd do after I turned 30."

As for the celebrity the players enjoy, and the power to control their own destinies they so patently lacked 50 years ago, it does pose new challenges. "Before the players' respect for the manager was unquestioned. Now you have to work harder to get it, because top players, the ones you really don't want to lose, can threaten to leave. Ronaldo is the perfect example. He had an eight-year contract with Barcelona and after a year he was gone. But he was a good lad, all the same. He treated senior players with respect. He always listened to what I had to say. Except when I asked him to stay at Barca. But that was the agent's fault."

Could he imagine a player having an agent in 1950? "I can't. What for? There was nothing to negotiate. Now it's gone too far the other way. Some agents are good, but many are a nightmare - perpetuating the player's unrest, never satisfied. Always looking to get a bigger cut, even if it is against their player's long-term interests. As happened, tragically, with Ronaldo. I'll never forget what he said when I asked him, during the negotiations before he left for Inter Milan, what his agents' view was: 'They said, I need to play football and they need to make money. I have to listen to them.'"

That's a long way from the thoughts that occupied Robson as he strolled unnoticed down Putney High Street in the Fifties. So much has changed. What hasn't? "I'll tell you what hasn't changed. I'll tell you what no amount of money can change," he says, his eyes lighting up, oozing devotion to the game that has been his life.

"The players play for the love of the game. They really do. Always. Money doesn't come into it when they're on the pitch. Once they are out there playing, it doesn't matter whether they are on 10 pounds or two million. That hasn't changed, and I don't believe it ever will. That stays the same. The love of the game, yes, that has always been the same."

-- Anonymous, August 07, 2000

Answers

Class feller, isn't he :-)

-- Anonymous, August 07, 2000

Thanks TM, excellent material and exactly what I would expect from Bobby. Always honest, entertaining and knowledgeable.

-- Anonymous, August 07, 2000

Ta - the mans sheer class. Not a bad word for anybody and full of the pride that drives all of us fans to love the game.

I saw the ad and forgot to buy the paper - is this excerpts from a book ?

-- Anonymous, August 07, 2000

I saw it too Josh, I think it is all of it.

-- Anonymous, August 08, 2000