by Terry Venables was so popular among the Euro 96 generation that England’s senior players constantly advocated for his return to the nation’s radioactive tracksuit. Glenn Hoddle fired? “Bring Terry back.” Kevin Keegan resigns in Wembley toilets? “Get Venners back in.”
Only echoes of it now remain, but for decades after 1966, English football was wracked by ideological struggles over how the national game should be played. Route One supporters preferred howitzer football: native aggression and directness with minimal elaboration. Idealists fought for the global trend of sophistication. In the midst of this battle 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 manager who would save English football from its insularity was never in one place long enough to present work convincing enough to defeat his critics. His often chaotic and sometimes dubious attempts to prove that he was a visionary businessman ultimately sabotaged his fitful efforts to be the coach his country craved.
But that longing was real, especially after the recurrence of the Graham Taylor years, when the progress made by Bobby Robson’s team at Italia 90 was torpedoed by the mandarins of the Football Association with no interest in continuity of styles of game. If Paul Gascoigne’s meteorite exposed the fallacy that English spectators were content to watch football played above the height of their heads, the entertainment conceived by Venables at Euro 1996 responded to another deep desire.
To be loved by an English crowd in the 1980s or 1990s, a manager would ideally be relatable, astute, cheerful and positive: an entertainer with swagger and the same level of tactical insight as Europe’s best. The applause for Venables on the Premier League grounds on the day he died spoke of an innate admiration for the anti-establishment football romantic who took charge of Taylor’s ruined England and turned them into the swashbucklers who beat the Netherlands 4-1 in Euro 96.
Venables is misinterpreted as a dreamer. Before that European Championship, he said: “In all the debate about the state of English football, one factor is always forgotten. It is the character of the English player.” He gave artists and craftsmen equal value. The elastic, elusive career of Darren Anderton or Steve McManaman was made possible by the alpha male dominance of Tony Adams and Paul Ince and the certainty of Alan Shearer and Teddy Sheringham.
Art for art’s sake, it was not. Don Howe, the defense guru, was his right-hand man. In restaurants with the El Tel salt and pepper shakers, As he became known in Barcelona, he talked almost as much about crushing the rival as about sweeping him off the field. The intellectual challenge of coaching and his talent for managing people – for making the footballer’s job intensely enjoyable – was the addiction that kept drawing him back to the bench while his “investment plans” consumed his time.
In his time and character, Venables absorbed the angst of a nation obsessed with 1966 but still in the early years of the Premier League revolution, before an influx of foreign players and coaches transformed English football in style, tone and spirit. . In Venables’ time the conversation was still internal: the mother country argued with itself. The choice was binary. In the industry you were either for Venables or against him. “Terry’s friends” became shorthand for the division in a media field that hung on his every word, whether out of admiration or to point out a flaw. Visionaries and reformers in other countries did not seem to have such complicated lives.
In retrospect, a football coach who had to pulp his own autobiography, was reprimanded for “deliberately and dishonestly” misleading a jury and banned from being a company director will 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 hypervigilant need for knowledge. Between comic anecdotes and tactical asides, he poked and prodded everyone around the table in search of information about this player, that president, this or that club. Behind the lights of his smile, his love of singing Frank Sinatra songs and his savant self-esteem, Venables possessed a football brain with no off switch. He was always on the lookout for the next opportunity, for the ever-present need to get ahead of the dogs.
An “educated” coach, as Adams called him, Venables opened the eyes of England players at Euro 96 to the possibility of playing like the continental powers. It was what they wanted, they all said: to escape their own deadly history. With England and at Barcelona, both briefly, Venables’ gift for understanding human nature in the pressurized context of elite football, combined with the eye he had for producing how the game works, flourishes completely in sync with his own character: cunning, restless. , exuberant, without complexes.
After Euro 96, no one realized that he had not nominated the penalty takers for the semi-final shootout against Germany, beyond penalty number 5: a mistake that allowed Gareth Southgate to volunteer to be the next, more out of duty than criteria. Southgate failed to score and Venables’ short reign of 24 England caps from March 1994 to June 1996 ended. As lawyers salivated over the fees for their legal messes, Euro 96 embedded itself in the English psyche like a brief enchantment, a rebirth for the national team and a response to the FA blazers who distrusted Venables as they tried to build a revolution. commercial about the popularity of his 1996 team.
Too distracted and mercurial to be a statesman, Venables worked best in the realm of imagination – in inspiration – something that would not be said of many English coaches. 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 form of standard equipment. If you didn’t like that one, Venables had others. He never lacked tricks.
