“One Night in Turin”: resurrected football, resurrected pasts

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1990. Football was as dead as Dillinger in England. Heysel, Hillsborough, Bradford – each appalling tragedy was another stake though the heart of the national game and a pin in the voodoo doll of the working class.

The Conservative party like New Labour today was in its death throes, wounded by the Poll tax riots, recession and bitter infighting that would lead the Iron Lady waving a tearful farewell to Downing Street whilst plucking the daggers out of her back. Thatcher and her poodle Colin Moynihan had a deadly axe to grind with football and by the time the Italia 90 came round they had the Italian government so rattled at the thought of dealing with the “English Disease” they even drafted in their special forces. Who were they expecting-Montgomery and the Eighth Army all over again?

Still, back home yours truly had just left school and was preparing for my first “adult” World Cup. When I say “adult”, I don’t mean some low rent porn version where a moustachioed German midfielder checks your “pipes” in nothing but their socks. No, I mean the first one I ever watched in a boozer.

And that is what “One Night in Turin” does well. The story of the English national team in the 1990 World Cup casts your mind back to those heady days and nights of wish fulfilment, harsh language and some harsher drinking. Would we win the World Cup with a team labelled a bunch of “Donkeys” by the press, or would it be another summer of disappointment?

I was in the no mans land between school and university that all working class lads face. Do I earn quick money now or do I better myself through academic rigour and defer my gratification? The World Cup was a welcome distraction.

You see, I’m still the only person to go to University in my family and not having anyone to discuss it with was a real bastard. Forget talking to your teachers. That sort of touchy feely thing never went on back then. And besides, I had a World Cup to watch. Life-changing situations could wait. Watching “One Night in Turin” brought all those memories flooding back.

Viewing documentaries in the cinema is an alien thing for most of us. They are so entwined with television that no one wastes their time on them when they are on the big screen. Yet when you have that personal involvement with a subject you should always go, because like a Paul Gascoigne pass they become magic as you sit in the dark, away from the ironing and the internet and a million other distractions. In the dark, all you can do is remember and smile.

The narrator is Gary Oldman, forever associated with his greatest ever role as the West Ham hooligan Bex in Alan Clarke’s “The Firm.” Oldman’s narration is dreamlike, spilling over those familiar images and keeping the tension of the tournament on a knife edge despite the well known outcome. Secretly, I wanted him to do it as Bex from beyond the grave, now that would have been something.

Unfortunately as great as this film is for nostalgia and as well made as it is, “One Night in Turin” doesn’t push the football documentary on to the green fields of Elysium for a heroic kick about. For the first few minutes, featuring Waddle stepping up to miss his penalty against Germany the screen was a purple and green haze, a projector fault, but for a fleeting moment I thought this is what the film would look like: “2001” meets “Escape to Victory.”

Sadly, it wasn’t to be, but I can’t help thinking the filmmakers had missed a trick. As “The Happy Mondays” kicked in, I thought we might get part of the little known story of how House music, ecstasy and the M25 rave scene helped to tame the football firms as rivals started cuddling each other in remote aircraft hangers listening to “Voodoo Ray” rather than slicing each other up on the terraces.

All the old images are there though: Gazza crying, Gary Lineker doing his “keep an eye on him” thing, the English hordes attacking the Italian Police with bottles and chairs and that missed penalty.

Poignantly, Nessun dorma soars at the end as Bobby Robson consoles Gascoigne, the star of the tournament, after that hardest of defeats from West Germany by penalties. “Don’t worry” the English manager says, “You’ve got your life ahead of you. This is your first.”

He could have been talking to anyone of us watching that night back home. Football was back from the dead. And I went to university.