Officially, football is the national sport. Unofficially, it can feel that mocking Robbie Savage is.
Rewind to May and there was some bemusement when, in a televised press conference, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock was interrogated not by Laura Kuennsberg, Robert Peston or anyone else from the Downing Street press corps, but by the former footballer who, infamously, was once fined for using Graham Poll’s toilet. Instead of lame banter with ‘Fletch’, he quizzed a senior government minister.
And yet Savage raised a good point. And not one for himself, either. He asked why young footballers at grassroots level, unlike their tennis- and golf-playing counterparts, were not permitted to receive one-on-one coaching. Savage highlighted the importance of football in youngsters’ mental and physical wellbeing.
He did it again this week. In an impassioned monologue on BBC Breakfast, he questioned the decision to suspend children’s sport and highlighted the inconsistency of a government who have refused to confirm whether it will resume when the second national lockdown supposedly ends in early December and who permit children to mix in class, but not on a sporting field at grassroots level. He came armed with experience and examples.
“I just feel sorry for the generation of kids who cannot play, not just football, I am talking all sports,” he said. “My team in the east Manchester junior league, there has been 3,300 games under the FA guidelines and three positive cases. Where is the scientific evidence to show this horrible virus spreads in outdoor sport? The 23 games my team has participated in there has not been one case.
In between his efforts for the younger generation, Savage’s name felt an incongruous presence alongside those of Greg Dyke, Lord Triesman and a host of MPs among the signatures on a letter calling for the government to provide a rescue package for Football League clubs. He became head of football operations at the relaunched Macclesfield, a role that, unless non-league football is far more lucrative than most of us realised, will not make him a fortune but which could benefit a town.
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Savage is not alone in showing altruism in troubled times and using his platform and profile to campaign on behalf of others – with Marcus Rashford the most prominent of many admirable examples – but at a point when many in football have mislaid their moral compass, it is worth celebrating those who have not seen a pandemic and an economic catastrophe as something they can exploit for their own purposes.
He has not, for instance, tried to cancel relegation, as Brighton, West Ham and one or two others thought they might. Nor has he tried to turf two clubs out of the Premier League – with the knock-on effect that two more would lose their Football League status – strip others of some of their revenues and cancel the League Cup in a power grab. He has not tried to create a European Super League to try and cement a permanent divide between the haves and the have nots while destabilising domestic leagues. He has not come up with a plan to charge fans an extra £14.95 to watch games at a time when many find themselves ever shorter of funds.
There has been something depressing and disgraceful about the way too many have seen a crisis as something they can manipulate in self-serving style, enriching themselves and undermining others when they are at their most powerless.
Too many have forgotten that football matters at all levels, professional and amateur, adult and child; that it is part of communities and vital to the physical and mental health of millions. Those who have championed the underdogs or raised significant issues, like Savage, have done others a service. He may never be regarded as one of the game’s great intellectuals, as the response to his unexpected appearance on a government press conference indicated, but he has shown his heart is in the right place. And if only that could be said of some of the game’s powerbrokers.
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