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Hornbyesque this book is not, or so its author forewarns us; nor is it an academic history of the sport, you will find no tedious tables of World Cup victors or players' potted biographies. What it is - and its title, Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football (Bloomsbury £14.99), is testament to that - is an unconventional encomium to England and the English.
David Winner examines English football's "unsexy" roots (a cure for masturbation on the playing-fields of Uppingham, as well as training for war) and asks everyone from Italian academics and sports journalists to collectors of football memorabilia: "What's wrong with English football?" Of course, this is just code for "What's wrong with the English?"
I remained unconvinced by his stale and predictable theory of English "declinism" (the idea that all
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The theory is shaky but the practice is convincing, says lalya lloyd |
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our failures and insecurities, sporting included, hark back to our loss of Empire), although one quotation from England's 1-1 draw with Poland in 1973 is illuminating. Of Roy McFarland's unsuccessful rugby-tackle one bemused Polish observer wrote: "The British Empire tried to save itself by pulling the pants off Polish footballers." Winner is at his best when being creative. In "Roys, Keens and Rovers" he explores the English fighting spirit through the medium of boys' fiction and weeklies, tracing the various incarnations of both Roy Keane and Roy of the Rovers, including one fictional "Royston Keene" who died during the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Ultimately, this is hopeful yet melancholic: an England, their England for the post-War generation. 
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POSTED FEBRUARY 13, 2006
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