The Sad Decline of English Football's Knucklehead Centre-Backs

I have a mate who is 50 and the other day he was explaining how one of his favourite TV shows when he was growing up had been something called Cannon. He sketched out the premise. So you've got Frank Cannon, a private investigator working out of LA, a former cop who now cracked cold cases and drove a cool 1972 Lincoln Continental. But there were a few things you needed to know about Cannon. The first was that his wife and son had died under mysterious circumstances. The second was that he was properly fat. The third was that, despite his size, he turned out to be really fucking good at martial arts.

I told my mate I honestly thought that sounded amazing. But he just looked at me sadly and explained that he'd watched some episodes online only to realise within about ten minutes that Cannon was in fact a massive pile of shit. Slow, clunky, cheesy shit. Badly edited, lazily scripted, embarrassing shit. What had been pulsating viewing back then was now barely watchable to modern eyes.

It's the same with the football. If you've ever gone on YouTube to watch clips of old matches it's striking how often you're left with the awkward, indignant feeling you might get were you to revisit a 1970s TV show about a grief stricken, crime-solving lardarse who kung-fu chopped his way to justice. And I don't mean "clips of old matches" like watching men in flat caps passing out in each other's arms because Stanley Matthews did that piece of skill where he kicks the ball and runs after it despite there still being rationing on. What I mean is that you can spend an hour soaking-up footage from the Premier League's first decade or so and still come away asking some difficult questions. Like, did fullbacks really just ping the ball down the channels every single fucking time? Did midfielders seriously misplace passes that often? How come I don't remember the number of awkward, panicky touches everyone needed to take? You compare it to the game we watch today and can only conclude that modern football has gained much over recent years. But there have been losses too. And few of those losses have been as sad to witness as the slow death of the homegrown centre-back.

This decline isn't just UKIP-style scaremongering. Opta released stats this week showing that while 50 percent of the Premier League's centre-backs were English in the 1999/00 season, just 33 percent of them are this year. Were you to make these stats inclusive of all British and Irish players, or to stretch them back another ten years, the disparity would only be greater.

But why has this happened? And why should we care? And who are we even really talking about anyway? Let's start with that last one. It has often been observed that for many years, the one thing England never struggled to produce was very good centre-backs. But I'm not talking about very good centre-backs, players like Tony Adams or Gareth Southgate or Sol Campbell or Rio Ferdinand. I'm not even talking about the glut of pretty good centre-backs the country has produced, from Ugo Ehiogu to Steve Bruce to Martin Keown. What I'm talking about are the third-tier of talent, the no-nonsense knuckleheads that once helped shore-up the back line of every Premier League team up and down the country. The Steve Howeys, the Spencer Priors, the David Weatheralls. The Chris Perrys, the Colin Hendrys, the Steve Boulds. The kind of players who had "SAFETY FIRST" written in cross-stitch and framed above their single bed. The kind of players who, in footballing terms, were so honest that life became unbearable for them and the only effective therapy turned out to be doing 50 headed clearances a week and cutting Julian Joachim in half twice a year.

At this stage you might be like, "Hmmm, aren't you just making out that you're some kind of earthy, misty-eyed Luddite when actually you're just being really fucking patronising towards an entire group of effective if unshowy professionals?" to which I would say, yes, you're right, these players truly were effective and unshowy professionals. And the appeal of their unshowiness becomes greater with every new Vine loop you see of some anonymous player from a league no one cares about demonstrating "mad tekkers" to no obvious end result. I mean, Matt Elliot – 18 Scotland caps but really as English as they come; born and raised in South London – never had mad tekkers. Matt Elliot barely looked like a footballer. If anything he looked like a brickie who was destined to one day badly bungle a gangland hit he'd been pressured into doing on account of his dad's gambling debts. But Matt Elliot won The League Cup. The fucking League Cup, single-handedly. In the 2000 final he won it for Leicester City with a brace of headed goals so towering and butch they actually verged upon gay.

This was, in retrospect, the last real hurrah for the knucklehead centre-back. That cup final against Tranmere was their Battle of the Little Bighorn, with Elliot as Sitting Bull and Gerry Taggart, obviously, as Crazy Horse. As the 90s gave way to the 00s, a cleansing began. How come? All sorts of reasons. Rule changes made physically beasting opposition strikers harder and harder. Tactics moved towards possession rather playing the percentages and pumping balls forward. In quite short order, these players needed to be halfway comfortable on the ball, which had never really been their thing. If it had been, there would never have been such a longstanding fascination with the strange and otherworldly (read: "foreign") role of "sweeper". Remember the days when an English manager would decide to experiment with a sweeper and MI5 would immediately start compiling a file on him? We actually can't read what the security services knew about Jim Smith for another 30 years.

But it changed. The popular narrative is that one day Marcel Desailly pitched up at Chelsea, smilingly back-heeled it to his 'keeper, and in doing so signalled a sea-change in what centre-backs did, what they were for. The reality is a bit more complicated, but not much. In one of his annoyingly really fucking good newspaper columns last year, Gary Neville described how in the 90s defenders were essentially trained-up to be an elite corps of automatons dedicated to ruining the game for everybody else. It meant that even if you weren't an amazing natural footballer, if you had the right coaching, you could still put in a shift for the gaffer. Now? Coaching is all about technique. You get really good at football, then someone decides you're a defender. It's the reason why a player like David Luiz – a man who in another life would have been employed principally as Paul McGrath's driver – today moves clubs for £50m. Tastes change and the world moves on.

Still, I mourn it anyway. Maybe it's because these players represented the last recognisable connection at the elite level to the game you played yourself on Sunday mornings. I'll never know what it's like to ping cross-field passes around like Vincent Kompany or have Laurent Koscielny's pass completion rate. But I know exactly what it's like to feel a surge of satisfaction when smacking the ball into the safety of touch or knocking over a striker who is definitely much better than me and actually getting away with it. It meant there was a folk connection with these knuckleheads we'll not see again. Ten years ago I was at a folk music festival in Wales, and the guy in the tent next to me had taken a lot of drugs and then spent an entire night singing "We All Dream of a Team of Gary Breens" until he passed out. And I couldn't be mad. Because I understood. When the final, final traces of this breed leave the Premier League gene pool for good – and I'm basically talking about Richard Dunne now – the passing should be marked. These noble, knucklehead centre-backs were men of their time and, I think, men of the people. Fire up YouTube. Watch them. Remember them. Pour one out.

@ben_machell

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