It is not clear who emerged with greater dignity from the towel controversy at Watford’s ground this week, but for the moment I’m going with the towel. Noticing that the ballboys were drying the ball before returning it to home players, but were not extending this courtesy to the away side, Neil Warnock, the Sheffield United manager, grew exorbitantly aggrieved — something of a pastime for him, but still good value when it happens. “A disgrace,” Warnock called it, adding, “You can’t do things like that in the Premier League.”
At half-time, Warnock raised the matter with the fourth official. But whatever the fourth official is employed to do, apart from hold up the number board and act as a buffer between fighting coaching staff, he evidently has no brief to deal with matters of possible favouritism arising from ballboy towel use. So nothing happened.
Still stewing, Warnock then dumped a towel of his own by the halfway line — more a gesture of protest, one felt, than a delivery to his players of much-needed emergency supplies. (The players, we should note, remained utterly unmoved by the towel war unfolding around them and were possibly oblivious to it, what with having a game of football to play and everything.) This in turn caused Adrian Boothroyd, the Watford manager, to wonder, after the match, whether Warnock needed that extra towel to dry “the new perm he’s got for the Premiership” — a completely unhelpful remark. You don’t want to go towel-drying a perm. You’ll ruin it.
And now only rancour and mystery remain. Were Watford guilty of manipulating the ballboys to hand their players an unfair, dry-ball advantage at throw-ins, reasoning that anything is useful which helps you to gain that extra 1 or 2 per cent? Or, in this case, that extra 0.00017 per cent. Or had United neglected to request the full ballboy moisture removal service? Sometimes you need to ring down to reception in advance to secure an extra facility such as this, or even ask for it at the time of booking to avoid disappointment.
Either way, observers could hardly fail to notice evidence, in this complex saga, of football’s increasing namby-pambyism. After gloves, roll-neck vests and Lycra leg warmers, it was only a matter of time before footballers started wanting to have the ball cleansed of residues before touching it. You never saw the likes of Ian Hutchinson getting his ball polished for him, and he could throw it over the stand on the other side.
In fairness, though, the modern player is working with different equipment. The sleeves of the old, durable cotton jerseys, if pulled down and anchored by the fingers in the palm of the hand, in the received style of ball-drying, long-throw experts since time immemorial, were far more absorbent than today’s synthetic fabrics, which are designed actively to repel surface moisture, making them all but hopeless in a liquid removal situation.
Nevertheless, this week’s incident has done nothing to dampen the anxieties of those who believe we are witnessing a worrying spread in the covert use of ballboys to influence matches at the very highest level. Though it is hard, at this stage, to get anybody, apart from Warnock, to go on the record about this, footballers are slowly coming forward to protest that they are subject to campaigns of intimidation by those seemingly innocent, and frequently extremely cold, small boys in tracksuits.
For instance, several Barclays Premiership players now talk privately of being on the receiving end of hard stares from ballboys at away grounds. “There was this one at [name of leading English stadium withheld]. I could feel his eyes following me round the pitch,” a player recently recalled. “It was really upsetting. And the worst thing about it was, there was no one I could tell.” The player was in no doubt that the ballboy had been “put up to it” by the home team’s coaching staff. “This went all the way to the top, I’m sure of it,” the player said.
This solitary anecdote would seem insubstantial if it could not be coupled with disturbing reports of incidents of ballboys returning the ball with spin. “I put my hands out to take the ball on the bounce,” a top-flight goalkeeper, who wished to remain anonymous, said. “Of course, I wasn’t expecting the spin, was I? It veered off to the left slightly and I took the full weight of it on the end of my ring finger. I wasn’t myself after that for the rest of the game.”
Other players claim to have been adversely affected by ballboys rocking backwards and forwards on their plastic stools in “a really irritating way”. And it is not only away sides that worry. Some players are now concerned that their own ballboys might have been “got at” by the visiting side in the run-up to the match and offered incentives, including chewing gum and KitKat Chunkys, to work as “double ballboys”.
It’s a growing school of thought that when Kanu, then with West Bromwich Albion, clasped a ballboy to himself in the act of celebrating a goal last season, he was actually frisking him for concealed devices. Had he only done it once, no one would have suspected anything. It was the fact that he did the same thing again, in the second half, to a different ballboy, that aroused people’s fears that something systematic might be going on.
Now that Towelgate has blown the lid on underhand ballboy use, perhaps the Football Association, which has thus far, typically, turned a blind eye to this whole area, will finally feel obliged to investigate and act. If Warnock achieves nothing else in his career, at least he will be able to claim credit for that. Something needs to be done. Otherwise, how long will it be before the game is awash with a new breed of wildly emboldened ballboys, not afraid to go nuclear and deploy the ultimate weapon in their armoury — not giving the ball back at all?
Italians stand trial of a different kind
I wonder whether, in the light of recent events, Italy was automatically the best place to stage the long-awaited trial of goalline camera technology that is set to happen this weekend. Obviously, we are all keen to see how a remote system of extra assistance for referees works out in practice. But, given what went on in the Italian game last season, our reading of the results from this experiment is bound to be affected by a few nagging worries, such as whether some of the more powerful clubs might have in some way “got to” the cameras in advance, or have possibly leant on the authorities to install cameras of the clubs’ own choosing. Maybe, in the circumstances, it would have been sensible to pick somewhere more neutral, like Luxembourg or Wales, where no one cares enough about football to want to fix it.
Botham loses it Down Under
“Whoever thought a Mickey Mouse, 14-a-side game and a three-day workout would be sufficient warm-up for the most fiercely contested series in Test cricket needs his head examined.” (Ian Botham, this week.) “It’ll be ferocious, but England will win the Ashes.” (Ian Botham, last week.) Do you want to book Mr Botham in for his head examination, or shall I?
