‘Football Days’ Is a Photographic Feast

A couple of packages came tumbling down the chimney last week.

The first was a highly prized, long-sought-after, much-desired, not-exactly-inexpensive digital camera. Brilliant.

The second provided reasons aplenty to throw the camera immediately into the wastebasket. I mean, why bother?

Peter Robinson’s book, “Football Days,” shows in hundreds of ways across 352 captivating pages just why it’s not the bells and whistles on a camera that make a picture. It’s the mind’s eye behind all those technological gizmos.

The mind’s eye, yes, but also the heart. There is love behind these images, love not only of the sport being played, but of the people who play it and, even more so, of those who follow it.

“It only took me 38 years,” Robinson said of the work that went into producing what on the surface is a photographic time capsule of the last four decades of international soccer but what, in reality, is far, far more.

Ever since earning his degree from England’s Royal College of Art in 1965, Robinson has been traveling the globe in search of the human side of the game.

It is fitting, therefore, that another globetrotter, Michael Palin, provided the foreword to the book. The former Pythonite is, it turns out, an avid fan.

“This curious quality which elevates football from being simply a game in which a round object is kicked about by 22 people to something which allows us to rise above the everyday, to become giants through our heroes, is what this book is all about,” Palin wrote.

“And it’s all done with images. Images as eloquent as any words.”

Robinson’s choice of cover is superlative. The black-and-white photograph of balding Bobby Charlton, about to take a corner kick for Manchester United circa 1970, sums up in one picture Robinson’s approach to photography.

Charlton is the subject -- long before he became Sir Bobby, long before he sat in the stands at Old Trafford, wearing a Russian fur hat and watching Ruud Van Nistelrooy earning more in one game for United than he earned in a season -- but it’s not Charlton the viewer sees.

Instead, the eye wanders over the scores of animated faces in the background, the fans ranging from hero-worshipping schoolboys to white-haired old men.

Wrote Palin: “You could be looking at the crowd in a Renaissance painting, watching water being turned into wine or dead men brought back to life. There is the same rich collection of faces and expressions, the same foreshortened perspective, the same intensity of expectation.

“There’s no doubt about it, there are elements of religious experience here; the focusing of collective psychic energy around one man whose kick might, at least for an hour or two, change lives.”

Intensity, yes, and subtle humor too.

The timing of the photograph is exquisite. Taken from ground level, there is Charlton on the right, preparing to kick; there is the corner flag; there is the old leather ball; and there, on the left, is another “Bobby,” the uniformed English policeman plodding along the endline, keeping his eye on the fans, balancing the image perfectly.

Unfortunately, the policeman has been cropped from the cover shot, but the entire image is inside the book, reason enough to open it and enjoy the photographic feast that awaits.

Some of the images are shocking -- the dead Juventus fans at Heysel Stadium in Brussels in 1985 -- and some are joyful -- Rivaldo and Ronaldo after Brazil’s World Cup victory in Yokohama in 2002.

Some of the images are peaceful -- the old shepherd looking over his flock of sheep and goats in Cyprus while the saucer-shaped rim of a soccer stadium makes up part of the horizon -- and some are angry -- English fans making obscene gestures at Diego Maradona after the Argentine star’s memorable second goal against England in Mexico City in the 1986 World Cup.

Robinson’s soccer travels have taken him to more than 100 countries, and “Football Days” does not ignore the United States. There is, for instance, the shot of the two burly Massachusetts policemen, whose beefy arms frame an Italian player as he takes a corner kick at Foxboro Stadium during the 1994 World Cup.

There is equally burly U.S. goalkeeper David Vanole, shot from behind, waving a small Stars and Stripes flag and with the word “Ciao” inked onto his goalkeeper’s glove. It was taken in Florence, Italy, during the 1990 World Cup.

Then there is Johan Cruyff, running a gauntlet of cheerleaders at RFK Stadium in 1980 in his days with the Washington Diplomats. And Pele, in that same year, making a similar entrance to Giants Stadium, with a Cosmos-uniformed Bugs Bunny trudging along behind.

The focus on cheerleaders and cartoon characters is a subtle dig of sorts, a suggestion that, in those days at least, show business was more important to American soccer promoters than the sport itself. Things haven’t changed all that much.

To turn the pages of “Football Days” is to relive the memory of matches gone by, moments from half a lifetime of following the world’s game.

They’re all in here, not only Charlton, Cruyff, Pele and Maradona, but also Franz Beckenbauer, George Best and Franco Baresi; Denis Law, Eric Cantona and Juergen Klinsman, and all the rest of the wonderful cast of characters whose antics and achievements have enlivened the sport over the last four decades.

Players, yes, but also coaches and administrators and, best of all, fans.

And a puzzle or two.

In a question-and-answer format with interviewer Nigel Atherton at the beginning of the book, Robinson talked about the enigmatic nature of many of his photographs.

“I suppose I am asking the reader not to read the pictures one by one, but to take the book as a whole,” he said. “Many of these pictures are puzzling or paradoxical.

“This frankly is my intention. I’m asking the reader to work a bit and speculate what might be going on overall.”

He repeats the idea a while later.

“The intention of each photograph is quite different. Sometimes it’s purely a document -- in other words, cold, informative and objective -- at other times a puzzle.

“But generally it’s a form of intensive looking that speculates on what football might really be all about.”

Hours can pleasurably be spent in that pursuit but in the end the conclusion is inescapable: Robinson has succeeded brilliantly in capturing the humanity of the world’s game.