WHEN FOOTBALL WAS FOOTBALL

Sefton Samuels is a distinguished, Manchester-based photographer with a long career and many excellent photos under his belt, as you can see on his website. The last two photo exhibitions at the National Football Museum were excellent (see my review of its Pele exhibition in February 2018 below) so I had high hopes of this one - When Football Was Football* - featuring his work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really do the photographer justice.

“When Football Was Football captures a long-ball world of 3pm Saturday kick-offs, Bovril, affordable tickets, packed terraces and sideways northern drizzle……Samuels shot a bygone era that’s a world away from dreaded prawn sandwiches, £100m players and proposals for a superleague.”   So says the Museum in its blurb but that is a bit of a lazy pitch and it comes a bit too close to parody for my taste.

What you actually get is thirty-odd largely undistinguished photos on panels in the entrance area to the museum.  The curatorial effort is minimal and relies mainly on anecdotes and generalities.    To my eye,  what emerges mainly from the exhibition is that football in the 20th century was mainly a working-man’s sport; that players and managers were more accessible then than they are now; and that photographic style has changed the game’s image out of all recognition.

Take this photo, for example.  (I do rather like this one, actually).

  It’s a 1948 image which shows 19 of the 22 players on the pitch plus the referee.  Okay, it’s shot from the crowd, but you just don’t get that style of shot anymore.  It shows a team game, devoid of any real drama and with individual players largely unidentifiable.   In contrast, the modern footballing image, thanks to powerful lenses and digital capture, is a close-up of a dramatic moment featuring no more than one or two players.   The team game has gone and the heroic moment has taken its place.  It’s not the game that’s changed, it’s the portrayal of it. Technology creates truth: now it’s The Beautiful Game, then it was apparently all horizontal drizzle and packed terraces.

Footnote: I just thought that I would pop in the two images below. First is a Sefton Samuels shot of children playing football. I immediately thought it looked just like an L S Lowry painting (as did the photographer, apparently). So I went looking for which one and came up with Lowry’s painting ‘The Cricket Match.’ Am I right or am I right?

* “When Football Was Football”: The Photography of Sefton Samuels continues at the National Football Museum in Manchester until 31 December.