My father and other working-class football heroes

William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2005. Lo stesso premio vinto alla seconda edizione da "Fever Pitch" di Nick Hornby. Per uno come me, appassionato di storie sportive, di aneddoti, di scrittura sportiva e dei vecchi tempi, "My father and other working-class football heroes" di Gary Imlach, è manna dal cielo. La storia di Stewart Imlach, left-forward scozzese degli anni '50, famoso soprattutto per i suoi 5 anni al Nottingham Forest e per la partecipazione alla Coppa del Mondo del 1958. Una storia che ho adorato letteralmente, composta di mille storie che si intrecciano: dalla vita personale di Stewart ai ricordi e cimeli rimasti in soffitta o in testa a Gary, alla lotta del sindacato dei giocatori per ottenere delle migliori condizioni contrattuali. Si parla dei tempi del retain-and-transfer e del maximum wage. Un sistema che adesso sembra assolutamente improponibile. Si parla della questione dei caps: nonostante Stewart Imlach avesse indossato 4 volte la maglia della nazionale scozzese, non ebbe mai un cap, visto che questi venivano assegnati solo a giocatori che giocavano contro le Home Counties. Il cap fu consegnato postumo a Imlach e a un altro centinaio di giocatori che avevano subito lo stesso scherzo del destino. Imlach indossò anche un altro cap, confezionato da dei suoi tifosi di Nottingham apposta per lui. Come racconta il figlio: "He'd been happy with the copy. Maybe he was right to be, maybe it had more value: a cap crafted out of genuine feeling by people who saw him play and admired him, as opposed to an item squeezed out of an unwilling bureaucracy [...] Either way, the copy is the only he ever wore."

Ecco la sequenza che ho scelto:

Here's forest first cup-winning team from 1897-98, proudly showing off the trophy - before the game.
It's a great story. At the photographer's request, Nottingham Forest and their opponents, Derby County, had each posed with the cup before the game kicked off so that there'd be a suitable picture of the winners whatever the result. Perhaps he had another engagement to get to and couldn't wait until the final whistle. Or perhaps it had more to do with nineteenth-century standards of photographic etiquette. Portraits were formal occasions demanding one's best clothes, so the idea of showing the teams in their post-match disarray might have offended late-Victorian sensibilities. And the story didn't end there. In black and white, the photographer feared that Forest's red shirts wouldn't stand out sufficiently well from the foliage in the background, so he had them borrow Derby's white tops for the picture.
Fabulous. So Nottingham Forest's first great moment of triumph was captured for posterity before the fact and in the colours of the opposition. Somewhere, I presume - unless the wet plate was destroyed at the time for the sake of propriety - is a fading team picture of Derby County posing in proud anticipation with a trophy they never won.