Once in a while (in a while, mind) the BBC gives us reason to be cheerful about the way they spend the hard-earned cash they take from us through the outrageous licence fee.

I thought such an event was going to occur on Thursday night with a documentary on BBC4. A Game of Two Eras, part of the Timeshift series, looked at the way football has changed over 50 years through an in-depth study of the 1957 and 2007 FA Cup finals. As I sat down with the top layer of the Milk Tray I had some expectation that this was going to be ‘one to watch’. By the end of the hour, I was left with a feeling that I had yet again been mugged by the media.

I was in the lucky position of having watched both finals - 1957 Aston Villa v Manchester United and 2007 Chelsea v United - on the BBC (admittedly I was nearly two for the ’57 final although I would be amazed if my late father had not left me screaming in the pram while he pulled up the armchair to within 10cm of the 5cm screen).

'If the English game is so much better today, why is our top league built around the modern-day Hungarian equivalents?'


The programme did not tell us anything we didn’t know already about football – for yesteryear's diet of fish and chips, dripping sandwiches, four pints of ale and 20 Woodbines, read today’s boutique chefs at the training ground eaterie, ‘sports’ drinks and diet consultants. For the old-time balls, which accumulated enough weight to make heading them a shoe-in for permanent brain damage, read today’s paper-weight synthetic efforts which allow headers more powerful than shots. And for yesteryear's ‘contact’ between players that was ostensibly GBH in football kit, read today’s over-protection PC refs give keepers.

The usual clichéd suspects were wheeled out - Sir Tom Finney, Player of the Year in 1957, was shown on a crackly newsreel enhancing his meagre football salary by plumbing in the off-season. Goodness me, he even had his hand down the late Alan Hardaker’s khazi. Pick any of the great winger’s 2007 equivalents - Ryan Giggs, Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo – same skill but icons of their era.

And herein lies the moral of the programme which, despite being a very interesting watch, scored an own goal of Gary Neville in Croatia proportions. Using the very 2007 premise that the only way to keep up with the mass stampede for credibility is to employ a consultant, the BBC paid out lots of our hard-earned money to some stupid company with blokes in designer glasses and £60 T-shirts doing a statistical analysis comparison of the two finals.

It’s a hard life looking at how many times a keeper rolls the ball to a colleague, or how many shoulder charges before a jaw is broken (which, of course, happened to Manchester United keeper Ray Wood). Or indeed how in ‘those days’ the long-ball game was dominant. Does the BBC really think fans cannot work out these things for themselves?

So what this own goal tells us is that our glorious game today is controlled by cool guys from consultancies that have made players and hangers-on from the media incredibly wealthy and famous.

They have turned a simple game into a complicated game with their lies, damn lies and statistics. They have made David Beckham and Wayne Rooney more famous than the prime minister and they have told us that guys like Sir Tom Finney are not to be taken seriously because he and his ilk were nipping out for a Woodbine at half-time and that he didn’t have a diet consultant to pull him up for eating fish and chips.

And for the sugar-free icing on the diet consultants’ cake, the producers of the programme showed the great Hungarian side of the '50s routing England as an example of how far behind the times English football was then and how much better it is today.

Perhaps the producers and their statistical gurus would like to tell me, then, that if the English game is so much better today, why is our top league built around the modern-day Hungarian equivalents? Sorry guys, you have got it wrong. Football was better in 1957 and I don’t give a pig’s burp about technical this or technical that, or about ‘statistics’ or about people who can read and write ghosting books for those who can’t.

It was better because it was an industry serving the community, because the fans smoked Woodbines with the players, because Sir Tom Finney played for his local team, because the game was an escape from the drudgery of the working week. And most important of all, because it didn’t have morons counting shoulder charges.