“People watching television series used to have to wait till the next week to see what happened, now you can get it on iPlayer, you can download it through torrents, people have seen it before it’s made sometimes. It’s a wider change in society that has had a detrimental effect on football.
One of the things I try to encourage is a sense of belief and culture, and a sense of continuity. When I was 17, 18, 19 everyone we knew who was older, we’d ask about the 50s, ‘What was Finney like? Why did United not win 3 European Cups with a forward line of Best, Charlton and Law?’ I wanted to find out about these things. It struck me the other day that young lads now, they don’t ask me questions about all the stuff I’ve seen.
Growing up, I remember reading Salinger, I think it was Franny and Zooey or Seymour: An Introduction, one of those, and it says, ‘For me, I didn’t have fairytales; the Great Gatsby was my fairytale.’ I read that and thought, ‘You know what? My fairytales were all Billy Lidell and Albert Stubbins.’ That’s what I grew up on. It made me want to watch more and it seemed like a wider thing that I was into.
There’s something brilliant about singing the songs your father sang, and when you lose that part of the game, it just becomes entertainment, instead of being culture.
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