EPL TALK: Beckham documentary shows what Premier League has lost

FOR years, Thierry Henry didn’t get the Alan Shearer thing. It made no sense. A striker of that calibre lacked the ambitions of an elite centre-forward. Newcastle United were not worthy of such a peerless talent. A hawk among clipped Magpies? What was that about?

In fact, Henry didn’t get the Shearer thing until it was too late. Almost. The Frenchman saw the light in the Emirates darkness, back in 2012, when he rolled the ball past the Leeds goalkeeper and took the roof off. The finish was familiar, but this was his first goal as a fan. An Arsenal supporter had scored the winner in an FA Cup tie. He’d come off the bench, rather than the terraces, but the feeling was the same.

Henry had become one of us. Just another fan.

He’d become Alan Shearer at Newcastle; Robbie Fowler, Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher at Liverpool; John Terry at Chelsea; Matt le Tissier at Southampton and the Class of '92 at Manchester United. He was home.

He admitted as much on the excellent The Rest is Football podcast this week. In his first, illustrious spell at Arsenal, Henry was all about the trophies and the desire to stand alone at the podium, at any cost and to the exclusion of anything as facile as emotional attachment. He was married to his career, not any particular club. But when he returned for a brief loan spell in 2012, he discovered the umbilical cord that connected them all: Shearer, Terry, Gerrard, le Tissier and the Class of '92 at Manchester United.

Especially David Beckham at Manchester United.

His Netflix documentary, currently being devoured in every global territory where cable television, the Internet, the English Premier League and the Spice Girls turned up in the 1990s, is the warmest of red and white security blankets for tourists of their own youth.

Comforting nostalgic boxes are ticked so often throughout the four episodes, it’s a wonder anyone over the age of 40 doesn’t curl up on the sofa with an Oasis soundtrack to enjoy the occasional sucking of one’s thumb. It’s a feel-good curation of a generation’s greatest hits, culturally and sportingly, with the majestic Eric Cantona straddling both.

And still, there are poignant takeaways. Beckham’s brand did surpass his weekly output at Old Trafford, which unfortunately blurs his brilliance among subsequent generations. From 1999 to 2001 or so, he was among the finest passers of his generation, practically inventing his whipped delivery. Bending balls around defenders was nothing new. Trevor Brooking was doing it in the 1970s. But bending balls across such distances, maintaining the elevation, accuracy and pace from one flank to another, defined the Beckham "Hollywood" pass.

Second, the hatred directed his way after his 1998 World Cup red card now sits somewhere between absurd and obscene. The hanging of effigies belonged to a less enlightened time, but the sustained anger does hint at something greater than the sum of its ugliest parts.

Even at the time, it never felt like a coincidence that the worst of the Beckham vitriol came from London, and particularly East London, where the effigy was hanged, where Beckham was from and where he was supposed to be one of their own.

Documentary a paean to local street footballers

It seems silly now, but the notion of a Manchester United-crazy kid, raised by an equally Manchester United-crazy father in Tottenham/West Ham territory, was less common in the 1980s and brings us back to the Alan Shearer thing, which is also less common now.

The most striking aspect of the Beckham documentary was his genuine reluctance to leave the theatre of his boyhood dreams. Real Madrid, AC Milan, Paris Saint-Germain and even the LA Galaxy carnival look like valiant attempts to fill a void. But the hole remains.

Beckham was Manchester United. Just as Gerrard was Liverpool and Terry was Chelsea. Henry became Arsenal, sure, but he had enough tribal leaders to lead the way from the beginning. Tony Adams was Arsenal, along with Martin Keown and Ray Parlour. The devotion to their local cause was absolute and infectious, pulling in the likes of Dennis Bergkamp and Patrick Vieira, an indoctrination process that was repeated amongst the Gunners’ major competitors throughout the Beckham era.

If anything, his documentary is a lovely, filmic paean to the last of the local street footballers, perhaps culminating with a council estate kid who took the baton from Beckham’s generation at United. Wayne Rooney. He went on to represent something that the English game gradually lost, certainly at the top of the pyramid, as part-time scouts on the sides of freezing school pitches gave way to temperature-controlled international academies filled with dieticians, data scientists and multi-lingual translators.

Do not fear. This is not a jingoistic, Brexit-fused tirade lamenting a loss of Englishness and the need to make English football great again. The EPL has never looked better or brighter. Manchester City have seemingly cracked the tactical atom, broke it down to its smallest parts to create something kinetic, hypnotic and seamless, with no niggly bits.

But sometimes, we want the niggly bits, the visceral stuff that titillates and irritates in equal measure. We want Gary Neville to run the length of the pitch to kiss his badge in front of Liverpool’s foaming faces. We want noisy neighbours, flying pizzas and a non-playing John Terry lifting a trophy in his full kit. We want a little of that street anarchy spilling over into a controlled, sanitised, revenue-obsessed environment just to pretend, for a bit, that there’s still a connection between footballer and fan.

We don’t get the dominance of autocratic rulers and American hedge funds talking about the newfound love of “soccer”, or VAR’s quirks and foibles, or players beginning to view the EPL’s traditional titans as some sort of transit lounge before the Middle East comes calling with enough money to keep Beckham in branded underwear for centuries.

But Shearer’s ingrained hatred of Sunderland? We get that. Neville despising Liverpool and Carragher loathing United? Yep, makes sense. Henry fighting back tears as he scored his final goals for Arsenal? Totally. Beckham’s lifelong regret at walking away from Old Trafford? We’re with him all the way. Because in those vulnerable moments, the charismatic face on a thousand billboards is stripped back to reveal you and me. A fan. A street kid who made our fantasies his reality. He played for his club.

And then he lost it. He lost the Alan Shearer thing. But then, so did the EPL. The closest example in recent years might be Harry Kane at Tottenham and he still left for Bayern Munich. That’s not a criticism of a dignified footballer who arguably served Spurs for too long. It’s just a pertinent example of the game’s evolution.

The English Premier League is still a compelling, international spectacle, but it’s sacrificed a little of that gritty, local flavour along the way. The greatest players can still bend it like Beckham. But how many are doing it for their boyhood clubs?

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 28 books.

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