Nothing in recent years has changed football as much as television.
The box in the living-room corner has spawned Manchester United fans from Tacoma to Tahiti and made top players as wealthy as successful bond traders.
Few of us now, not even the most avid groundhoppers, consume as many matches live as on TV.
Even professional football reporters, who think nothing of covering 100 games a season, will turn instantly to the screens scattered around the press stands to assess whether a foul has been committed or the ball has crossed the line.
So it is high time a book was written tracing the main developments of televised football from the flickering, black and white early days to the cornucopia of action served up across numberless channels today.
That this book is both consistently insightful and laugh-out-loud funny is a bonus, though not an unexpected one given that the author is Martin Kelner, writer of one of the best sport-on-TV columns to have graced the British media.
Sit Down And Cheer* is UK-centric; it also casts its net over the full range of British televised sports, not just football.
But the story of how the BBC, Sky and others escorted and in many instances led the sport of Busby, Bremner and Beckham along the path to the position of utter dominance it now enjoys is expertly and entertainingly told.
If sexual intercourse began, according to poet Philip Larkin, in 1963, zero hour for televised football, according to Kelner, came a decade earlier.
At the start of the 1950s, he writes, there were still only 340,000 TV licence-holders in Britain.
Yet by June 1953, an estimated 20 million watched the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, albeit often in large groups clustered around tiny sets.
Exactly a month before that had come: the Matthews Cup Final, the big kick-off for televised football.
Kelner cites two academics who see this match, between Stanley Matthews’s Blackpool and Nat Lofthouse’s Bolton Wanderers, as “only slightly less significant in television history” than the Coronation.
This is partly because it marked the moment when football crept out from behind cricket’s shadow: “Cricket,” writes Kelner, was as central to the English way of life as the weather. All that began to change after 2 May 1953.”
It also set the template for the six decades of sports coverage that have followed, in that the human interest angle – the 38-year-old Matthews’s last chance to claim an FA Cup winner’s medal – comprehensively trumped other niceties such as tactical analysis, or the fact that Blackpool’s Stan Mortensen scored a hat-trick.
“If you have ever wondered when the seeds were sown for the ludicrous, self-important, over-inflated, all-consuming leviathan of a game…we have today, it was on that first Saturday of May in 1953,” the author argues, clambering on to a rhetorical soap-box which, though not over-utilised, is never far out of reach.
Kelner exhibits Matthews-like deftness of touch as he weaves a path through the main episodes of British football coverage over the subsequent six decades.
He is enlightening, for example, on how ITV’s fragmented structure tended to stymie efforts by commercial television to mount a sustained sports challenge to the BBC.
Repeatedly, he finds the net with memorable anecdotes, such as how, prior to the 1966 World Cup, ITV staged a commentators’ trial at a Boys Clubs’ cup final – “ITV broadcast it live, giving six novice commentators [including, it should be noted, Barry Davies] fifteen minutes each.”
There are bigger surprises too, such as when he quotes former BSkyB executive David Elstein saying: “It’s a myth that football made Sky.”
The pay-TV broadcaster’s success is attributed instead to factors such as the launch of Sky multi-channels – and cricket, our old friend: “That’s when Surrey found Sky.”
Probably my favourite passages of the book, though, come when Kelner analyses the so-called Gazza’s tears episode from the 1990 World Cup.
This happened in England’s semi-final against West Germany, when Paul Gascoigne, the brilliant but excitable England midfielder, was cautioned for a foul and realised that the sanction would cause him to miss the World Cup final, should England progress.
This has long been pinpointed as the moment the middle-classes and yuppies ‘got’ modern football and became hooked, enabling the game to put the bleak 1980s behind it.
But Kelner highlights a number of additional, very salient, points:
● The TV coverage was outstanding – think Nessun Dorma and Des Lynam in his hyper-relaxed pomp – but the football was mostly dire.
● It was a quintessential television moment, since hardly any of the spectators actually present in the stadium would have been close enough to the England midfielder to discern his reaction.
● It cemented the Mr Nice Guy image of Gary Lineker, the England centre-forward turned Match of the Day frontman and public face of Walkers crisps.
If Italia ’90 did indeed gentrify, or re-gentrify, football, “making it a game fit for families and paving the way ultimately for the Premier League”, Kelner insists, “it is the televised version of 1990, not the tournament itself that deserves the credit”.
There is a reason why Chapter 1 of this excellent book is entitled, “Not Being There”.
*Sit Down And Cheer – a history of sport on TV by Martin Kelner is published by Bloomsbury.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938