Lunatic Fringe
Imagine for a minute that you are Steven Gerrard, John Terry, Cashley, or Lampard, players somewhere near their peak in 2008 and with their bi-annual tilt at tournament football – at footballing immortality – slipping away; imagine looking toward the bench to see that the manager’s primary concern is not to throw on game-breaking substitutes and shake things up, nor to deliver a rousing exhortation, but to keep his thatch dry. It’s the equivalent of Genghis Khan stopping for a quick pre-pillage manicure. (Incidentally, Barnet-envy must have been at the root – no pun intended – of him stripping the captaincy from His Royal Hairness, the Duke of Beckhamshire, and giving it to the more conservatively mopped “JT”.)
It would be churlish and unrealistic to suggest that people ought to be able just to brush off such neuroses. The process of balding can be traumatic (on this note, what exactly did his mentor at Derby, renowned slaphead Jim Smith, actually teach him?), to which eloquent testimony is paid by many an unsightly and ill-advised footballing combover, from Bobby Charlton to Chris Garland. However, as both Max Clifford and the England players’ sleeve tattoos ought to have screamed out at him, this is an image-dominated age. “The medium is the message, Steve!!” “Gotcha, Max”. So, for McClaren to seek to uphold a façade of hirsuteness (much less undergo what Martin Amis used to call a “rug rethink”) without face-saving contingency plans for inclement weather was negligent in the extreme, and provided an open goal for the press. And the red-tops are hardly renowned for treating England managers with kid gloves (Exhibit B: “Swedes 2 Turnips 1”).
Having already started in the job with the epithet “Second-Choice Steve” (rumours that his wife also used this sobriquet are yet to be confirmed.), the “Wally with the Brolly” headline was clearly McClaren’s death knell as England coach. A bad hair day, to say the least. Reputations: a lifetime to build, a moment to destroy.
Thus, after an 18-match stint at the helm, the shortest in England’s history, the FA nabobs handed over the reins to a man who, while having the disadvantage of not speaking English, had the advantage of not speaking English. However, and crucially, Capello at least had a dense follicle canopy (which presumably cancels out the communications shortcomings by virtue of the fact that his dim-witted and hair-conscious charges are themselves not, liiiike, proper into, like, words and shit, yeah?).
Meanwhile, off McLaren went to Twente Enschede to blast industrial strength hairspray on his thinning reputation, a rare broadening of horizons – in British managerial terms – for which he ought to have been roundly commended. However, he immediately scissor-kicked himself another spectacular PR own-goal, ensuring permanent ridicule on these shores by giving – with all due respect to Messrs Kinnear, Clough, Keegan and one or two others – possibly the most infamous TV interview ever given by an English football coach (was Max Clifford still advising him at this stage, or did he only come in when there was a forest fire to put out?). This interview would forever cloud the fact that “Der Kuifje” – the Dutch for Tintin (literally, ‘the quiff’), as he ought to have been dubbed by the local media, if he wasn’t already – in pulling off the minor miracle of winning the Eredivisie with a team outside the Big Three (Ajax, PSV, Feyenoord), became the first Englishman to win a top-flight title since Bobby Robson’s Porto in 1996.
Instead, McClaren will be remembered as the man whose hair neurosis single-handedly emasculated a Golden Generation of footballers and cost England their best shot at tournament success since 1966, with disastrous effects for their own careers, the morale of the people, and thus ultimately the economic and political health of the country. Could fascism sprout from such a barren brow?
Leaving aside for now the somewhat incidental question of whether the Golden Generation even existed – either as a generation, or as something golden – or whether it was in fact yet more laughably raddled tabloid hyperbole and Sky-injected steroidal braggadocio, it is entirely plausible, within the historiographical framework set out earlier, to link our nation’s present economic malaise, social turmoil and political uncertainty to McClaren’s quiff-protection. Who knows what might have happened had we qualified for Euro 2008? Let us simply note that the tournament’s winners, Spain, undoubtedly confident from casting off the “nearly-men” tag, went to the World Cup in South Africa and won there, too, the first European side ever to win another continent.
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