JONNY BRICK TALKS TO THE MAN WHOSE NAME YOU KNOW FROM ITV AND SKY SPORTS, AND WHOSE MEMOIR IS OUT NOW…
PECKHAM Town FC play in Step 7 of Non-League. In April, they welcomed a former football reporter as a match sponsor or, more specifically, his book.
Ned Boulting’s Square Peg, Round Ball is a memoir of a man who fell out of love with the game which gave him steady employment for 20 years.
“If you go up you have to have floodlights and organised training sessions,”
Ned tells me of a conversation he had with someone from the club. “None of the lads want that!”
With a voice that reminds me a lot of Peter Drury, Ned talks for over an hour about his charmed life, which started at Sky making tea for Jeff Stelling on Soccer Saturday.
“He told me to respect the game but mock its pomposity,” Ned writes of Jeff’s advice, and we both chuckle that Stelling has followed Sir Alex Ferguson and Eminem back out of retirement.
“He very nearly left Sky and went to ITV for the 2006 World Cup. He’d become a bit of a cult hero and this would have propelled him into household fame, but Sky offered him double what ITV offered.
“He’s lost without it!
From Wednesday onwards, pre-internet, he had reams of newspapers and would write copious notes and was committing them to memory.”
Ned went to his first match as an 11-year-old. He was impressed by Chelsea but not bowled over, devoting his teenage and university years to acting.
He came across a Wimbledon fan called Giles at university who, in 2015, helped to bring the story of the Crazy Gang to bookshelves in the book of that title by Dave Bassett and Wally Downes. His next-dorm neighbour Si was a Liverpool fan who shared in the joys of victory and, in the 1988 FA Cup final, despair.
There is a masterful paragraph early in his book where Ned describes watching football with his eyes open: “The stretching and shrinking of a back four’s fragile line of defence, the loneliness of the goalkeeper, the snap and tussle of the centre where mini-battles for possession fl ashed like grenades igniting into no-man’s land. The sheer astonishment of a goal!”
He concludes that football is ‘like catching water in a sieve’ because a goal is so rare and the roar is so loud when it goes right. It is a brilliant description of the pharmacological nature of football, which is also psychological as, in Ned’s 20s, football became his ‘avoidance of reality’. He moved back to Hamburg, putting his acting ambitions to one side and took to being whatever the German for a flâneur is.
St Pauli became his favourite team after he caught them by chance on his year abroad and was taken by the way they held on for a victory. He thinks every club has their own version of Klaus Ottens, a hopeless striker.
He also writes well about the Sky Sports era, where footballers became stars of music videos, with match footage set to music by Sky’s team whose ‘sheer competence’ amazed Ned.
George Best was part of the Soccer Saturday panel when Ned was making tea for the panel before becoming a match reporter.
“I’m very honoured to have known him reasonably well for a couple of years. His presence, of all the footballers I have ever met, he stands in a category all of his own. There was only one George Best.
“I describe my dad, who was a season-ticket holder of Chelsea, telling me how he remembers Best coming to Stamford Bridge and tearing them apart. I’m having this conversation on a mobile phone, sitting on a gantry next to George Best, high up in the stand.
“I turned to George andsaid,‘Dadreckonsyouwereahalf-decentplayer!’Hehadthattwinkleinhiseyeandsaid,‘Iwasn’tbad’.”
Ned comes up with the three stages of working in the football industry: you see them as normal, realise they’re not normal, then discover at last that they are actually normal after all.
“There’s a confusion as to whether the modern footballer is a normal human being or not. I think it fi lters into their own personalities. I did a year of fi lming with Steven Gerrard for a doc- umentary that his people had called into life. It was 2005, 2006 and he was one of the best players in the world.
“There was a defi nite confl ict between how he was as a private individual – how he is a complex, thoughtful, tough human being – and his public persona that he still tries to control. In his kitchen, devoid of anything that resembled food, he struggled with slices of bread and some ham for the crew.
In his kitchen, devoid of anything that resembled food, he struggled with slices of bread and some ham for the crew.
“It was a curiously intimate yet distant relationship and it said a lot about the way we elevate these lads to a posi-tion that they aren’t prepared to occupy.
“Gerrard was a one-man team. That Liverpool team that beat Milan was not a good team. I’d been with them every step of the way and ended up in Istanbul. They didn’t finish in the top four that year in the league yet they won the Champions League and bumped Everton out of the UCL places!”
This from a man who had never met a Scouser until university. I often wonder when Modern Football (or Big Football, as Jonny Liew has called it) began and Ned has a theory.
“I started off in the sport at the same time as the Golden Generation, who were ultimately quite disappointing,” he said.
“The way they started marketing themselves coincided with the sudden hyperinflation of the game. It moved through the gears. The moment the match was thrown onto the kindling wood was the Manchester United Treble of 1999.
“The following season, United really ripped up the rulebook by not taking part in the FA Cup as defending champions. I think that was a really important turning point. It was the first flickering of the European Super League.”
Ken Bates, whom it comes to a surprise to Ned is alive at time of interview, once banned him from Elland Road.
“I’d done a rather snide voiceover on ITV’s show The Championship and how, though he was Monaco based, Leeds were in trouble with HMRC for unpaid tax that they owed. I was on the M1 and he rang me up: ‘You’re never coming back son!’”
Ned has no domestic side he supports in England, instead following the national team as a fan and journalist. In 2010, Ned was the ‘TV libero’ who could make packages taking in the sights, sounds and smells of South Africa, which was a respite from the football itself.
He has happier anecdotes about Michael Carrick, whose parents told him to overdub music over some footage of a squealing Carrick, and Joe Cole.
“When he was 17 or 18, breaking into the first team, the amount of hype that came with Cole’s ascendancy was truly remarkable. He was the new Gascoigne/
Best/Pele all rolled into one, but his career never matched up to that promise.”
Ned is off on a tour this autumn telling anecdotes about his time following the Tour de France, which kicks off in Denmark on July 1. His co-commentators are world-class cyclists like Chris Froome and David Millar.
Ned hosts the Never Strays Far podcast with the latter, and such is the switch to cycling that when he was watching the World Cup semi-final against Croatia, with an England side managed by his old mate and colleague Gareth Southgate, he ‘didn’t even know who Kieran Tripper was!’.
Back in his day, Ned always doubted whether his work actually had an impact on the person in the pub, since people only tuned in for the match.
“You do want to hear what Roy Keane has to say. It is entertainment,after all. I used to go on the road to Champions League matches with ITV and I’d sit pitchside with Robbie Earle.
“He talked to me throughout the match with all those technical aspects, like full-back position.
“The red light would go on and all the complexity, nuance and passion evaporated and he’d fall back into platitudinous cliches.
“Something scares football people away fromwantingtoappearasinterestingandasdetailedastheyactuallyare.Theydon’twanttoappearlikeasmartarse.”
Leavethat to the profession- als likeNedBoulting.
Ned popped into the Football Library to talk about Square Peg, Round Ball: Football, TV and Me, which is out now, published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). Hear the interview at soundcloud.com/jonny_brick
