Charity begins........

The English football season is starting to re-emerge from its summer break, even allowing this year for the World Cup and the seemingly endless early rounds of pre-competition games for the seemingly pointless lower echelon of european tournaments. The press agencies are spinning stories which have had difficulty in getting column inches and airtime in the close-season. The hype has begun again.

The realisation that a new season is upon us comes with the Charity Shield Match. It is taking place today. This was always a bit of a non-event. From memory during my childhood it was rarely televised and also poorly reported. Apart from the participation of the winners of the League and FA Cup from the previous season I am not sure what role, function or purpose it served. Even the Charitable aspect was never really explained at any time.

I was, in my 11th year, absolutely obsessed with football. It had really started as an all engrossing thing in 1970 with the World Cup and my quest to fill up the book of collectors cards for all of the main squad members. It was the Brazil team of that time that caught my imagination and fascination. An exotic mix of skillful, athletic and charismatic players which was so much in contrast to the dour, drab, characterless and, frankly, old looking contemporaries of the English teams. I lived, breathed, talked and dreamed football.

I did follow Chelsea at that time but I think my main motivation was the playing kit, especially the white stripe flash on the side of the team issue shorts, again a burst of colour in a black and white world. My first ever kit was however Liverpool and I recall the oval profile cardboard container which my parents bought from the town sports shop containing the bright red Umbro made kit. It was very, very red with only the thinnest dog collar in white, a bit  like our vicar's. I lived in that strip for weeks and months. I could soon reel off the full Liverpool team from Clemence, Lawler, Lindsay, etc through to Smith, Lloyd, Heighway, Hall, Toshack and of course Kevin Keegan.

As a tenuous link with Kev we had moved, as a family to a town close to the Steel Manufacturing town of Scunthorpe. Kevin Keegan had been discovered as a talent on the playing field by Scunthorpe United and spared a working life down the coal mines of South Yorkshire around Doncaster.

Keegan was a mini-powerhouse. A bustling, frizzy permed haired striker of a style not really seen in British football. It was not surprising that a good part of his career was spent in the German Bundesliga where he fitted in well in all aspects of a fast paced game and fashions of the period. He was a prolific talent, play-maker and goalscorer.

Imagine my shock and horror when Keegan my hero was sent off for fighting in, of all things, the 1974 Charity Shield match.

The match was being broadcast on the radio as our family were driving down to Somerset for our summer holiday. It was a hot, sultry day. The whole family sweltered in the VW Estate Car.

Liverpool against Leeds United was always going to be a niggly, competitive game. It must have been difficult for the 22 players to get motivated for a Wembley game after a long, lazy summer break and the match was labouring on throught the first half.

I could not believe my ears when the commentator described the boxing match, scuffle or handbagging between Keegan and the equally diminuitive Billy Bremner. Both of them were respected figures in the game but all was forgotten in the melee. The two players did not stop at the fisticuffs. They both took off their shirts and threw them down on the pitch. The double sending off was headline news at a quiet time in the sporting calendar but had significant after-tremors in football and through the media and public. An 11 match ban and a fine was imposed on the miscreants.

It was a very ugly incident. Over the next decade there followed equally disgraceful behaviour by so called fans and followers in the English game as though the foundations holding up the beautiful game had been blown apart on that sunny afternoon in august.