Foul: The Alternative Football Paper

[dem bones]

No self respecting Vault Football Library could possibly show its face in public without mentioning ....

Mike Ticher (ed.) - Foul: Best Of Football's Alternative Paper 1972-1976 (Simon & Schuster, 1987)

Foul logo: Steve Gleadall

Blurb:
For a few glorious years in the 1970's FOUL added its idiosyncratic voice to the debate on what was wrong with British football. Managers, the F.A., the Football League, referees, the press, and of course, the players - the ball-winners and the recipients of the 'Foul of the Month' and 'Clogger of the year' awards - were attacked with verve and venom. As the editor put it, FOUL consisted of "the witty, the brave, the well-informed, the snide, the downright cheap."

Since the last issue in 1976 FOUL has become a legend as one of the few attempts to provide an intelligent and unvarnished account of the British soccer scene. This compilation gives something of its unique flavour but it is not just an exercise in nostalgia - some of the names may be different now, but not much else has changed.

Give or take the Wealdstone F.C. programme, various comics and stuff they force fed us at school, Foul magazine was where the reading experience began for me circa 1974. Foul led to library visits and Hugh Lamb's Victorian Nightmares (first ghost book) and the Pans and on and on and ... Funded by Tim Rice (it was Foul's proud boast that it was the only project he lost money on) and his brother Julian, contributors included Eamon Dunphy, The Doog, Gordon Siege of Trenchers Farm and pre-So It Goes, Factory Records Tony Wilson. I even bought the Foul t-shirt.

Foul. I salute you.

Kevin Macey

[dem bones]

One for Craig, Franklin, Pulphack and Ripper.

Andrew Nickolds & Stan Hey [eds.] - The Foul Book of Football No. 1 (Foul/ New English Library, 1976)

"Six foot two, eyes of blue, Big Jim Holton's after you."

Bill Tidy

The brainchild of Cambridge Undergraduates Steve Tongue and Alan Stewart, Foul: The Alternative Football Paper was launched October 1972 as an antidote to everything they perceived as rotten about the modern game (i.e., virtually everything). It survived - often precariously - for 34 issues, bowing out in October 1976.

Highlights over these two volumes (see above: several articles are repeated in both) include regular two-footed,studs-up assaults on Alf Ramsey's ultra-negative, increasingly brutal England, and then more of the same when his successor, Don 'The Godfather' Revie, perseveres with the same take-no-prisoners approach. The Foul of the month/ season awards. Why Showaddywaddy pulled out of a Southport F.C. fundraiser. "The most miserable club in the [English] League." A pin-up of Manchester United's master of the mistimed tackle Jim “If you can’t get the man, get the ball,” Holton, beaming all over his handsome face, having performed non-consensual surgery on some poor fucker or other: suspensions permitting, Jim was a near ever-present in Tommy Docherty's United as they clogged their way to relegation in 1974. Why Charlton supporters sued their own club for libel. A regular tout-watch column celebrating the business activities of 'Fat' Stan Flashman. On a sobering note, there's Falling Masonry, Alan Stewart's report on January 1971's Ibrox disaster ....

Unfortunately, this first compilation good as sounded the death knell for the magazine when respected Sunday People hack Mike 'The Talk of Sport' Langley threatened to sue over comments in The Foul Press Guide.

As Mike Ticher explains: "Rather than face the potentially massive cost of a court case and withdraw the book indefinitely, the editors decided to fall back on the goodwill of their readers and made the best of a bad job. When the book was recalled they transported all the copies from the warehouse of the New English Library in West London to an empty house in Blackheath, where over 20 volunteers had answered the call and set about snipping the offending paragraph from the book and replacing it with an apology. For a week in the middle of that legendary hot summer, nearly 15, 000 copies of the book had been amended to the distributors [NEL], who by now seemed less than fully committed to the project."

By the time Foul terminated their contract with NEL, they still had 10, 000 unsold copies - half the print run - on their hands. "Tim Rice offered to store the books in his barn, and eventually most of them wound up on the bonfire."