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Sport and the British – 21 Years On: Response to Comments

Having written more than I envisaged in my accompanying essay, I do not wish to add a great deal to what I have already said. However, I would like briefly to respond directly to the generous and thoughtful remarks of my ‘critics’. First, there are the assessments of Sport and the British made by Robert Colls, John Hughson, Martin Johnes and Martin Polley; then there is the longer essay by Ross McKibbin, which raises some fundamental questions about the nature and possibilities of sports history. The comments by Robert Colls convinced me to say more about the ‘insider/outsider’ aspects of the book. I agree with his view that my own personal journey from the north-east to the south-east and then to Oxford clearly informed the book in ways I was not fully aware of at the time. Whether I was defending the values of British sport in the context of the Heysel disaster, which happened when I was in Brussels and writing the book, I have no idea. I remember the shock of those in Brussels who still thought Britain was the home of ‘fair play’. Heysel made it easier to see that an age of working class respectability had definitively come to an end. Colls is right in pointing out that the book ‘was always a little bit old fashioned . . . in the sense that it is social history with the politics left out’. The role of the state and political parties in sport is a yawning gap for the period after the Second World War and there is probably a lot more to be said about how politicians of different parties used sport before the 1940s. He is right, too, about the ‘market’ revolution of the 1980s. This was taking place as I was writing and culminated in the formation of the Premier League in 1992. It was ‘a second revolution’ in sport, which profoundly changed the picture. I sensed the general shape of things to