Jonathan Yates - Fractured why our societies are coming apart - and how they can be put together again

HarperNorth

111 Piccadilly

Manchester M1 2HY

A division of

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

HarperCollinsPublishers

1st Floor, Watermarque Building, Ringsend Road

Dublin 4, Ireland

First published by HarperNorth in 2021

FIRST EDITION

Copyright Jon Yates 2021

Cover layout design Alex Kirby 2021

The Dutch national football team with coach Guus Hiddink at Euro 96, Guus Dubbelman/De Beeldunie

Jon Yates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at

www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

Source ISBN: 9780008463960

Ebook Edition June 2021 ISBN: 9780008463977

Version: 2021-04-30

This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

• Change of font size and line height
• Change of background and font colours
• Change of font
• Change justification
• Text to speech
• Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008463960

For Lisa, Chloe, Millie, Bethany, Margaret and Rachel my family who make everything possible, everything worthwhile and put everything in perspective.

Thank you especially to Lisa, who is my rock.

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation.

Mahatma Gandhi

I can remember it vividly: jumping up and down, beer spilling out of my glass, celebrating with strangers. If I close my eyes, I can see the pub unfolding as we walk in. We came early to get a good spot. We chatted, nestling the beer I thought we wouldnt get served, watching the highlights of the previous match over our shoulders. I can feel the nervousness in my stomach before kick-off. Would we score? Could we stop them scoring? Would I get served another beer? I was sixteen: old enough to sneak into a pub and young enough to believe England could win the European Championship. It was all we talked about that summer. When we werent revising for our exams, we dreamt of England winning the trophy.

We werent the only ones. Media interest was intense. England had not hosted a major football tournament for thirty years. The tabloids were making up for lost time. Even the pop charts had surrendered, with the official England song camped at No. 1. Keen to escape the pressure, the England team departed on a pre-tournament tour of the Far East. Away from the media, the players would have a chance to get to know each other on the pitch with a couple of friendly games, and off the pitch with a couple of drinks. Except that it wasnt just a couple of drinks.

Six days before the first game, the front page of the UKs best-read newspaper told the world that the England team had drunk so much before flying home that theyd wrecked the plane. A bill had been sent to the team for damage caused to seats and TV screens. A day later, photos followed. Here were the players: drunk, swaying in a Hong Kong nightclub, their clothes covered in rips. The headline printed above a picture of the teams most famous player, Paul Gascoigne, simply read: DisgraceFOOL. The rest of the media piled in. One paper printed photos of drunken England players next to convicted hooligans and asked its readers to spot which was which.

Englands opponents took a different approach. The Dutch had a superb team and were favourites to win. Theyd reached the semi-finals at the last European Championships, and won the tournament before. That spring, the majority of their players had represented perennial Dutch Champions Ajax in the final of the biggest club competition in Europe. Unlike England, they had world-class players in nearly every position. Unlike England, their team preparations exuded confident professionalism as the photo below suggests. As the match kicked off, my heart hoped for a draw, but my head feared a drubbing.

At this point, Im tempted to encourage you to put down this book, go online now and watch the highlights of the game. I still cant listen to the commentary or watch Englands four goals without the hair standing up on the back of my neck. And what goals! It was a drubbing but England were the ones handing it out. As we cheered every goal, the commentator caught the mood of a nation. It gets better and better, he said. My friends and I left the pub that evening on top of the world.

How had it happened? It would be neat to say that it was down to English talent, ingenuity and guts. But the real story of that night was the Dutch. The explanation starts with that photo. Amid the sophistication, class and good food, is another story altogether one that becomes clear when we spot the difference between the table at the back, on the left, and the other two.

The Dutch national football team with coach Guus Hiddink at Euro 96, Guus Dubbelman/De Beeldunie

The Dutch team was mostly White, with a small group of highly talented Black, Surinamese players. That group Michael Reiziger, Edgar Davids, Patrick Kluivert and Clarence Seedorf felt like members of a different team. Reiziger told the press: The four of us form a separate group. We talk easily with each other, because we think the same way, come from the same culture, and make the same jokes. Before long, the Dutch press had a name for them the Cabal and were reporting that the Cabal were not happy. They felt under-appreciated by a manager who thought they should talk less and listen more; undervalued by an Ajax team that had accidentally revealed that their White teammates were being paid up to six times more than them; and underused by tactics that left them watching more games than they played. Edgar Davids was a superb player, who dominated Ajaxs midfield. Unselected for the first game against Switzerland, he fumed from the bench and watched in amazement as another of the Cabal was substituted off just a third of the way into the match. When the game ended in a draw, Davids exploded. Accosting a delighted Swiss journalist, he declared that the problem was the manager, Gus Hiddink, who was clearly in thrall to the older White players. The only solution was for him to get his head out of players asses so he can see better. That outburst sealed his fate. Hiddink immediately sent Davids home. The Dutch team fell apart. They had fractured well before the game against England.

Why wasnt the English team similarly divided? It was no less diverse, being composed of Black and White players from different clubs on very different wages who just weeks before had been competing passionately against one another. For days since the aeroplane dbcle, theyd faced relentless attacks from the English tabloid press, high on moral indignation; the disapproval of a public readying themselves for disappointment; and even the censure of Parliament, with some MPs demanding players resignations. But their booze-fuelled antics and the constant criticism that followed did not divide the England team. It brought it together. The players refused to identify who had caused the damage on the plane despite it being down almost entirely to mercurial midfielder Paul Gascoigne. Instead, they all paid the bill and asked their spokesman to tell the press that they accepted collective responsibility. Years later, Teddy Sheringham, the scorer of the fourth England goal that night, told a reporter: We had so much stick going into the Euros in 1996. All we did was make it work for us. There were no real divisions among the squad the feeling was that we were one unit.