Terry Venables was so popular with the Euro 96 generation that senior England players consistently advocated his return to the country’s radioactive tracksuit. Glenn Hoddle fired? “Bring Terry back.” Kevin Keegan stops in the Wembley toilets? ‘Bring Venners back in.’
There are only echoes of it now, but for decades after 1966 English football was wracked by an ideological battle over how the national game should be played. The Route Oneists favored howitzer football: native aggression and directness with minimal elaboration. Idealists fought for the global mainstream of sophistication. At the center of this struggle stood Terence Frederick Venables, a myth to his enemies, a prophet without honor in his own land to his disciples.
Related: Terry Venables obituary
The Messiah coach who would save English football from its insularity never stayed in one place long enough to produce a body of work compelling enough to defeat his critics. His often chaotic and sometimes dubious attempts to prove himself as a visionary businessman ultimately sabotaged his periodic efforts to be the coach his country longed for.
But that desire was real, especially after the recurrence of the Graham Taylor years, when the progress made by Bobby Robson’s side at Italia 90 was torpedoed by Football Association mandarins who had no interest in the continuity of playing styles. While Paul Gascoigne’s meteor burst exposed the misconception that English spectators were content to see football above head height, the entertainment Venables created at the 1996 European Championship answered another deep desire.
To be loved by the English public in the 1980s or 1990s, a manager would ideally have to be recognisable, streetwise, twinkly and positive: an entertainer with a swagger and the same level of tactical knowledge as the best in Europe. The applause for Venables at the Premier League grounds on the day of his death reflected a built-in admiration for the anti-establishment football romantic who took over Taylor’s devastated England and turned them into the reckless players who beat the Netherlands 4-1 at European Championship 1996.
Venables is a misguided dreamer. Before that Euro he said: “In the whole debate about the state of English football, one factor is consistently forgotten. It is the character of the English player.” He gave equal value to artists and craftsmen. The elusive, elastic running of Darren Anderton or Steve McManaman was made possible by the alpha maledom of Tony Adams and Paul Ince and the assurance of Alan Shearer and Teddy Sheringham .
Art for art’s sake, that wasn’t it. Don Howe, the defensive guru, was his right-hand man. In restaurants with the salt and pepper pots El Tel, as he became known at Barcelona, he talked almost as much about eliminating the opposition as he did about sweeping them off the field. The intellectual challenge of coaching and his talent for managing people – making the footballer’s job intensely enjoyable – were the addiction that kept drawing him back to the dugout as his ‘investment programmes’ burned up his time.
In his time and in his character, Venables absorbed the anguish of a nation stuck in 1966 but still in the early years of the Premier League revolution, before an influx of foreign players and managers transformed the English game in style, tone and spirit . . In Venables’ time, the conversation was still internal: the mother country was arguing with itself. The choice was binary. In the industry you were either for Venables or against him. “Terry’s friends” became shorthand for the divisions in a media camp that hung on his every word, either out of admiration or to pounce on a mistake. Visionaries and reformers in other countries did not seem to lead such complicated lives.
In retrospect, a football manager who had to pulverize his own autobiography, was blamed for ‘deliberately and dishonestly’ misleading a jury and was barred as a company director would probably never be remembered solely as a tracksuit thinker. But Venables could be fascinating company. The more time you spent with him, the more you noticed his hyper-vigilant need for knowledge. Between comic anecdotes and tactical asides, he poked and prodded everyone around the table for bits of information about this player, that chairman, this or that club. Behind the lights of his smile, his love of singing Frank Sinatra songs and his wise self-esteem, Venables possessed a football brain without an off switch. He was always alert to the next opportunity, the ever-present need to stay ahead of the dogs.
Venables, a ‘well-educated’ coach, as Adams called him, opened the eyes of England’s players at Euro 96 to the possibility of playing like the continental powers. It was what they wanted, they all said: an escape from their own deadly history. With England and Barcelona, briefly in both cases, Venables’ gift for understanding human nature in the pressured context of elite football flourishes, combined with the eye he had for the mechanics of the game, in keeping with with its own character: cunning, restless. , exuberant, unashamed.
After Euro 96, no one noticed that he had not nominated penalty takers for the semi-final penalty shootout against Germany after penalty No. 5: a mistake that allowed Gareth Southgate to voluntarily go next, out of duty rather than judgment. Southgate failed to score and Venables’ short 24-match reign in England from March 1994 to June 1996 was over. While lawyers drooled over the fees from his legal entanglements, Euro 96 cemented itself in the English psyche as a brief spell, a rebirth for the national team and a response to the FA brass who distrusted Venables as they tried to build a commercial revolution based on the club’s popularity. his 1996 team.
Venables was too distracted and volatile to be a statesman, but nevertheless he functioned best in the realm of imagination – in inspiration – which is not something you would say of many English managers. There was a time when his 4-3-2-1 formation seemed so exotic that people called it the ‘Christmas tree’. Now it is a standard team format. If you didn’t like that one, Venables had more. He never lacked for tricks.