The life and rise of Jews in our game

 
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2 October 2012

From my father I inherited a love of Jewish humour and one of his favourite jokes back in the 1960s was the one — stop me if you’ve heard it — about Goldberg, who makes it big in the East End and moves to the Home Counties, where his greatest wish is to be accepted as one of the jolly old chaps at the golf club.

He knows his name could be a problem because of resistance to Jews in some bastions of traditional Englishness and so changes it to Gooding. His application is duly accepted and he quickly becomes popular at he club.

One day he is out on the course with three regular companions. He smites the ball sweetly at a short hole, watches it soar and land on the green, where it trickles slowly towards the flag and out of sight. A hole in one! Goldberg/Gooding cannot contain his excitement.

“Oy vey!” he roars. Three pairs of admiring but bewildered eyes are suddenly on him. He shrugs and smiles. “Whatever that means.”

Times have changed and last week a leading football commentator, praising David Bernstein, noted that he was the sort of chap who would go down well at your local golf club: and an apt description it was of the epitome of mainstream respectability who serves as chairman of the FA.

Bernstein is the second successive Jewish chairman of the FA, after Lord Triesman and, in an enthralling new book, Anthony Clavane, whose Promised Land was the sports book of 2011 by a mile, points out that Triesman’s rival for the post was another Jew, David Dein.

Although there have been relatively few Jewish players in the English game, the Jewish contribution — as spectators, journalists, footballing intellectuals and administrators — has been massive and, at a time when old wounds have been reopened on another ethnic front, it speaks kinder volumes for our civilisation that Jews are in charge of much of the Premier League without most gentiles noticing. Roman Abramovich owns Chelsea, Daniel Levy runs Spurs for Joe Lewis and the Glazers, while hardly loved by Manchester United fans, are disparaged only for being exploitative or, at times, “American”.

When Avram Grant was manager of Chelsea, a journalist from an Israeli newspaper asked why Chelsea fans had not warmed to him. I replied that it was because he had neither experience of a top league nor an especially magnetic personality, at least in public. She absorbed these reasons and then there was a pause. “Is it not because he is a Jew?” she enquired. She had to be told that such prejudice was a thing of the past except within a tiny few of England’s loonier skulls.

Nor, for that matter, is Dein missed by a good many Arsenal supporters because he is Jewish; rather it is because they think he was an able administrator before his departure in 2007. And because, if they pricked him, he would bleed red with white sleeves.

Triesman is of the other north London persuasion. He tells Clavane that his father, Mick, felt so understandably resentful that he fought long and hard to get into a club —even though he didn’t play the game, let alone aspire to a hole in one. Whatever that means.

Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here? The Story of English Football’s Forgotten Tribe. By Anthony Clavane, Quercus, £17.99.

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