The search for a new England manager is filling the papers — and not just the back sections. Meanwhile, Stuart Pearce, affectionately known as ‘Psycho’, has been appointed for just one game, a friendly against Holland on 29 February.
There are perhaps a hundred men in Britain who are truly qualified to assess Psycho’s technical qualifications for the job. But England managers aren’t selected strictly on the basis of their footballing nous. They are also expected to combine a set of qualities that seldom inhabit the same breast.
An England manager is supposed to be an orator of Cicero’s prowess. A public-relations genius on a par with Max Clifford. A monogamous man never even suspected of playing away from home. An atheist or, at a pinch, someone who keeps his mouth shut on religious subjects. A man innocent of any fiscal impropriety, or, barring that, never charged with it, or, barring that, acquitted. Above all, his views on multiculturalism and race can’t diverge one iota from those proclaimed over a glass of Chardonnay in the Georgian terraces of Islington.
If such are the selection criteria, then even his mother would probably agree that old Psycho falls short on most of them. But some of the deficits could be overlooked: we are, after all, talking about one game, a friendly.
Some deficits, yes — all, no. For even such a brief tenure demands simon-pure credentials on the last requirement, one dealing with racial issues. And — oh horror! — it’s in this vital area that Psycho fails on two counts.
First, in 1994 he insulted his England team-mate Paul Ince with the John Terry triple whammy, only replacing the first word with ‘arrogant’. Soon thereafter Pearce apologised, and anyway that incident happened 18 years ago.
Under the 1974 Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, the rehabilitation period is five years for most non-custodial sentences, seven years for prison sentences of up to six months, and 10 years for those of between six and 30 months. After that the ‘previous’ can be ignored.
Now if you’re familiar with today’s length of custodial sentences, you’ll know that the last category covers most multiple burglars. They’re entitled to forgiveness after a mere 10 years, but then their crimes were committed against private property. Why would state officials be overly vindictive towards someone who is in the same business they are, redistribution of wealth? On the contrary, similarity breeds content.
It’s quite a different matter when someone encroaches on the state’s instruments of power, of which political correctness takes pride of place. Here school’s out. Use the word ‘black’ in a pejorative context, and you are blackened for ever. You can break some of the ten commandments, and not just those in the misdemeanor category, and expect compassionate understanding. But say one word that places you outside the state-enforced PC consensus, and you’re a pariah.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not condoning racial abuse. Someone insulting a man for the way he was born commits an offence not just against the victim, but also against the standards of civility and human dignity without which a decent society is impossible. All I’m suggesting is that we put things in perspective and grant the offender the same mercy we proffer to burglars and muggers.
Someone who grew up on a mean council estate, where crime was rife and violence not just the last resort but the first, can’t be realistically expected to have Dr Schweitzer’s alertness to ethnic and racial subtleties. For example, when Pearce managed Nottingham Forest years ago, he delivered a pep talk to his dressing room full of Columbians, Nigerians and Italians, telling them to toughen up because they were all English. So even without the latest revelations, Psycho would probably fail a post-graduate course on diversity.
And it gets worse: Pearce’s elder brother Dennis is a BNP member, and I don’t mean Banque National de Paris. That’s not nice but, speaking as someone who refuses to attend any conservative do at which the BNP is likely to be represented, I still don’t see the relevance of this revelation.
‘My brother’s political views are his own,’ Psycho is quoted in The Times. Quite. But the same paper points out, as proof of Dennis’s (not Stuart’s) racism, that he ‘claims that Islam is incompatible with British culture.’ If that’s all, then ipso facto Dennis is no more racist than I am. He could, for example, be a keen student of Britain’s culture, the constitutional history of the realm, and comparative religion. Anyway, what does it have to do with Stuart taking charge of England for one game?
Looking at the pristine character expected from England managers, I recall the one about a woman buying a chicken. She pulls the wings apart, sniffs under them and says, ‘This chicken smells.’ ‘Madam,’ replies the irate butcher, ‘are you sure you could pass the same test?’