A kick in the chest for a disunited game

HEMMED in by hooligans once more; up to the neck in theories and remedies that bring mocking echoes from the past; football has spent the past three days enacting a ritual of hair-tearing and breast-beating that has a depressingly familiar and futile air about it.

True to form, also, have been the government. Their limp, hopeless performance on the subject in the House of Commons on Thursday deserved a shower of fractured seating from the spectators' gallery if anything did. We don't need them to tell us what a disgrace it is; we know. What we require from them is the acknowledgement that the root of the problem is their unwillingness to prevent known troublemakers leaving these shores. Until the Home Office have the firmness of mind to stop exporting psychopaths, the Football Association will be drawn towards the conclusion that they have no alternative but to withdraw England from playing on foreign soil until the evil spirits are cast out.

But a certain amount of self-help is necessary before the exorcism is possible. The house of football cannot offer a concerted solution while it is so divided against itself. There has never been a time when the game has spoken in so many disparate voices. Every part of football seems to be factionalised. Referees, players, managers, Premiership, FA, Endsleigh League, spectators, media - all have acquired their own corporate power and loud voices and appear to be operating under such varying priorities that any pretence to a common objective has long been abandoned.

Not only is there a lack of a sense of collective direction, they can't even bear to be tolerant of each other. Players berate referees, referees bristle at managers, managers whisper insults at Premiership chairmen, chairmen cock snooks at the FA. The only sentiment that unites is the image of players as a bunch of money-grabbing, agent-loving, ill-disciplined and talentless layabouts. As for the media, I wish the English yobs had been put as firmly in their place as we were last week.

It is hardly comforting to know that should Eric Cantona feel obliged to karate kick me in the chest, the manager of Manchester United and the chairman of the Football Association would not be upset. Rather would they nod their heads in appreciation of just deserts being wisely distributed.

Not for one moment do I presume to compare myself with anyone so fine as an ITN reporter but I do belong to the same low-life species and no doubt would be asking for it were I to press my never-ending search for wisdom as far as asking Mr Cantona for a few words on his present predicament which is fascinating to a large number of the customers we aim to please.

But Alex Ferguson felt that Terry Lloyd, the ITN news reporter who dared to approach Cantona with his camera crew while the Frenchman was sunning himself on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe with his wife and family, was "let off lightly" with a mere headlock and a kick in the chest that put him in hospital.

Ferguson then came out with the strange words: "To film, without permission, a man's six-month pregnant wife in her swim-suit on a beach is deplorable. Any husband worth his salt would react."

I'm prepared to accept that ITN are as capable as any television station of squandering money, but to suggest they have sent a unit all the way to the West Indies in order to bring us pictures of the pregnant Mrs Cantona is ridiculous and a smokescreen of the most transparent kind. But Ferguson receives the impassioned support of the FA chairman, Sir Bert Millichip, who dismissed the incident as a "totally football-unrelated matter". If that's an example of internal FA-talk, I pity the person who has to take the committee minutes.

"I have great sympathy for people who are looking for a bit of peace," the sympathetic Sir Bert added. There are circumstances in which someone who committed an attack as violent and as public as Cantona's would be having his bit of peace in the remand wing of Brixton prison. If Cantona is able to go off to contemplate his transgressions in bright sunshine in the middle of what should be his busy season, lucky man. But to portray it as a well-deserved family holiday that the dastardly press have intruded upon is a touch rich.

When a sport climbs into bed with television as willingly as football has, there's a big duvet to cope with. It spreads beyond showing games and pocketing big cheques. Television ensures a luxury life for those at the top in football but part of the price is the glaring light of attention. We've never seen as many televised games as we have this season. And more games means more warts. The Cantona incident would not have become as big or as immediate a cause clbre had it not been seen on television.

Once it had happened, the legitimate interest in Cantona and his feelings about the matter should have been expected. It would not have taken a JobCentre full of Saatchis to calculate that a few minutes of Cantona expressing a touch of televised contrition might have improved his situation and called off the hounds.

I can't deny having had the odd surge of ill-feeling myself to television crews. Back in my football-star badgering days, a grubby notebook was our only equipment and we soon had to get used to being jabbed aside by cameras, goosed by sound booms and out-brilliantined by a man with a microphone. The camera became king and those in the game became willing subjects to it.

The trouble is that football people have no idea how to handle themselves in a world they've helped to create. By condoning Cantona's Guadeloupe flare-up, two leading figures in the game have sanctioned violence in a week not quite appropriate for such support. It will be interesting to see what Sir Bert does when Vinnie Jones comes up before the FA for biting a journalist's nose in Dublin on Wednesday. Where does the FA chairman's list of pardonable violence end?

There are enough hot-heads on the fringe of the game; the pressing need is for a few cool heads within it.

VIC BUCKINGHAM was born in the same year as Sir Stanley Matthews. The impact he had on the game could not be compared but he achieved much as a coach and a manager and it is sad his recent death passed without much attention. Here was a manager of style. He won the 1954 FA Cup with West Brom. He successfully managed Ajax - discovering Johan Cruyff - and Barcelona.

He ended up at Fulham in their First Division doldrum days of the mid- 1960s and, sure enough, they were bottom on the last weekend of February. They were about to play the leaders, Liverpool; Buckingham walked into a dressing-room that contained such old hands as Johnny Haynes, Bobby Robson and George Cohen. "I've just worked out," he said, "that if we win 10 of our last 13 games we'll stay up." Considering they'd won only five of the previous 29, it sounded like the rantings of a lunatic. But Vic made it sound feasible. They beat Liverpool 2-0 and proceeded to win nine and draw two of those games to avoid relegation by one point.

Blessed is the football man who can inspire hope. Seen one lately?