“I think my experience behind the counter at the butcher’s shop helped because it made me fairly good at chatting people up,” he wrote in his 1976 autobiography, Jack Taylor: World Soccer Referee. “Although you are dealing mainly with women in the shop, human nature is much the same in footballers. For instance, sometimes when an old dear comes into the shop you can tell as soon as she steps through the door that she is in a frightful mood. Maybe she has had a row with the old man or the kids have upset her. She has clearly come in sparring for a row so you mention that her hair looks nice. Or, if she looks rough, ‘My, I bet you had a fair old time last night.’”

You think that’d work on Ronaldo today?

The Accidental Referee

Taylor, it seems, rather fell into his career as a referee in the 1950s. This was an age before full-time referees – indeed, even by the conclusion of his career in the 1970s, Taylor still writes that “I do not think we will ever have full-time referees in England.”

When Taylor began refereeing in his teenage years – he was a keen player, but not good enough to turn pro – he had little idea or ambition to move up the ladder, at least initially.

Yet once he had risen rapidly up the ranks, Taylor did not think refereeing should stand still while the rest of the game rapidly modernized in the 1960s. His career traversed the gap in England between notions of amateur idealism that staidly stuck with its administrators and into an era of modern professionalism, intense media coverage and of television saturating the game.

Taylor freely admits that “I resented television totally when it first arrived because it seemed yet another way of pointing out my mistakes to the world. I had now not only twenty-two players and forty thousand fans to put up with; another fifteen million were looking in on television and I suspected that every one of them delighted in proving me wrong.”

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, Taylor soon concluded that “I could not have been further off the mark for, as I gradually learned to live with television and to understand the effect it was having on everyone, I realised it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to football.”

Taylor was a man more than willing to adapt to the modern game, and indeed, use it to his advantage. Initially fearful of the media, he soon developed close relationships with several journalists who proved trustworthy and supportive of him: “I can count on one hand the number of journalists who have let me down and broken a confidence,” Taylor writes.

Building relationships was critical to Taylor’s rapid progress from parks’ referee – getting his start at the age of 17, talked into it by a friend in his butcher’s shop – to international referee. First it was Jim Lock, a local experienced former referee and soon his mentor; then Percy Harper, the 1932 FA Cup final referee who he met by chance and who quickly became another mentor; and then Teddy Eden, a Birmingham FA official who helped accidentally land him his first full international refereeing assignment at the age of only 23, running the line for a France-Spain international in Paris.

His age quickly made him stand out. Taylor was youthful and flashy compared to his colleagues, unencumbered by a wife or a mortgage, and he wrote that I “like to think of myself as a trend-settter and I was always buying new gear and trying out new things. I always trained in a flashy track suit and had a white flash around my badge. . .I think I was one of the first referees to get in step with the fashions being set by the players by turning my shorts up.”

At 25, he was the youngest linesman in the Football League. Not that there was any training: “You just had to pick it up as you went along,” Taylor recalled. Almost straight away, he was picked on in the London press for one decision he still defended in his memoir that was seen by one reporter to have been “terribly wrong in flagging Fulham out of the cup with the worst offside call I can recall.”

Taylor, though, says that even at 25 he already knew another questionable decision would come up soon enough, and the incident would be forgotten. He could at times be quick to anger (something he learned to control), but he had a relaxed approach to dealing with the game as a whole, feeling it helped him handle pressure far better than building up tension or blowing up the importance of what was, after all, a game he loved.

Unlike many of his contemporaries in British football, Taylor had an open-minded view of the world. He clearly loved to travel; unlike his father, whose life was contained solely in his butcher’s shop, Taylor enjoyed his many trips abroad. Approaching the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, he poo-pooed English fears that there would be trouble on the field due to the aggression of South American teams, commenting – based on his past experience refereeing on other continents – that “Obviously there will be tension, because the will to win is there, but I think there is a fair standard of sportsmanship throughout the world today.”

Taylor had already observed the lack of understanding of overseas cultures in the preparation of referees for the 1966 World Cup in England: “In 1966 the referees were gathered together in London only three days before the opening match. On the whole, they were well prepared physically but they were ill prepared as a group for what lay ahead. The teams taking part had been painstakingly trained for many months. When the referees arrived in London they were given a few inadequate lectures, and they had barely enough time to get to know each other before being divided into groups and sent to the various centres around the country.”

Importantly – given the events that followed at the 1966 World Cup that so infuriated all parties – Taylor goes on to observe that “There was not enough consideration given to the different styles of football played in South America and in Europe: not enough understanding of the sort of things that referees allow on one continent but not on the other.”

It was no surprise, then, when the referees – almost all European – so unsatisfactorily controlled matches involving South American teams, who felt they were kicked out of the competition by a European conspiracy. “It is not difficult to imagine the thoughts which haunted the Brazilians, Uruguayans, and Argentinians as they packed their bags and left for home early,” Taylor concludes.

By 1970, though, FIFA had learned from their mistakes in 1966: the sole Englishman in Mexico, Taylor was one of the referees given extensive training and careful preparation by the Referees’ Committee, who looked for input from referees from each country to figure out how officials could work together. “Bit by bit we talked our differences out. The interpretations put on things in South America and Europe were compared and from this we agreed on a system of cooperation between the referee and his linesman,” Taylor recalls. In the event, the dangerous tackle from behind was clamped down on and not a single player was sent off in the entire tournament.

Taylor believed in discipline, but he also believed in understanding the actions of players and managers, and the pressures and aggression they were often responding to. “We all have a breaking point,” he writes. “When a player loses control of himself and retaliates I cannot excuse what he does, but at least I ought to try and understand it. If someone said something terrible to me how would I react? As a kid I had a temper. How would I have reacted if someone had come up behind my back and whacked me so that I had no chance of playing the ball? I must condemn the offender and I must take positive action. You will never stop trouble, so you have always got to try and understand.”

Nastiness, though, was something Taylor had trouble understanding – and even more troubled by the growth of in the modern game.

Dirty, Dirty Leeds?

One thing he was sad to see change was the attitude on the field; when Taylor began his career as a referee in the Football League in the early 1960s, it was “the closing stages of a golden era in English soccer. . .a new, tougher, breed of professional was beginning to introduce a win-at-all costs attitude that we’d never seen in this country before, while most of the game’s administrators refused to face up to reality.”

Referees were rapidly becoming a big deal, targeted by players and the media. In the old days, “on the park, we could have a quiet word and a joke. There aren’t many jokes on a football pitch today.”

Taylor saw how this spilled into the attitudes of the younger referees in the 1970s, who now “start to wind themselves up on a Thursday for a game on Saturday.”

This was the era of hard men. Yet a Times’ report on what might have been a brawl of a game between Chelsea and Leeds in January 1975 particularly praised Taylor’s handling of the game: “It was a proud match for heroes, flowing with endless action and entertainment, devoid of bus fires and anger and beautifully, even unobtrusively, handled by Jack Taylor, the World Cup final referee.”

If there was one man who could handle Leeds United, it was Taylor, who was assigned to their games 11 times in one season. He was even able to have a laugh and a joke with them: “I do not accept that players like Gabriel and Norman Hunter, of Leeds United, are dirty,” he says in his memoir. “They are hard and they push their luck a long way at times, but they should not be pilloried for having an aggressive style. Players like that, by the way, often have a good sense of humour.”

For Taylor, such a write-up mentioning his unobtrusiveness was surely the highest praise: being the centre of attention was not the purpose of refereeing, he makes clear in his memoirs. Taylor was a tall, imposing figure, confident in his own abilities, and felt no need to prove his place on the field. “The referee will never become as big a personality as the player. He must not. In some countries he is glorified, over-publicised and over-filmed . . . but the referee will never be a true artist.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Taylor recalls he “slept like a log” before taking charge of the 1974 World Cup final.

Jack Taylor performing the coin toss for the 1974 World Cup final with Johan Cruyff and Franz Beckenbauer

In the event, Taylor did become something of the star of the show when, feeling he had no choice, he awarded two penalties within 25 minutes. He remains convinced that from his angle, on each call, he made the correct decision.

The second was the most controversial, but in retrospect, Taylor had no regrets: “As Hoelzenbein went over, I thought to myself ‘It’s not as bad as you’re trying to make it look, old son’, but the Laws state that attempting to trip an opponent is just as serious an offence as actually tripping an opponent, and, as the German had pushed the ball two or three yards ahead when the tackle came, Jansen was certainly not going for the ball.”

Take a look, and see if Taylor’s explanation rings true for you.

Taylor was also the referee for the 1966 FA Cup Final – which, by the way, he said was a greater honour than refereeing the World Cup final for an Englishman – and here’s how he picked the ball:

“After breakfast I went for a walk in the park with ‘Tich’ Harding and then on to Lancaster Gate to select the match ball. They laid out about thirty balls, each one identified only by a number. You have to pick three and only after that has been done can you find out the maker’s name.”

That process is a bit different these days (“Neo is your new football”), but for Taylor, that probably wouldn’t have mattered too much. Despite some sadness reflected in his memoir at the changes from the sport in his early days of involvement, Taylor has remained a part of the game to this day, surely still appreciating the “fairy story” he says he has lived in the start of his memoirs.

Courtesy of jlmurtaugh on Flickr.

The FA Cup has been declining in prestige for a couple of decades now, for reasons that aren’t very difficult to understand. The institution of the UEFA Champions League made it a tertiary priority for the big four clubs who came to dominate English football.

Even for smaller clubs in the Premier League, the growing riches of league play made the rewards to be had in the FA Cup much less important financially than whether the club finished in seventh place or seventeenth in the league, due to the much greater prize money at stake there.

The FA Cup winner takes home £3.4 million; a minimum of £30 million is taken home for just staying in the Premier League.

This disparity in rewards did not exist until recent times. No wonder so many teams field weakened teams.

For fans, playing semi-finals at Wembley as well as the final has taken some of the lustre off the pot at the end of the tunnel, the greed of the FA making a Wembley appearance more commonplace.

Unpredictability and upsets remain, as we’ve seen this year in spades, but the media spotlight on the tournament has diminished with so much focus on European competition and the Premier League title race.

And you know it’s bad when the Football Association actually determines they need to do something about it, or it least get a committee to talk about doing something.

Unfortunately, according to the Times, they have a batty solution to reigniting interest: instead of finding a way to build off of the tradition of the world’s oldest football tournament, they instead want to bring in some gimmicks by reportedly making it a testing ground for experiments in the rules and regulations of the game:

The dilemma for the FA and its ten-man Challenge Cup Committee, which is chaired by Sir Dave Richards, the Premier League chairman, is what kind of changes to make to the competition. The FA’s hierarchy is conscious that much of the Cup’s appeal lies in its tradition, which is why there is resistance to the idea of seeding the draw, but there is a growing feeling that something needs to change. [..]

Perhaps the most intriguing idea, though, is that the FA Cup could attract greater interest by volunteering itself to be used as a stage for future experiments with the laws of the game.

Fifa, world football’s governing body, is likely to give a trial to various innovations over the coming years — having confirmed yesterday that goalline technology will be back on the agenda when the International Football Association Board meets next month — and there is a school of thought within the FA that, as a pioneering competition, it could benefit from staging such experiments in future.

It’s all very well for the FA Cup to be a pioneer and a testing ground for change. But it sure as hell isn’t going to save the grand old competition. Did a lot more people suddenly start watching the UEFA Europa League because it was featuring an experiment with additional assistant referees on the goalline?  No.

The solutions are actually likely prosaic changes like more prize money, smarter scheduling and marketing the class and history of the FA Cup. Whether the FA can manage to do any of that remains to be seen.

Entrance to the ground of Salford City FC, Moor Lane.

Photo credit: zawtowers on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Big Story
One shock result and all is well once again with the FA Cup, according to Sam Wallace in the Independent, who says “Here’s a radical theory: the FA Cup is actually in relatively decent shape.” Wallace’s argument is mainly that it’s a myth that the FA Cup used to be less predictable in the first place:

Despite all their other priorities, attitudes towards the FA Cup among clubs and fans are healthy particularly in light of the fact that winning it has always been the preserve of the big teams, give or take the occasional anomaly. These days it is ever more restricted to the big four – who have won 16 FA Cups out of the last 18 – but it was not that much more egalitarian in football’s golden age.

In the 1960s, when football was much less divided by wealth, the FA Cup was won by teams finishing in the top eight for six out of the 10 years between 1960 and 1969. The lowest ranked club to win it in that decade were Manchester United, who finished 19th when they won the Cup in 1963. They won the league title two years later with much the same team.

This is an incomplete argument. Since the advent of the Premier League in 1992, only six different teams have won the trophy. In the two decades prior to that, 13 different teams won the trophy. Even in the decade that Wallace cherrypicks as his example, the 1960s, eight different teams were victorious.

What Wallace’s numbers show is that the FA Cup is a reflection of English football as a whole, and English football as a whole has become much more predictable because of the dominance of the same big clubs — ie, the variety of the clubs finishing in the top eight Wallace mentions has been reduced substantially. In the post-war period up until the start of the Premier League, many, many different teams finished at or within touching distance of the top of the league. “Big” teams did not dominate for as long (exceptions such as Liverpool aside, but for some reason their dominance elsewhere was not reflected in the FA Cup), so different teams more often won trophies, especially the FA Cup for those just outside the title race itself.

What has changed is not that the the top eight or so best clubs are winning the trophy more often (the best clubs usually will), it’s that the top of English football itself has become much more predictable, and the top few within that elite ever more dominant over the past two decades. This is reflected in the big four’s dominance of the FA Cup, and the reaction to the Leeds result yesterday only shows how much many would want that to change.

Worldwide News

• Fans of Cardiff City are dismayed that a season ticket drive for next season they believed was planned to fund investment in the team during the January transfer window will instead go to pay an outstanding tax bill, as the Sunday newspapers revealed.  The Cardiff City Supporters’ Trust released a statement today expressing their concern that this is the latest in an ongoing series of episodes of financial mismanagement and the truth being hidden from fans. The club have responded by saying that “Cardiff City Football Club are concerned at an article in one of today’s national newspapers. Some of the information contained within this article can only have come from documents which have been stolen from officials at the Club and are currently the subject of a police investigation.”
• Meanwhile, the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust (MUST) has also released a statement about a Sunday newspaper report that the Glazers are unsuccessfully trying to refinance their debt. MUST asks: “The Glazers have taken us from being a club that were the richest in the sporting world to now the most indebted. In the four years before the Glazers’ takeover the Manchester United invested over £80 million in the form of players like Rooney and Ronaldo. In the four years since the Glazer takeover the turnover has doubled but, despite protestations to the contrary, independently published figures suggest the net transfer spend is now negative. We have to be thankful for the magnificent job the manager and his squad have done. Where would we be now without the success Sir Alex has managed to maintain on the pitch?”
• There is a curious piece in the Guardian on South Africa and the World Cup, as low key New Year’s celebrations are suggested as a warning the World Cup itself could be lacklustre. The correlation between the two seems pretty shaky to me.

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Having each played one game at home, two neutral venues (one nearer to each club) were selected, and a coin toss held to see whether the game would be played closer to Rotherham at Hillsborough, Sheffield, or at White Hart Lane in north London.  Rotherham won the toss, and this beautifully illustrated programme cover was created. Rotherham went on to win the game, before losing to Brighton and Hove Albion in the next game, after a further marathon three games.

Credit: once again, to the wonderful Footysphere.

FA Cup 1st Qualifying Round. Sheffield FC 1-3 FC United of Manchester. Coach and Horses Ground, Dronfield, Derbyshire. September 14th, 2009. Their dreams of Wembley glory ended last month after a 3-0 loss to Northwich Victoria.

Photo credit: Matthew Wilkinson on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Only 41, 989 more than our last home league game then.

About an hour and a half before kick-off, whilst in the Flat Iron pub a short walk down from the Anfield Road away end, one of my regular associates, Chris, suggested that he didn’t feel any different than prior to any normal big-day-out away game; before an Eastbourne; a Lewes; a Bath City or such. In the pub, with chums, looking forward to the game – always fantastic. After all, you’ve never lost at this point of any Saturday. I felt the same, the difference being that I don’t usually spend nine whole days before going to, I dunno, Sutton, feeling at once anxious, giddy and consumed by belly fizz.

This is not to say that we did not appreciate the enormity of the occasion, but we’re tossing out these BIGGEST! GAME! EVER!’s like mints at a Halitosis Anonymous blue-cheese and cigars away-day at the minute; we barely get a chance to allow one to sink in, before another comes along. Just a week and a half to enjoy beating, quite comfortably I might add, the side currently romping away at the top of League One? It’s not bloody good enough I tells ya! Who might I complain to?

The walk from the Flat Iron made all the difference. Suddenly I’m happening upon people I haven’t seen in over a decade, since my college days; upon a friend who lives in Blackpool, here with his sister and fiancé who have come up from Havant for the day. Joke as we regulars might about daytrippers and Johnny-Come-Latelys, but when it comes down to it, I am delighted to see so many people excited about, and indeed present at, a Havant & Waterlooville game.

A great many will not have been to a game before, and of those, a fair majority will probably never do so again, but it certainly can’t hurt to have 6,000 people taking an interest. Up until a month ago, people asking who I supported would usually follow my answer with an incredulous exclamation. Usually ‘Who?’ sometimes ‘where?’, and once or twice ‘Why?’ Of course, given our double-teamed moniker, the clever-clever retort would be ‘Which?’ However, l reckon I’ll be waiting a long time on that one, or indeed to hear again any of the others as unless I talk to someone that’s been living beneath a rock that’s underneath a big sheet of thick tarpaulin, below an ever bigger rock, I reckon they’ll have a fair idea. “Ah yes, the famous Havant ‘Looville – you were going to Wem-ber-lee, is that right?”. Yes. Yes it i

Read the rest here.

This Satuday’s FA Cup Fourth Round match against Conference South side Havant & Waterlooville is probably the very last thing in the world that Liverpool want right now. With growing concerns about their financial woes, the unwelcome prospect of a no-win match is looming large on their horizon.

Havant & Waterlooville, a semi-professional team who play their trade six divisions below The Reds, will be rolling into town on Saturday afternoon complete with four and a half thousand or so very noisy supporters. The Hawks were only formed in 1998 (eight years after Liverpool last won the Football League Championship), but they’ve packed a lot into their ten years.

Formations & Merger

The club was formed from the merger of two failing, smaller clubs. Havant FC were formed in 1883 on the outskirts of Portsmouth, and played in the Portsmouth Football League for much of the next century, merging with Sunday League club Leigh Park in 1969. Their growth as a club was hampered by Front Lawn, their home ground, which had such spartan facilities that the club were unable to move up the ladder. In 1980, they acquired the site of West Leigh Park, their home ground and under the new name of Havant Town moved in 1982. The hoped-for promotions soon followed: to the Wessex League in 1986, and then into the Southern League in 1991.

Waterlooville FC were founded in 1905, joining the Southern League in 1971. They spent much of the next twenty years in the Southern League Premier and Southern Divisions, before financial difficulties led them into the merger to form Havant & Waterlooville FC in 1998.

Havant and Waterlooville 1, Millwall 2. FA Cup 1st Round, 13h November 2006, Fratton Park

Success was more or less instant. They won the Southern League Southern Division in 1999, and came close to winning the Southern League Premier League championship (which would have promoted them into the Conference) in 2002, before eventually finishing in third place. The following season, they reached the semi-final of the FA Trophy before losing to Tamworth.

In the summer of 2004, non-league football was restructured to fit in two regional divisions below the Conference, called the Conference North and Conference South, and Havant’s twelfth place finish in the Southern League in 2004 was enough for them to squeeze into the Conference South. Their first season in the Conference South saw them at the bottom of the table at Christmas, before they managed to pull themselves to safety. In 2006, they finished just outside of the play-off places, and last season they were beaten in a play-off semi-final after drawing 3-3 on aggregate with Braintree Town. At the time of writing, they are in twelfth place in the Conference South, although they could somersault into the play-off places if they win all the games in hand they have over the teams above them in the table.

Who’s who

So, who’s who at West Leigh Park? Manager Shaun Gale started his career at Portsmouth, and he went on to play for Barnet and Exeter City before finishing his career at Havant & Waterlooville. His assistant manager, Anthony Philip David Terry Frank Donald Stanley Gerry Gordon Stephen James Oatway was named by his father after the Queens Park Rangers team that was promoted into the First Division in 1973. He’s better known as Charlie Oatway: –the nickname Charlie comes from an aunt who remarked, upon hearing that he was being named after an entire football team, “that he’ll sound like a proper charlie”. He played in the Football League for eight years for Brighton & Hove Albion before retiring through injury last summer.

Havant and Waterlooville 1, Millwall 2. FA Cup 1st Round, 13h November 2006, Fratton Park

Having tried bringing in former star players such as Dean Holdsworth, Fitzroy Simpson and David Howells only to see it fail, there are few household names in the current Havant team. Midfielder Gary Hart was a stalwart in the Brighton & Hove Albion midfield for almost ten years, but the rest of the players (including Rocky Baptiste, whose goal earned them a replay against Swansea City and who then scored in said replay as well) are non-league journeymen, part-time players with full-time jobs.

A Giant-Killing?

How difficult, then, will Havant & Waterlooville’s job be at Anfield on Saturday? Well, there were eighty-three league places between Havant and Swansea, the team that they beat in the Third Round recently. There are one hundred and twenty-three places between Havant & Liverpool. Nobody making the long trip north will seriously be expecting them to get a result there and, in some respects, they have already won. They’re expecting to make between £600,000 and £800,000 out of Saturday’s match: enough to pay their wage bill for months and months, as well as paying off any debts that they may have laying around. For a club of the size of Havant & Waterooville, this is a life-changing amount of money.

But the dream of glory also remains. Sutton United, of the Conference, beat Coventry City in 1989. Exeter City and Burton Albion, both of the Conference, held Manchester United to draws in the last few seasons, and Exeter did it at Old Trafford. Havant & Waterlooville are a division below them, but Liverpool FC is a mess of in-fighting and mud-slinging at the moment. It’d be nice if they could at least give The Reds one hell of a scare.

Highlights of their Third Win against Swansea City are available here.

Photo credit: JonHall

They reside in the Southern League Division One Midlands, which according to Bill’s map of the English football pyramid, puts them in the eighth tier. Their opponents today, Cardiff, were six tiers higher.

The F.A. Cup visits Chasetown

Chasetown’s fans can be more than proud of their team, who took a shock seventeenth minute lead against Cardiff before eventually losing 3-1 in front of 2,000 at the Scholars Ground. There’s a wonderful photo gallery of Chasetown here.

Photo credit: Slightning on Flickr