Jimmy Hill led one of the few football strikes to achieve anything but there’s a walkout I’d back til the bitter end
AMONG the handful of strikes and threatened strikes in this country at the moment, the proposed action by the Wales rugby squad was easily the oddest.
Sports people do not do such a thing. Or do they? Strikes have happened all over the world, one of them in football with the most celebrated success.
Like others, the Welsh quarrel had payment of players at its heart and I can’t help thinking how a blackleg would be distinctly nervous about walking through a picket of threatening scrum muscle.
The late Jimmy Hill, lantern-jawed and persuasively tongued, was far from physically threatening.
It was the power of his language and logic that was to lead England’s players to an immense victory over the men who 63 years ago were determined to keep the maximum wage.
When Hill, a radical thinker all his life, took over as PFA chairman in 1957 he set about fighting the injustice of the £20-a-week maximum (£17 in summer!).
By January 1961, three days before the strike was due to take place, the FA backed down and the cap was taken off wages.
Soon afterwards Hill’s Fulham team-mate Johnny Haynes became the first £100-a-week player. And within three years, the players won a bitter battle and the right to freedom of movement.
It’s a long way to £400,000 a week . . . but we are there now in some cases.
Hill couldn’t see a good campaign without wanting to lead it and soon became Coventry City manager, taking them from the Third Division to the First.
Later he was club chairman and followed that with all sorts of headline appointments in TV.
Other strikes were far less successful. That by referees in Scotland in 2010 was both futile and farcical.
Their main aim was to quieten strong criticism by managers, players and fans. They might as well have tried to capture the Loch Ness Monster.
The refs’ cause did have merit, yes, and today the violence of some comments is frightening, particularly on social media.
What referees too often forget is that they are at the epicentre of a drama and it just is not possible to control let alone silence, all of it, although we must try.
From time to time just about every football authority has planned to do so but managers have a right to be heard on decisions that might well affect careers.
Maybe the then-Celtic manager Neil Lennon should not have poured oil on troubled fires when he commented: “Craig Thomson’s supposed to be one of the best in the country. It doesn’t say a lot for the rest if that’s the case.”
Anyway, the strike went ahead, despite the pleas of Scotland’s main political parties.
The weather acted more decisively, making play impossible in all but four of the scheduled matches, reffed by officials from Israel, Malta and Luxembourg after Polish and Portuguese officials had pulled out because they hadn’t realised why they were required.
Three years ago players and staff at Macclesfield Town and Bolton players and staff staged match-day strikes because they had not been paid for months. Utterly forgivable that.
In Spain, there have been player strikes over distribution of TV income, a guaranteed wage, austerity policy, not being paid at all and one threatened over tax increases — a few of us would back that!
It would take something momentous to cause a full-on strike in the Premier League. Mind you, Dimitri Payet went on a one-man strike when my club West Ham refused to sell him to Marseille.
After a stand-off, it became clear that we couldn’t win that one either. Other clubs have come to similar conclusions. Sometimes, though, I wish VAR would go on strike forever.