ABSTRACT
On 6 August 1967, the Sunday Express published a cartoon by its regular contributor, Giles (Figure 1). It represents a group of visitors at a museum, attending to a uniformed guard who adopts an oratorical stance while expounding on the virtues of one of the many works displayed on the walls of these ornate surroundings. One of the museum visitors, however, has chosen to ignore this official commentary, listening instead to a sports commentary delivered on the small transistor radio he holds to his ear. Billions of these popular cultural artefacts were sold globally during the 1960s, and became a common sight at sports grounds, as owners listened to commentary and results elsewhere. Here it is specifically a football match that captures the museum visitor’s attention far more than the surrounding art, as the radio commentator announces, as articulated in the accompanying caption, ‘Greaves passes to Gilzean, Gilzean to Greaves, Greaves puts the ball across to Mackay, brilliant header by Chalmers …’. The inclusion in the commentary of the names of well-known players – Jimmy Greaves, Alan Gilzean and Dave Mackay of Tottenham Hotspur and Steve Chalmers of Celtic – enables a precise identification of the match being played. On the previous day these two teams had met at Hampden Park in Glasgow in a pre-season friendly; Tottenham appeared as FA Cup victors (having recently beaten Chelsea 2–1) and Celtic as the first British team to bring home the European Cup (having defeated Inter Milan 2–1 in Portugal). 1 This careful staging of a match between the winners of the so-called ‘Cockney Cup Final’ and the ‘Lisbon Lions’ was clearly designed to reflect the current strength of British football, and stand on the shoulders of England’s famous victory in the World Cup the previous summer. 2 It also reflected an increasing media attention devoted to football, not least of all an expansion of television coverage. For example, the BBC’s flagship football programme Match of the Day had first been broadcast just three years earlier in 1964 and live coverage of big games in the FA Cup, the European Cup and the World Cup was increasingly becoming the norm. Football, along with other forms of mass entertainment such as pop music, was changing the face of British culture.
