Football: Real v Fake

Billy Bonds was a football titan. He played the game with every fibre of his being, he gave everything for every minute of the match and his sheer commitment to his team made him a legend with supporters who revered him and with his passing are mourning him deeply.

At West Ham, where Billy played almost all his career, he was remembered with great love at the home game against Liverpool (yesterday). But the news of his death had only just come so a much more in depth appreciation of his life and what he meant to the club will be celebrated at their next match. It will be an emotional moment and there will others like it at clubs where Billy spent time - at Charlton, my team, where he began as a teenage lion right back before his transfer to West Ham and at places like QPR and Millwall where he coached after stopping playing at West Ham, in his 40s!

Billy Bonds

Billy was a 100% footballer, a hard man in the tackle but had a deft touch too, he loved the game, he competed fiercely, as Captain he led from the front. Supporters could see it, applauded it and never forgot it. The avalanche of tributes on social media and on mainstream channels assert how much he embodied what football was supposed to be. Bonzo was real.

Billy never dived. He never cheated. He never feigned injury. He never wore gloves when it was mildly cold. He didn’t wear multi-coloured boots. He never got an agent to invent newspaper stories to get a move to a ‘bigger’ club and more money. He played football the right way with his heart and soul. He took knocks and spilt blood as a natural part of the game and became one with the crowd. And all the time he was utterly humble, as quiet off the pitch as he was a colossus on it, an eternally normal, nice guy. Billy was truly real.

Billy - revered at West Ham

Bonzo’s passing is a fitting moment to take stock of football today and to realise how low the game has sunk since he glorified it during the 60s,70s and 80s - a golden era, perhaps as they co-included with my own playing career but because although Billy was exceptionally real, the game was littered with real players then in every team and league.

Since Billy’s time there has been a drip-drip-drip bleeding out of football’s essence, the true magic of what the game was. Billy’s spirit can still echo in games and at clubs these days but it is being crushed by the onslaught of fakery.  Football, professionally across the world and down through the leagues, but even at semi-pro, amateur and even kids level, has moved far away from what Billy extolled and represented to a place where fake rules.  And it’s not just the players - the managers, club owners, TV pundits and, woefully, the organisations that run the game too are all faking.

Fake here means not just play-acting, or feigning injury as almost all players do these days. It also stands for managers taking credit for wins and never for losses, or always blaming others except themselves. It stands for club owners increasingly seeing their club as an asset, a thing of the bottom line not a living part of a community. It stands for referees making gargantuan errors on the pitch and never having to explain themselves. It stands for the abomination that is VAR which has destroyed spontaneity during a game and made refs just a human face behind its robot decision-making. It stands for clubs fleecing supporters by criminally expensive tickets and catering. It stands for TV pundits bent on entertaining rather than evaluating, on never calling-out the real woes of the modern game like diving because peddling football fakery is how they make their money. It stands for the TV broadcasters who hype football beyond belief, seeking to make even the most mundane match a game of the century, and who talk up players so much even their most ordinary actions are deemed ‘world class’.  It stands for the utterly disgraceful football authorities who bend any rule, kiss anyone’s arse to make a buck. Ronaldo being let off a three-game ban for a sending off and only getting one instead so he can play for Portugal in the opening games of the World Cup being the blatant, latest example.

And money, of course, is the root of it all - the mother of fakery. Billy Bonds played in an era where footballers, if they were any good, could become relatively wealthy by the standards of the time. Even then, they might be only a little better off than a bank manager but not much. Today, as billions flood the game, as TV rakes it in and rapes the game for all its worth, as players, certainly in the upper echelons but even at lower levels, earn as much as Cresus, and as vast industries like TV, betting, video games and all manner of consumer products, feed off football’s carcass like crows, those in the game now live lives far out of a normal supporter’s orbit.

Yet supporters themselves often live in the land of fake too. They can love and adore a Billy Bonds, they can remember or think on England’s 1966 World Cup win with teary eyes, they can love their club, but they will keep paying ridiculous match-day prices and well-over the odds cash for awful pies and beer. They will buy the latest club shirt when it’s just a smidgen different from last years’ and know they are being fleeced. And why? Because they mistakenly somehow think their club is ‘in it’ for them and continue to believe that this time next year, the football Gods will shine on them and they will win the cup or the league when the God of football’s money has already decided those spoils will only ever go to the richest and most powerful.

Not so long ago, the Women’s game was almost immune from fake. Not now. With the growth of women’s football and it having reached, at last, an economic threshold where it will make money for all and sundry, it too has succumbed. Massive over hyping and commercialism, especially by TV, and with players earning considerable amounts, the women’s game has now spawned its fair share of diving, feigning injury and the usual men’s game bad-tricks.

I have watched, played and followed football all my life. It’s in my DNA and my son’s too as they played highly competitive semi-pro football. I still go to Charlton games at the Valley where I once used to see a young Billy Bonds maraud across the pitch. I have SKY Sports. I suppose, therefore, I too have a little fake in me - we can’t all be perfect. Yet, I also have long seen in clear daylight football’s fakery in all its sad glory.  And as I still wonder that I have experienced the game when players like Billy Bonds were its life-blood, I now see the game con, dive, act, fleece and sell its soul for money.

Billy Bonds will be sorely missed.  I will miss him. And I miss the game he personified.