Ken Jones: Seventies drinking culture sparks overdose of self-indulgent TV waffle

At the age of 18, Alan Hudson was, in the critical eyes of many in the game, including Alf Ramsey, easily the most promising young English footballer they had seen in many years. It had only been a matter of time before Chelsea's manager, Dave Sexton, promoted Hudson to the first team, and Ramsey's estimate of him was so high that he was earmarked for a place in England's 1970 World Cup squad.

Perhaps it was the disappointment of missing the FA Cup final that year, when Chelsea overcame Leeds in a ferociously contested replay, that helped to prevent Hudson from fulfilling his great potential, perhaps it was some damaging quirk of temperament. Who, including Hudson himself, can really tell.

However, on Tuesday night, following transmission from Turin of Manchester United's outstanding victory over Juventus in the Champions' League, the ITV network put out a programme in which Hudson prominently figured as a victim of the high life that was said to exist in English football during the Seventies.

Since Hudson has shown remarkable fortitude in a struggle to recover from a road accident that almost took his life, it was disturbing to seem him caught up in a cliché-ridden documentary, Hitting the Bar, that spun around the evidence of some notable hell-raisers of the time, and conclusions arrived at by journalists acting purely on received information, not personal experience.

To begin with, the drinking culture on which they held forth did not begin with the period on which the programme concentrated, although I guess things moved on a bit as football and thus footballers themselves became more glamorous.

The editor of an organisation I served at the time got it into his head that a gossip column based on sport would provide lively entertainment for our readers. This was not going to involve me personally but I could imagine it being a pain in the backside for whoever was handed the assignment. My argument against the idea was that for every footballer, or sports person generally, who fell about in clubs, there were hundreds pushing trolleys around supermarkets. "Footballers, in the main, are quite ordinary people leading quite ordinary lives away from the excitement of their public appearances," I said.

Even in those days, which of course were vastly different from the days we have come to know, popular newspapers were given to explosions of hot air which is how the column I counselled against came into being. As I remember, it lasted less than a month before being abandoned on the very basis of my argument. Through no fault of the reporter involved, it was boringly repetitive, calling up all the usual suspects, which was precisely the case with this week's ITV programme.

For example, it featured Frank Worthington, who makes a living these days recounting tales of behaviour unbecoming to a professional athlete. An extremely skilful footballer, Worthington's problem was that he never seemed to give the game his undivided attention.

Since the Seventies was a bleak period for the England team, bringing failures to qualify for two successive World Cups it did not come as any great surprise when memories of Don Revie's stern brand of football management was introduced to the programme as one of the reasons why a number of the game's mavericks failed to prosper. The journalist Jim White, who could have been little more than a boy at the time, spoke of a "cavalier versus roundhead" conflict as though that in itself was an explanation for the drinking culture. Thoroughness was one of Revie's strengths, but he was a pragmatist, too, particularly where it concerned Billy Bremner, whose marvellous play and indefatigable spirit didn't spring from a spartan lifestyle. Without Revie's influence Bremner would not have been the player he was for Leeds and Scotland.

The great Celtic manager, Jock Stein, once said that his greatest feat in football was not winning the European Cup but extending the wayward Jimmy Johnstone's career. Matt Busby's biggest mistake was not to recognise sooner the weakness that has grievously afflicted George Best's life.

Going back further, Tottenham's great team of the early Sixties included a number of players who could outdrink any others in the league.

Dave Sexton did not watch Hitting the Bar, correctly guessing that it would merely be a vehicle for fatuous theorising.