Memories which mean we must give the new Home Internationals a chance

By Steve Anglesey in Laptop with Martin Lipton

Published 11:11 11/01/11

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Timewarp time at Wembley today.

Back to 1984. Not Big Brother - Orwell was a bit premature on that one - but the Miners' Strike, Torvill and Dean and Band Aid.

And the last Home Internationals. Until now.

The official unveiling of the plan to bring the British Home Championships back from the dead does seem to represent a mistake at first glance.

After all, haven't we been told for the past decade by the FA that playing 100mph football against our nearest and dearest is no sort of preparation for major tournaments and that we should instead be taking on the global giants.

Indeed, the scorn that has been directed at the very concept from the Wembley blazer brigade in recent years means the overnight Damascene conversion does not look especially genuine.

Except that a Doha friendly against Brazil did not do Fabio Capello's side that much good in Bloemfontein, did it? You know, when we were battered by Germany.

Even so, the plan to revive the oldest tournament in international football does still seem somewhat odd to happen now.

The last time it was mooted, in the wake of the Euro 2008 debacle, when all four Home Nations found themselves as witnesses rather than participants, it was blown out of the water - despite the support of then-PM Gordon Brown.

Suddenly, all is different, although the FA are at pains to point out that they did not initiate the round of discussions that have been given added impetus by the arrival of Vauxhall as the £40million sponsors of all four teams - with half of the cash going into the FA coffers.

And, of course, the reasons the FA would agree to the project are, almost entirely, financial.

England v Scotland guarantees another 90,000 sell-out at Wembley plus, no doubt, a brand-new TV deal just for the tournament.

Money, money money, as four Swedes could tell you.

All the justifications - that there is unused space in the calendar, that there is a clamour from the fans, that it can bring in the next generation of potential England supporters - are a smokescreen, designed to try to pretend it is not what it actually is.

The fact that 80,000 of that crowd are going to be Scottish is not the issue. Their money is as good as anybody's and the cash cow needs to be milked.

Wembley, otherwise, could prove to be a fatal anchor weighing down on the FA, as new chairman David Bernstein, already Wembley head, knows all too well.

Bernstein must have given his support, even though he does not take over at Wembley until later this month.

Yet there have been so many momentous fixtures in the past that the traditionalists will not be alone in welcoming the plan.

In Scotland, they still talk about the Wembley Wizards of 1928, of "Slim Jim" Baxter playing keepy-up as he ran rings around Sir Alf's world champions in 1967, about Kenny Dalglish putting one through Ray Clemence's legs in 1976, while there must be 500,000 Scots who were not only clambering onto the Wembley crossbar in 1977 but have an authentic piece of the turf in a cupboard somewhere.

They are, unsurprisingly, somewhat less keen to talk about 1961 - "What's the time?" "Nearly 10 past Haffey" - or Stewart Kennedy's 1975 disaster.

But you can bet your next fiver that George Best's improvised - and disallowed - brilliance against Gordon Banks will be replayed plenty of times over the next 24 hours and not only in Belfast; that Welsh memories of Wrexham 1980 will be rekindled.

It always seemed to matter more to the Celtic nations than to England and the fever in Glasgow ahead of the Euro 2000 play-off at Hampden was astonishing to witness - almost as astonishing, in fact, as Scotland's collective failure to notice Paul Scholes popping up on their box twice to extend Kevin Keegan's reign by a further 11 months.

Windsor Park, too, was fantastic when Lawrie Sanchez's Northern Ireland stunned Sven Goran Eriksson's England in a World Cup qualifier in 2005, even if the Millennium Stadium was less frenetic or passionate four days earlier.

For the Irish and Welsh, in particular, this really would mean something big.

Next month's launch of the Carling Nations Cup, with the Republic of Ireland playing the role of England, is a pastiche of the original and the best.

Now, even if it does feel anachronistic, we will get the opportunity to see if it was right to put the old dear to sleep as it celebrated its centenary, or right to bring it out of cold storage.

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