It has been 40 years since Ipswich last beat Aston Villa in the top flight at Portman Road. Alan Sunderland had put Ipswich ahead early, but the game turned on the dismissals of Villa’s Peter Withe and Colin Gibson in the first 10 minutes of the second half. Russell Osman and Eric Gates rounded off a 3-0 win for Ipswich.
You don’t have to know that the opener stemmed from fine approach play from Gates and Kevin O’Callaghan, who played the Allied goalkeeper Tony Lewis in Escape to Victory – “Make it a clean break, skipper” – to feel a frisson of nostalgia; you just have to be about 50 years old.
To learn that Mich D’Avray came off the bench for Trevor Putney is like Proust wolfing down an entire packet of madeleines: it’s to be transported back to the comforts of childhood, to a crackling radio in an Austin Maestro, to Findus crispy pancakes at my gran’s, to sitting in front of the fire at home with a mug of Cup-a-Soup. It’s a cliche that once you get to a certain age you’ll happily have conversations that comprise nothing more than listing sportspeople from your childhood, but it’s also true.
By September 1984, decline had already set in for both clubs. Villa finished 1984-85 10th, Ipswich 17th. Ipswich would be relegated the following season and Villa a year after that. Although both clubs have had their ups and downs since, Sunday’s meeting is their first in the top flight since 2002.
Yet at the beginning of the 80s, the two had been challenging for the league title. Bobby Robson’s Ipswich beat Villa three times in 1980-81, twice in the league and once in the FA Cup. When they won 2-1 at Villa Park on a Tuesday evening in mid-April, it brought Ipswich to within a point of Villa at the top of the table with a game in hand. Exhausted by a run to the FA Cup semi-finals and ultimately to glory in the Uefa Cup, though, Ipswich lost four of their final five league matches and Villa were champions.
The title may have been Villa’s seventh, but it was their first since 1910. They were highly unlikely champions. Even by the time they beat Bayern Munich in the 1982 European Cup final – they meet for the first time since in the Champions League on Wednesday – their squad had only 12 caps between them. It was Ipswich players who swept the individual awards.
Very little of that season makes sense. Villa used a record low of 14 players; this season they had used more than that by the 74th minute of their opening game. Ipswich ended up losing seven of their last 10 games, but they also had a spell in the autumn when they won only one of seven.
That was an era when title races were unpredictable because fatigue and anxiety often made the contenders tighten up, when a team could lose about a fifth of their games and still win the title; there wasn’t the demand for constant, remorseless winning and that gave seasons a different texture with more scope for twists and turns.
Villa’s then manager, Ron Saunders, the bastard’s bastard, disliked by his peers, most journalists and most of his players, quit the following February after a dispute with the board, then immediately got fans to side with the board by joining Birmingham. He had organised everything so well, he insisted, that even “a complete idiot” would take nine to 12 months to destroy it.
It was a needlessly if characteristically cruel line, made in the knowledge that he had been replaced by his long-time assistant, Tony Barton. Three months later, in his first managerial job, Barton led Villa to the European Cup. He left Villa in 1983-84 and took over at Northampton.
It was a very different time. It was far from perfect – the away leg of Villa’s semi-final against Anderlecht was marred by serious crowd trouble – but there was a romance to football that meant provincial English sides such as Villa and Ipswich could win major trophies. No one would suggest Villa’s board – whether under Doug Ellis or in Ron Bendall’s two-year interregnum in which they won the league and European Cup – was especially enlightened, but neither did they treat fans with the contempt the present board does.
On the pitch, this is the best life has been for Villa fans in four decades; off it, as prices soar, already shabby facilities are worsening as toilets and bars are shut while groups who have sat together for years are broken up to make way for corporate guests. Supporters’ concerns over the makeover of the badge have been ignored and, given the design on the shirts differs from that in much of the stadium, the process has, anyway, been shambolic.
There is a sense that for certain executives, long-term fans have become an encumbrance. The change of mentality is clear. Prices for Champions League games – a minimum of £70, even with a season-ticket holders’ discount – seem calculated on the basis that fans will not loyally go to every game but pick and choose between them. This is part of a broader movement linked to the proliferation of games. Football clubs exist now to generate content for television; the notion that they are offering a service for a specific and local community feels so quaint as to be absurd.
And that clearly has changed from 40 years ago. Does it matter? Progress happens, for better or for worse, whether the middle-aged like it or not. It’s for the better that football is no longer as abrasive as Saunders and that fans rarely scrap on cross-Channel ferries. Free-market fundamentalists, those for whom the terms “fan” and “consumer” are essentially interchangeable, decry the notion that a football club might mean something beyond making profit: money is being made, so all is good.
But football should at least be aware of this shift and what it means for the game as a whole, particularly in terms of the generation of a self-perpetuating elite. Football can’t always be about communities, whether those are Mich D’Avray nostalgists or groups of people used to sitting together at games, but perhaps it should ask why it is so happy for greed to trample over the social interactions the game makes possible.
