Football With a Twist of Blimey a Big Success
After a weekend that was supposed to highlight the best of soccer, an upstart import was applauded Monday for overshadowing the latest case of fan rowdiness at English sports.
From event organizers to newspaper columnists, American football was hailed as an exciting, family oriented game unsullied by the misbehavior in the crowds that has become an uninvited guest at so many sports events in England in recent years.
The Rams beat the Denver Broncos Sunday night, 28-27, on a four-yard touchdown run by Charles White with 28 seconds left.
The game, a National Football League exhibition, featured five lead changes in the second half and had the near-capacity crowd of 72,000 at Wembley Stadium cheering until the final gun.
By contrast, 11,000 fewer people turned out Saturday at Wembley for an all-star soccer game pitting English League players against an international squad. That game celebrated the 100th birthday of the English Football League, the oldest professional soccer league in the world.
Those on hand for England’s 3-0 victory spent much of their time booing Diego Maradona, the Argentine superstar whose hand-aided goal helped oust England from last summer’s World Cup competition.
“What happened on Saturday turned what should have been one of the greatest days this stadium has seen into one of its blackest,” said Jarvis Astaire, Wembley’s deputy chairman. “What the crowd did to Maradona was a disgrace. It tarnished the whole occasion.
“Fortunately, what happened Sunday night proved that British crowds can behave well.”
The field at Wembley, England’s national stadium, was transformed overnight from a soccer pitch to a regulation NFL field, complete with the league emblem at the 50-yard line and the end zones painted in Denver’s orange and blue and Los Angeles’ blue and yellow.
Many of the 11 daily national newspapers published here also noted that steel crowd-control barriers that were erected for the soccer match were taken down for the football game and, despite the larger audience, were not needed.
“I wouldn’t trade a minute of Maradona for an eon of John Elway,” wrote sports columnist James Lawton in the Daily Express.
“But if the choice is between Millwall and Leeds (soccer clubs whose fans have been involved in repeated fighting) or the Rams and Broncos, and there is a family to entertain without risk of physical danger and exposure to the manners of the gutter, I know the decision.”
Carolyn Scott, Wembley press officer, was quoted by the tabloid Sun as saying at the Ram-Bronco game: “We were lucky that the (soccer) Football League’s centenary match was incident free. . . . But the people who came to this (NFL) match seemed to belong to a different section of society.”
Said Jeff Powell, a columnist for the Daily Mail: “On successive days, English crowds came to abuse the Argentine who is currently the preeminent exponent of the game we gave to the world, then salute the American practitioners of an alien code.”
Sunday’s game was the fourth pro football exhibition played at Wembley in the last five years.
In 1983, the Minnesota Vikings beat the St. Louis Cardinals before fewer than 30,000 curious fans. Two years later, about 20,000 fans watched two teams from the United States Football League.
About that time, Channel 4, one of Britain’s television networks, started televising hour-long highlights of NFL games each Sunday. The shows rapidly became a hit and football, American style, took off, spawning a 90-team semipro league and more than half a dozen weekly and monthly magazines and newspapers.
Last year, more than 80,000 people packed Wembley to watch the Chicago Bears beat the Dallas Cowboys 17-6, in the first NFL-promoted “American Bowl.”
“The big difference between 1983 and tonight is that the people now are very knowledgeable,” said Steve Dils, the Rams’ reserve quarterback who played here in ’83 with the Vikings. “They seemed to enjoy the game and they seemed to cheer at the right time.
“The fans have a greater appreciation of football now.”
