Seven subs for premiership

Published : Aug 23, 2008 00:00 IST

There was a strange belief, which can be found even to this day, that it is hard to play against a 10-man team, because by and large it tends to defend itself deep and with great commitment.

Seven, count them seven substitutes, may now sit on the bench for potential use in the Premier League this season, raising the number allowed by two; and bringing the Premiership into line with various European countries. We are now so used to subs — three of them allowed in the Premier League and most other tournaments — that it’s easily forgotten just how long football contrived to do without them. So far as the World Cup finals were concerned, subs were not permitted until the 1970 tournament in the heat and heights of Mexico; of which more later. True, there were sporadic examples long before of international teams bringing on a sub in a friendly. I seem to remember England doing this in Brussels away back in 1950. But in those now remote days, there was a touch of the old English public school ethos; an odd belief that teams which lost a player through injury could and should rise above it. As indeed they sometimes did. The idea that a team which lost a man, or men, to injury was thus at an unfair disadvantage seemed simply to go by the board.

There was also a strange belief, which can be found even to this day, that it is hard to play against a 10-man team, because by and large it tends to defend itself deep and with great commitment. But when in 1956 at Wembley the Welsh team lost their able ’keeper Jack Kelsey, injured in a collision with Tom Finney, losing 3-1, there was a pithy exchange. Jeff Hall, then the England right-back, observed, “It’s always difficult, playing against 10 men,” to which Ivor Allchurch, Wales’ famous blond inside-left, replied, “Toy playing 10 men against 11; that’s really difficult.”

So there was always what you might call a moral case for allowing an injured player to be substituted, and when subs were at long last allowed, it initially seemed that this would be the logical — and fair — case. But such illusions lasted no time at all, as we saw all too clearly and sometimes even ironically in that 1970 World Cup. Far from simply using subs to replace injured players, coaches and managers deployed them for, in many a case, purely tactical reasons.

In that World Cup, two substitutes were allowed rather than the present three, and it might be said that the West Germany manager Helmut Schoen’s canny use of them gave him unexpected victory over Alf Ramsey’s England; only for the wily Schoen to be hoist with his own petard when it came to the ensuing semifinal game against Italy in Mexico City.

The concept of substitutes never did seem acceptable to Ramsey, for whatever reason. Maybe, consciously or otherwise, being the old school moralist that he was, he felt the practice somehow unfair. At all events, he got things fatally wrong that torrid afternoon in the quarterfinal in Leon, which one watched there with increasing despair.

England in fact begun very well, and scored two excellent goals without a German reply. But the absence of their outstanding goalkeeper Gordon Banks, suffering mysteriously from food poisoning — no other member of the England squad was affected — meant that very shaky Peter Bonetti had to keep goal.

And very poorly, alas, he did. In the second-half, he dived too late on to what seemed a commonplace low cross shot from Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer, and that made it 2-1. It was at this point that Ramsey, inexplicably, decided to substitute Bobby Charlton, at deep lying centre-forward, the fulcrum of the team. The reason later given was that Alf had become overconfident and that he wanted to save Bobby’s legs for the subsequent semifinal. But what this did, however, was to release Beckenbauer from his role of marking Charlton, enabling him to surge into the attack.

Meanwhile it had become increasingly evident that England’s two attacking full-backs, Keith Newton and Terry Cooper, were seriously running out of steam. But Alf, who could with profit have substituted both of them, in fact took off neither of them, with fatal results. By sharp contrast, Schoen, obviously seeing that Terry Cooper at left-back was wilting in the heat, sent on the fresh Jurgen Grabowski at outside-right; and Grabowski simply played havoc with the tiring Cooper. Time and again he went past Cooper, and it was his run and cross which eventually brought West Germany the winning goal, when it was nodded back to the prolific Gerd Muller who promptly lashed it home 3-2.

Now came the semifinal; where Schoen would prove too clever by half. The Germans were doing well against Italy, with Beckenbauer often advancing from his position as libero, in the tactical manner he himself had invented, when, on one of those runs, he was cruelly and cynically chopped down on the edge of the Italian penalty box. Under subsequent rules, the offender might well have been sent off. As it was, he stayed on, the free-kick proved useless, and Beckenbauer was struggling with a severe shoulder injury caused by his fall, his arm pinned to his side in a sling. Schoen, by then, had used both his permitted substitutes and there was nothing left for Franz but gallantly to stay on the field and do what was now his limited best. The Italians, in a welter of goals, went on to win 4-3. Some deluded critics called it a marvellous and memorable game, but I preferred the curt summing up of an Italian journalist: “Basketball!”

In time, there came the reign and role of what was called The Super Sub. None more so that David Fairclough, the red-haired Liverpool flyer, who transformed for his club game after European game when coming on at outside-right as a substitute and turning the match around with his electric dash and pace. Seldom indeed did he actually start a game, but Super Sub was his appropriate nickname.

Sometimes, a manager can wrongly deploy as substitute a player who deserved to start the game; as happened several times last season, when Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger belatedly brought on the fleet Theo Walcott as a sub at outside-right; to see him excel twice against Milan in the European Cup and again at Anfield against Liverpool, with a superb 80-yard run.

In 1965, the Football League permitted just one sub; he was Keith Peacock of Charlton, a left-winger whose son became a star with Newcastle United and is now a TV commentator.

But perhaps the most spectacular substitutions came in Barcelona in the 1999 European Cup final, between Manchester United and Bayern Munich. Bayern were deservedly leading 1-0 and might have been further ahead when, in his desperation, Alex Ferguson, United’s manager, brought on first Teddy Sheringham, then in the 81st minute Ole Gunnar Solksjaer who has just had his testimonial game at Old Trafford. Sheringham equalised, Solksjaer scored the winner at the death. Of his 126 goals for United, 26 came as a sub.

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