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‘You’ve beaten them once. Now do it again...’
By Simon Kuper
Published: May 11 2007 18:05 | Last updated: May 11 2007 18:05
With its very first match, Wembley Stadium acquired its defining myth. The story of the “White Horse Final”, the 1923 FA Cup final between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United, is worth examining for what it reveals about Wembley’s place in the British psyche. What happened was a near disaster: up to 240,000 people crammed into the ground, almost twice Wembley’s capacity at the time, and probably the largest crowd ever at a football match. There was a crush and nearly 1,000 casualties were treated.
But, according to the myth, far worse was averted thanks to mounted police constable George Scorey and his white horse. Together they pushed back the thousands spilling on to the pitch before the match “Now, those in front join hands,” Scorey called out. They did and began retreating step by step. “The horse was very good,” Scorey recalled in 1944, “easing them back with his nose and his tail.” Bolton won 2-0, helped, it is said, by the odd trip of an opponent or telling pass from the hordes massed on the touchline.
The “White Horse Final” provided Wembley with the perfect myth. The horse evokes the stadium’s timeless appeal: so old as to be almost pre-technology. The hordes represent mass passion. And the story’s gentle resolution evokes Wembley’s sporting spirit: in place of strife, harmony. Almost uniquely among the world’s football grounds, Wembley doesn’t house a club. It is non-partisan, the national stadium, sitting above the game.
But for almost seven years the British have been without Wembley. In 2000, after one last dismal defeat against Germany, the old stadium was demolished. Next weekend, however, at a cost of £800m and four years late, the new Wembley will host its first FA Cup final, when Manchester United play Chelsea. The task of the new Wembley is to preserve the spirit of the old one: to be a shrine to Britishness, ancestor-worship, and to fandom itself.
It’s appropriate that the new Wembley will officially open with an FA Cup final because the final has always been the stadium’s chief ritual. The game is a spring rite of celebration, whereas international matches, also played at Wembley, tend to be autumn evenings of anguish.
The FA Cup final belongs to everyone in English football. Dozens of clubs have played in it and their supporters all sing the same songs about it: “Que sera, sera,” “We’ll really shake them up/When we win the FA Cup,” and, before the game itself, in unison, the hymn “Abide with me.” This harmony is unique in an industry whose driving passion is hate: always for the opponents, often for their stadium (Manchester City fans have serenaded the wartime bombing of Manchester United’s ground), sometimes for your own team, and even for yourself for watching them. Only Wembley transcends this.
The fans’ ritual on FA Cup final day is unchanging. For years I lived just off Baker Street in central London, the place where supporters gather before cramming on to Tube trains bound for Wembley. They would drink beer in the sun and then, in search of a discreet side street, come and urinate against my house. Once I scolded a urinator from my window: “Handy isn’t it, if you don’t live here?” “It is very convenient, yes,” he replied. I’m sure people were urinating there in 1923.
Wembley contains football’s past but also the fan’s personal past. When you go to a stadium, you remember being taken there as a child. That’s much of the point of being a sports fan. How many other buildings do you visit all your life? As the Dutch football poet Henk Spaan has written, a stadium is
A monument to all fathers who are already dead
A monument to the common man.
And whatever was happening in Britain from 1923 to 2000, Wembley was always there, stolid, ugly and suburban. On June 8 1940, the Germans seemed on the point of invading Britain. They were already invading France, and the British Expeditionary Force had just fled Dunkirk in an armada of little boats. But that afternoon, 42,399 football supporters, in heroic denial of reality, were at Wembley stadium watching West Ham v Blackburn in the War Cup Final.
During the first half, word went round the crowd that an important announcement was to be made at half-time. Roy Peskett, a sportswriter attending, thought perhaps the Germans had landed. Instead the announcer said: “There are six heroes here today. Men who have just come back from Dunkirk, been to the depots and got refitted, and come here to watch the football match!”
Like most British traditions, Wembley has often been more appreciated by foreigners. Pele, who never played a match there, once took a ball on to the empty pitch and, like a schoolchild pretending to be Pele, kicked it into the empty net. He called the stadium “the church of football”. In Istanbul once, I met Fatih Uraz, Turkey’s goalkeeper on the day they lost 8-0 to England at Wembley in 1987. Was that the worst day of his career? “No!” said Uraz. “It was a nice memory for me, because I showed my effort. All my career I wanted to play in Wembley. If I got another chance to play there, even if I conceded 15 goals, no problem.”
Yet the old Wembley had to go. After the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, in which 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death in an outdated stadium, billions of pounds were spent modernising big British football grounds. A similar process happened in the US at about the same time – “the ballpark renaissance” – and around Europe.
Jacques Herzog, the Swiss architect who in 2001 with his childhood friend Pierre de Meuron won the Pritzker prize chiefly for designing London’s Tate Modern art museum, designed Munich’s stadium for last year’s World Cup, Basel’s for next year’s European football championship and is now finishing Beijing’s Olympic Stadium. His Basel ground, he told me, “was the first of the new football stadiums to be built by a famous architect. A stadium has the potential to be like an opera house. Nobody ever said that before.” He meant that whereas cities once derived status from their cathedrals, and later from their opera houses, they now do so from their stadiums.
Beside these new arenas, Wembley looked embarrassing. Like most elderly British football grounds, it dated from an era when stadiums were built on the cheap, without architectural pretensions. “For many years, within British sport especially, stadium architects were looked down upon with almost as much contempt as journalists,” says Simon Inglis, author of the seminal Football Grounds of England and Wales and several other books on the subject (few topics are so dominated by one writer, evidence of how, until relatively recently, stadiums have been neglected). The Empire Stadium, as it was originally called, was finished in 1923 in 300 working days, a year early, and in such a rush that a train was said to have been accidentally buried beneath it. Wembley was just a vast concrete bowl, whose chief boast was being as high as the walls of Jericho.
It would have been rational to scrap Wembley. Most countries manage without a dedicated national stadium. England could have continued playing in wonderful grounds around the country, as they have during the rebuilding period. That would have been a rebellion against London’s domination of English life. Newcastle fans would have been spared the nine-hour round-trip to see their team lose finals. The Football Association would have saved £800m. Imagine how many pitches and changing-rooms it could have built across England.
But scrapping Wembley was unthinkable. Instead, a new Wembley was commissioned worthy of the new London. “No other city in Europe is transforming so much,” notes Herzog. A “famous architect” was called in: Norman Foster, who in more than 40 years of architectural practice had never built a stadium.
The delays turned the construction into an international farce. To give some idea of the scale of this, in 2004 a South African football official told me that the R1.2bn (currently £87m) his country would spend on all its stadiums for the world cup of 2010 was a fraction of the cost of Wembley alone. Three years later, South Africa’s bill has somehow risen to R9bn (£654m) but that is still less than Wembley’s. Brian Barwick, the FA’s chief executive, resorted to jokes about the matter. Musing at the FT’s business of sport conference last year about England’s chances of hosting the 2018 world cup, he said: “There’s even a theory that Wembley will be finished by then.”
Finally complete, the new stadium looks wonderful even if the emotional point of building it was to have continuity with the old Wembley and Foster seems to have ignored that. The old ground’s hallmarks were its twin towers. “We all look forward to many more years of the twin towers,” Tony Blair had said, before construction started. Unfortunately Foster tore them down. “The towers were emblematic at their time,” he conceded, “but that was a long time ago and things have moved on.”
Herzog believes that it is details such as the towers that make a stadium feel like home to fans: Old Trafford’s “Munich clock” and the sign in Liverpool’s tunnel saying “This is Anfield” are other examples. But Simon Inglis has “no sadness at all” about their demise, desribing it as “a bad design by a bad architect who didn’t know what he was doing.”
Can the new Wembley achieve emotional continuity with the old one? Simon Inglis says: “Yes, in the sense that the approach to the new stadium is the same as the old one, and so the routes and habits and everyday experience of Wembley-goers have not changed. In every other respect, no. It’s a completely new building in a new environment. I don’t think that once you’re inside the new stadium there is any continuity with the old one.”
This is not a problem, Inglis believes. “We knew [the old Wembley] as a ramshackle old building which had a certain familiarity. It has been replaced by a gleaming new corporate building which seems quite cold and clinical. But I daresay if you’d have gone there in 1923 you’d have had the same reaction.”
At Wembley many decades are present simultaneously. Next week’s game is incidental, a mere quotation of past games. In 1996, I went with an American friend to see England play Germany in the semi-final of the European Championship. On the Tube to the ground, fans were singing, as if it were June 1940,
Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler,
If you think old England’s done?
And when we got to our seats, bad ones above the corner-flag, we saw behind us, in even worse seats, two legends of Wembley. “The big man in the raincoat,” I told my American friend, “the one swaying to the tune of ‘Three Lions on a Shirt’, is Geoff Hurst. He scored a hat-trick for England against Germany here in the 1966 World Cup final. The little guy next to him who looks like a bank clerk is Martin Peters. He scored England’s other goal. It’s a bit like sitting three rows ahead of Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin.” After 90 minutes the game was tied, and while the players were being massaged before extra time began, everyone in the crowd reminded each other of what England’s manager Alf Ramsey had told his team at the same stage in 1966: “You’ve beaten them once. Now go out there and beat them again.” England won 4-2.
Eighty years from now, in all likelihood, people will tell stories about something the Manchester United winger Cristiano Ronaldo did in the 2007 FA Cup final, and old women will remember their dead mothers who took them to the game. By then London may be turning into desert but Wembley will be the same, complete with the same old queues at the Tube station and the urine on my door.
An overarching architectural perspective
Wembley has been a site in search of an icon for more than a century, perhaps now, with its sweeping arch, it can finally rest easy, writes Edwin Heathcote.
In the 1880s, it was the site of an ambitious scheme for a structure to overshadow the Eiffel Tower. Only the base materialised and this abandoned folly became an attraction in its own right until it was dynamited in 1907. The Empire Exhibition of 1924 was an attempt to rally the country after the trauma of the first world war and its centrepiece was the white bulk of Wembley Stadium capped by its own mini twin-towers. Encased in a concrete shell that evoked the city of New Delhi, which Edwin Lutyens was then building – a British fudge of art deco, classical and colonial – it was a huge stadium intended as a showcase for nation and empire, though its original official 127,000 capacity was reduced long ago by the abolition of the old terraces.
The new building is designed by Foster and Partners, probably the world’s preeminent architecture practice. It is another typically British construction, in which the form is a dramatisation of the structural and mechanical requirements, late British High Tech. The architects have achieved a rare thing, a stadium suitable (with some adaptation) for athletics as well as football and it is a building that very seriously questions the need for an new Olympic stadium in east London, which will inevitably become defunct once the games are over.
The focus, however, is on football. The arena is an elegant, shallow bowl that belies its huge size – it is twice as big as the Stade de France in Paris (and with a far better relationship of arena to pitch), comfortably seating 90,000. It is also, with its retractable roof, a building equipped to cope with British weather and global warming.
Despite being the home of the beautiful game, Britain has a less than beautiful heritage of grounds. There has been nothing in this country to match the architectural delight of Eduardo Souto de Moura’s stadium for Braga in Portugal, a breathtaking arena carved into the side of a rock face on the site of a former quarry, or Herzog & de Meuron’s sensual cushion-clad stadium for Bayern Munich, a soft-shelled building with a heart of brilliantly pure concrete that, chameleon-like, changes colour according to who’s playing.
Milan’s San Siro and Madrid’s Bernabéu are among the cultural landmarks of Europe. However, they are club stadiums first and it is easier to produce something rooted in place and culture with a club that has a devoted local fanbase. Far harder is to create a national stadium on a blank site, a building that must somehow embody the qualities of a placeless national team. After its elephantine gestation, Wembley has the opportunity to galvanise the nation once more. That is, after all, a triumphal arch, isn’t it?" retirado de, simplesmente o mais conceituado jornal de economia do planeta terra, Financial Times
‘You’ve beaten them once. Now do it again...’
By Simon Kuper
Published: May 11 2007 18:05 | Last updated: May 11 2007 18:05
With its very first match, Wembley Stadium acquired its defining myth. The story of the “White Horse Final”, the 1923 FA Cup final between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United, is worth examining for what it reveals about Wembley’s place in the British psyche. What happened was a near disaster: up to 240,000 people crammed into the ground, almost twice Wembley’s capacity at the time, and probably the largest crowd ever at a football match. There was a crush and nearly 1,000 casualties were treated.
But, according to the myth, far worse was averted thanks to mounted police constable George Scorey and his white horse. Together they pushed back the thousands spilling on to the pitch before the match “Now, those in front join hands,” Scorey called out. They did and began retreating step by step. “The horse was very good,” Scorey recalled in 1944, “easing them back with his nose and his tail.” Bolton won 2-0, helped, it is said, by the odd trip of an opponent or telling pass from the hordes massed on the touchline.
The “White Horse Final” provided Wembley with the perfect myth. The horse evokes the stadium’s timeless appeal: so old as to be almost pre-technology. The hordes represent mass passion. And the story’s gentle resolution evokes Wembley’s sporting spirit: in place of strife, harmony. Almost uniquely among the world’s football grounds, Wembley doesn’t house a club. It is non-partisan, the national stadium, sitting above the game.
But for almost seven years the British have been without Wembley. In 2000, after one last dismal defeat against Germany, the old stadium was demolished. Next weekend, however, at a cost of £800m and four years late, the new Wembley will host its first FA Cup final, when Manchester United play Chelsea. The task of the new Wembley is to preserve the spirit of the old one: to be a shrine to Britishness, ancestor-worship, and to fandom itself.
It’s appropriate that the new Wembley will officially open with an FA Cup final because the final has always been the stadium’s chief ritual. The game is a spring rite of celebration, whereas international matches, also played at Wembley, tend to be autumn evenings of anguish.
The FA Cup final belongs to everyone in English football. Dozens of clubs have played in it and their supporters all sing the same songs about it: “Que sera, sera,” “We’ll really shake them up/When we win the FA Cup,” and, before the game itself, in unison, the hymn “Abide with me.” This harmony is unique in an industry whose driving passion is hate: always for the opponents, often for their stadium (Manchester City fans have serenaded the wartime bombing of Manchester United’s ground), sometimes for your own team, and even for yourself for watching them. Only Wembley transcends this.
The fans’ ritual on FA Cup final day is unchanging. For years I lived just off Baker Street in central London, the place where supporters gather before cramming on to Tube trains bound for Wembley. They would drink beer in the sun and then, in search of a discreet side street, come and urinate against my house. Once I scolded a urinator from my window: “Handy isn’t it, if you don’t live here?” “It is very convenient, yes,” he replied. I’m sure people were urinating there in 1923.
Wembley contains football’s past but also the fan’s personal past. When you go to a stadium, you remember being taken there as a child. That’s much of the point of being a sports fan. How many other buildings do you visit all your life? As the Dutch football poet Henk Spaan has written, a stadium is
A monument to all fathers who are already dead
A monument to the common man.
And whatever was happening in Britain from 1923 to 2000, Wembley was always there, stolid, ugly and suburban. On June 8 1940, the Germans seemed on the point of invading Britain. They were already invading France, and the British Expeditionary Force had just fled Dunkirk in an armada of little boats. But that afternoon, 42,399 football supporters, in heroic denial of reality, were at Wembley stadium watching West Ham v Blackburn in the War Cup Final.
During the first half, word went round the crowd that an important announcement was to be made at half-time. Roy Peskett, a sportswriter attending, thought perhaps the Germans had landed. Instead the announcer said: “There are six heroes here today. Men who have just come back from Dunkirk, been to the depots and got refitted, and come here to watch the football match!”
Like most British traditions, Wembley has often been more appreciated by foreigners. Pele, who never played a match there, once took a ball on to the empty pitch and, like a schoolchild pretending to be Pele, kicked it into the empty net. He called the stadium “the church of football”. In Istanbul once, I met Fatih Uraz, Turkey’s goalkeeper on the day they lost 8-0 to England at Wembley in 1987. Was that the worst day of his career? “No!” said Uraz. “It was a nice memory for me, because I showed my effort. All my career I wanted to play in Wembley. If I got another chance to play there, even if I conceded 15 goals, no problem.”
Yet the old Wembley had to go. After the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, in which 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death in an outdated stadium, billions of pounds were spent modernising big British football grounds. A similar process happened in the US at about the same time – “the ballpark renaissance” – and around Europe.
Jacques Herzog, the Swiss architect who in 2001 with his childhood friend Pierre de Meuron won the Pritzker prize chiefly for designing London’s Tate Modern art museum, designed Munich’s stadium for last year’s World Cup, Basel’s for next year’s European football championship and is now finishing Beijing’s Olympic Stadium. His Basel ground, he told me, “was the first of the new football stadiums to be built by a famous architect. A stadium has the potential to be like an opera house. Nobody ever said that before.” He meant that whereas cities once derived status from their cathedrals, and later from their opera houses, they now do so from their stadiums.
Beside these new arenas, Wembley looked embarrassing. Like most elderly British football grounds, it dated from an era when stadiums were built on the cheap, without architectural pretensions. “For many years, within British sport especially, stadium architects were looked down upon with almost as much contempt as journalists,” says Simon Inglis, author of the seminal Football Grounds of England and Wales and several other books on the subject (few topics are so dominated by one writer, evidence of how, until relatively recently, stadiums have been neglected). The Empire Stadium, as it was originally called, was finished in 1923 in 300 working days, a year early, and in such a rush that a train was said to have been accidentally buried beneath it. Wembley was just a vast concrete bowl, whose chief boast was being as high as the walls of Jericho.
It would have been rational to scrap Wembley. Most countries manage without a dedicated national stadium. England could have continued playing in wonderful grounds around the country, as they have during the rebuilding period. That would have been a rebellion against London’s domination of English life. Newcastle fans would have been spared the nine-hour round-trip to see their team lose finals. The Football Association would have saved £800m. Imagine how many pitches and changing-rooms it could have built across England.
But scrapping Wembley was unthinkable. Instead, a new Wembley was commissioned worthy of the new London. “No other city in Europe is transforming so much,” notes Herzog. A “famous architect” was called in: Norman Foster, who in more than 40 years of architectural practice had never built a stadium.
The delays turned the construction into an international farce. To give some idea of the scale of this, in 2004 a South African football official told me that the R1.2bn (currently £87m) his country would spend on all its stadiums for the world cup of 2010 was a fraction of the cost of Wembley alone. Three years later, South Africa’s bill has somehow risen to R9bn (£654m) but that is still less than Wembley’s. Brian Barwick, the FA’s chief executive, resorted to jokes about the matter. Musing at the FT’s business of sport conference last year about England’s chances of hosting the 2018 world cup, he said: “There’s even a theory that Wembley will be finished by then.”
Finally complete, the new stadium looks wonderful even if the emotional point of building it was to have continuity with the old Wembley and Foster seems to have ignored that. The old ground’s hallmarks were its twin towers. “We all look forward to many more years of the twin towers,” Tony Blair had said, before construction started. Unfortunately Foster tore them down. “The towers were emblematic at their time,” he conceded, “but that was a long time ago and things have moved on.”
Herzog believes that it is details such as the towers that make a stadium feel like home to fans: Old Trafford’s “Munich clock” and the sign in Liverpool’s tunnel saying “This is Anfield” are other examples. But Simon Inglis has “no sadness at all” about their demise, desribing it as “a bad design by a bad architect who didn’t know what he was doing.”
Can the new Wembley achieve emotional continuity with the old one? Simon Inglis says: “Yes, in the sense that the approach to the new stadium is the same as the old one, and so the routes and habits and everyday experience of Wembley-goers have not changed. In every other respect, no. It’s a completely new building in a new environment. I don’t think that once you’re inside the new stadium there is any continuity with the old one.”
This is not a problem, Inglis believes. “We knew [the old Wembley] as a ramshackle old building which had a certain familiarity. It has been replaced by a gleaming new corporate building which seems quite cold and clinical. But I daresay if you’d have gone there in 1923 you’d have had the same reaction.”
At Wembley many decades are present simultaneously. Next week’s game is incidental, a mere quotation of past games. In 1996, I went with an American friend to see England play Germany in the semi-final of the European Championship. On the Tube to the ground, fans were singing, as if it were June 1940,
Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler,
If you think old England’s done?
And when we got to our seats, bad ones above the corner-flag, we saw behind us, in even worse seats, two legends of Wembley. “The big man in the raincoat,” I told my American friend, “the one swaying to the tune of ‘Three Lions on a Shirt’, is Geoff Hurst. He scored a hat-trick for England against Germany here in the 1966 World Cup final. The little guy next to him who looks like a bank clerk is Martin Peters. He scored England’s other goal. It’s a bit like sitting three rows ahead of Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin.” After 90 minutes the game was tied, and while the players were being massaged before extra time began, everyone in the crowd reminded each other of what England’s manager Alf Ramsey had told his team at the same stage in 1966: “You’ve beaten them once. Now go out there and beat them again.” England won 4-2.
Eighty years from now, in all likelihood, people will tell stories about something the Manchester United winger Cristiano Ronaldo did in the 2007 FA Cup final, and old women will remember their dead mothers who took them to the game. By then London may be turning into desert but Wembley will be the same, complete with the same old queues at the Tube station and the urine on my door.
An overarching architectural perspective
Wembley has been a site in search of an icon for more than a century, perhaps now, with its sweeping arch, it can finally rest easy, writes Edwin Heathcote.
In the 1880s, it was the site of an ambitious scheme for a structure to overshadow the Eiffel Tower. Only the base materialised and this abandoned folly became an attraction in its own right until it was dynamited in 1907. The Empire Exhibition of 1924 was an attempt to rally the country after the trauma of the first world war and its centrepiece was the white bulk of Wembley Stadium capped by its own mini twin-towers. Encased in a concrete shell that evoked the city of New Delhi, which Edwin Lutyens was then building – a British fudge of art deco, classical and colonial – it was a huge stadium intended as a showcase for nation and empire, though its original official 127,000 capacity was reduced long ago by the abolition of the old terraces.
The new building is designed by Foster and Partners, probably the world’s preeminent architecture practice. It is another typically British construction, in which the form is a dramatisation of the structural and mechanical requirements, late British High Tech. The architects have achieved a rare thing, a stadium suitable (with some adaptation) for athletics as well as football and it is a building that very seriously questions the need for an new Olympic stadium in east London, which will inevitably become defunct once the games are over.
The focus, however, is on football. The arena is an elegant, shallow bowl that belies its huge size – it is twice as big as the Stade de France in Paris (and with a far better relationship of arena to pitch), comfortably seating 90,000. It is also, with its retractable roof, a building equipped to cope with British weather and global warming.
Despite being the home of the beautiful game, Britain has a less than beautiful heritage of grounds. There has been nothing in this country to match the architectural delight of Eduardo Souto de Moura’s stadium for Braga in Portugal, a breathtaking arena carved into the side of a rock face on the site of a former quarry, or Herzog & de Meuron’s sensual cushion-clad stadium for Bayern Munich, a soft-shelled building with a heart of brilliantly pure concrete that, chameleon-like, changes colour according to who’s playing.
Milan’s San Siro and Madrid’s Bernabéu are among the cultural landmarks of Europe. However, they are club stadiums first and it is easier to produce something rooted in place and culture with a club that has a devoted local fanbase. Far harder is to create a national stadium on a blank site, a building that must somehow embody the qualities of a placeless national team. After its elephantine gestation, Wembley has the opportunity to galvanise the nation once more. That is, after all, a triumphal arch, isn’t it?" retirado de, simplesmente o mais conceituado jornal de economia do planeta terra, Financial Times