BB FANS

By Giles Smith
Sport on television

IN THE end, you can judge a manager only on results and, in this case, the results speak clearly. Last year on The Match, the Celebrities lost to the Legends 2-1; this year the Celebrities lost 2-0. One cannot sidestep the obvious conclusion: celebrity football is going backwards under Graham Taylor.

One can quibble over team selection until the cows come home — or, as may be, until a podgy Ally McCoist rises at the back stick in the 71st minute to nod home a second goal and kill the game. But far more worrying are the signs that Taylor has lost the dressing-room.

The manager had a week in which to fashion this assortment of former soap actors and Top of the Pops drop-outs into a workable football team and, in his pre-match team talk, Taylor presumably thought he was speaking a language that his players would readily understand when he said: “This is your theatre. This is your stage. This is your audience. All we want is a performance.” But he seemed to be forgetting that a high percentage of his squad hadn’t worked for ages. That’s why they were on The Match.

And what could talk of stages and performances possibly mean to a winner of Big Brother? If Taylor had been looking to awaken the giant in Anthony Hutton, he would have done better to take him aside and offer him a personalised gee-up along the lines of: “This is your couch. This is your sitting room. Now go out there and pick the hard skin off your feet.”

To be fair, Hutton needed no private rhetoric to inspire him. He was stationed out wide on the left side of midfield but, as he amply demonstrated during those long weeks of incarceration in the Big Brother house this summer, he is someone who is more than prepared to drop off, if the situation calls for it, while also being supremely equipped to come inside and hang around hopefully, waiting for something to happen.

Accordingly, Hutton walked away from the wreckage with the consolation prize of a man-of-the-match award — a prize that, if anything, he was a little too consoled by, continuing to beam and wave at his family in the stands during what was obviously the regulation period of post-match head-hanging for the rest of the team. But he is young: he will learn to fake that “too gutted about the result to take any pleasure in my own performance” stuff.

The gravest disappointment, from the Celebrities’ point of view — and the detail that raises the biggest question mark over Taylor’s management — is that these Legends were clearly ripe for the taking. Talk had suggested that this was a leaner and meaner Legends side than the one that almost embarrassed itself last year.

Meaner was right. Peter Reid expressed his admiration for the celebrities by mentioning that he was “hoping to get close enough to kick a couple of them” and his two-footer on Harvey, after just three minutes, was the hardest a member of So Solid Crew has ever been tackled by a non-policeman. Indeed, as temperatures boiled in the first half, it appeared that the celebrities had come through a week’s training simply to earn a once- in-a-lifetime opportunity to get clattered by David Batty, and it was hard to remember that children’s charities were benefiting from the money raised.

So, meaner, definitely. Leaner, though? In as much as many of the Legends appeared to have been preparing for anything, it was to audition for the part of the Fat Controller in a forthcoming Thomas the Tank Engine movie adaptation. Andy Gray, in the commentary box, kept talking up Neville Southall’s brilliance as a goalkeeper, even now — and with reason. There was a reflex save from Hutton that would have flattered Gordon Banks in his prime. At the same time, Southall’s size these days is such that, as soon as the ball enters the six-yard area, he can hardly help but get something to it.