JULIE BURCHILL ON FOOTBALL DEGENERATION - THE SUSPECTS (Part 2)

Of course they became a generation of the walking wounded. A cautionary feature in the Daily Mail in February 2001 screamed DOWNFALL UNITED – ‘They were the David Beckhams of their day. So how did these footballers end up destroyed by alcohol, woman and gambling?’

How indeed?

Alan Hudson, for instance, was a hooded-eye, lush locked young beauty when he joined Chelsea (of course) at 17. ‘Being a player in the Sixties and Seventies was fantastic fun,’ he told the Mail. ‘We were all young, we followed the fashion scene with a vengeance and we were friends with pop stars. Life was far from boring.’ Ominously he adds: ‘There really was nothing better than playing a great game, then going out for drinks and a good meal … we used to go out to all the best bars and clubs, where woman would make a beeline for us. At training the next morning, you could always tell the players who hadn’t been home the night before, because they’d turn up in the same clothes, reeking of alcohol.’

Hilariously, highlighting the unconscious homo-erotica of ‘The Beautiful Game’ (a uniquely effete description; imagine cricket being called by its aficionados ‘The Radiant Play’, or rugby ‘The Gorgeous Ruck’), which would end up with millions of men screaming with hatred at Victoria Beckham that she had the very sought of sex with her husband that they wished he would give them (‘POSH SPICE TAKES IT UP THE ARSE!’), Hudson went on to reflect, ‘There were always women around, although I was more of a man’s man and preferred drinking with my mates.’ ‘I was very easily led and was forever out on drinking binges that sometimes lasted days.’

Interestingly, Hudson claims only to have earned £25 a week, playing for a First Division club in the Seventies; nevertheless, he married a blonde model (like Best), losing her to America in the harsh light of the Eighties (as Best did his Angie). Like Best Hudson played ‘soccer’ in America, which is probably as low as any English player can go, literally; Tony Adams is still a well-respected man after regularly soiling himself, but playing for Seattle would have rendered him completely untouchable. At 49, Hudson lives with his mother, and writing for the Sporting Life means he no longer lives on the breadline as he did for most of the Nineties.

In the same feature, 52-year-old Stan Bowles – three wives and four children later, trumping Hudson’s two-three – was living with his mother, too. It is sad and strange but entirely understandable that these haggard, haunted ex-golden boys end up back with their mums, having stopped still mentally at the age when they were first discovered in all their tousle-haired, scabby kneed glory. By 1983, Bowles was downing a bottle of vodka and eight cigarettes a day, his body not so much his temple as his mangy old lock-up with the windows boarded over and the roof stoved in.

One morning he drank so much that he thought he was having a heart attack and took himself off to hospital for treatment. The doctors took one look at him and put him in a psychiatric ward filled with, in Stan’s words, schizophrenics and manic depressives.’ He stayed there for five days; ‘One man kept calling him his son; another kept telling me he had a train to catch … it was terrifying and made me realise how close I was to self destruction.’

It would be nice to think that one or both of the poor men mentioned also gave up the demon drink after the horrific experience of being incarcerated with a lunatic who kept insisting that he was Stan Bowles.

Malcolm MacDonald – ‘Supermac’, two wives, seven children – has managed to avoid going home to Mother,  despite being forced to retire from football at the tender age of 29. Going to Fulham in 1968, at the age of 18, MacDonald predictably ‘took to the high life like a duck to water … there was a real brashness about the game then,’ he bitches, ‘and a sense of freedom generally. Today’s players may earn vast amounts, but they are owned by marketing machines.’ Back on form, old MacDonald has a boast: ‘I was earning £500 a week and getting mobbed wherever I went. Footballers were the new pop stars and it was all long hair, flares and platform shoes. I did drink and smoke,’ he swaggers, ‘but that wasn’t unusual. Because I was young and fit, I could down pint after pint and not feel the effects the next day.’

So young and fit in fact, that he had to retire at 29 with an arthritic knee! The pain of which, coincidentally, gave him a good excuse to down a bottle of whiskey a day when ‘the painkillers didn’t work’.

Peter Marinello was the prettiest star of all, though; I remember having a moderate crush on him myself when I was ten and he signed to Arsenal in 1970, at the age of 19. Within days, the boy from an Edinburgh prefab was offered a guest appearance on Top of the Pops (a big deal back then), modeling contracts and newspaper columns. Being paid around £1,400 a week, he told the Mail, ‘sustainted a lifestyle of going drinking with my team-mates until 3 a.m.

Yet we always managed to make training – even if we did reek of booze.’ (We’ve been here before, haven’t we?) Bankrupt unemployed and on benefits, still married to his childhood girlfriend, Marinello nevertheless reveals a nature as sweet as his teenage face: ‘Of course I would love to be one of today’s players, earning those vast sums of money. They only have to work a couple of years and they’re set for life, whereas we had to make a 15-year career out of it to do that. I spend a lot of time at home with my wife, who hasn’t been well. I may be relying on benefits, but I’m quite happy these days.’