Referees know the rules, but they don't know the game, is one of those phrases that keeps emerging from the blatherstorm that currently surrounds sport. I have never played at the top level, which is probably why, whenever I hear an ex-pro trot this verdict out I find myself thinking, "Hang on a minute, isn't it a case that the rules are the game?" Because it seems to me that without the rules you wouldn't have a game at all, you'd have brute chaos, or England playing rugby union as it is more commonly called.
Bill Shankly is usually credited with coining this popular appraisal of match officials. Possibly that's right. If I seem a little sceptical that's because a few years ago somebody told me that it wasn't Shanks who originally said "Football isn't a matter of life or death …", but John Wayne in the 1953 film Trouble Along The Way. I have never been able to verify this because the only way to do so would be to watch the film in its entirety and, frankly, that's more of Leif Erickson as a genial Roman Catholic priest and Donna Reed with hair-fins than any man should have to endure.
Still, I like to think it's true. In fact, I like to think that a whole lot of our greatest football aphorisms were made up not by hard-bitten salt-of-the-earth football men as we have come to believe, but by Hollywood scriptwriters. I imagine a scene in which a group of snappy guys and sassy dames sit around a table in the commissariat eating pastrami-on-rye and saying stuff like: "And maybe at that moment Victor Mature could turn to Hedy Lamarr and growl, 'It only takes a second to score a goal'."
"Nice line, Joe, but I'm wondering how we can squeeze that into a biblical epic such as Samson and Delilah. What say we save it for the next Bette Davis picture?"
I don't believe anyone on the Warner back lot – or Bill Shankly – came up with, "Football is very much a squad game these days". It certainly seems to have entered the babble-bank of every pundit, though. Apparently the reason that football is very much a squad game these days is that the modern game is so much more physically demanding than it was in the 80s when Aston Villa won the title using just 10 men, with Dennis Mortimer playing twice in every match. This is undoubtedly true. But it is also true that tennis is much more physically demanding today than it was when the men wore long trousers and the women scampered about the court in skirts so thick and voluminous you could have held a wedding reception under them. Yet Roger Federer and Serena Williams don't get the chance to send out a younger, less polished and obviously not quite as good versions of themselves to play in the opening rounds.
Last year Rafael Nadal played 96 matches of competitive tennis (that was singles, he played some doubles, too, just to stop himself seizing up), quite often in temperatures so high toads exploded.
Some of the games lasted for over three hours, often he had to play four in a week and to do it he had to travel all over the world, not just from London to Sunderland every once in a while. And Nadal was never substituted, not even once. Just as well Harry Redknapp isn't his manager, really. If he were, the moaning would be so bitter it would curdle the milk in the very mouths of the newborn and the crops would wither in the fields.
Because football is now very much a squad game, those clubs without strength in depth have to "prioritise" competitions. Aston Villa and Spurs recently decided that they were not that fussed about the Uefa Cup, for example.
The pragmatic new approach of the managers has thankfully been taken up by the fans, and so it was no surprise to me earlier this week when a Tottenham supporter I know confessed that he was now totally embarrassed by the fact that "I got so excited by the Uefa Cup win of 1984 that I wore my trousers pulled up to my armpits in a sartorial tribute to penalty shoot-out hero Tony Parks for a decade afterwards".
"If it is not worth winning now, it was certainly not worth bothering with then," he told me. "I have been a right Charlie. Instead of focusing all my attentions on what was – all things considered – little more than a pathetic sideshow, I should really have been going cock-a-hoop about our remarkable third place in the league the following season."
My friend added that, since the scales had fallen from his eyes, he had also come to realise that Spurs' Double-winning season of 1960-61 was not quite as glorious as he had supposed, but was actually "very much the product of Bill Nicholson's total inability to identify a single goal and focus on it in a sensible, business-like manner".
It is to be hoped that those who administer our clubs will continue the robustly unsentimental course set by the managers and start clearing the trophy cabinets of pointless tat such as the Fairs Cup, the Milk Cup and the Charity Shield. For I believe only when that has been done that we will at last hear a coach make the announcement the game is crying out for: "Football is not our priority this season."
