<![CDATA[<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/AvtZgZxFGLs" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/AvtZgZxFGLs</a>]]>Jimmy Hill obituary
By Richard Williams, The GuardianFootballer, manager, pundit and campaigner fuelled by vast reserves of energy who fought for abolition of maximum wage for players22 July 1928 - 19 December 2015
Jimmy Hill, who has died aged 87 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, exerted a degree of influence on the modern evolution of football that has been matched by few other individuals. Fans growing up in the 1970s and 80s knew him chiefly as a presenter of BBC’s Match of the Day, on which he showed off his prominent bearded chin and an unfailing readiness to give a sharp-edged opinion. But as a player for Fulham in the 1950s he had made a far more telling contribution to the game when he was instrumental in a successful footballers’ campaign to abolish the maximum wage, which had long kept even the biggest stars of British football under the thumb. It was a profound change that shaped modern professional football.
Hill’s intervention came as chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association in 1961, when he issued a strike threat that finally brought an end to the era of the £20 maximum wage, thus enabling his Fulham team mate Johnny Haynes to open his pay packet and discover that he had become England’s first £100-a-week footballer. Today’s Premier League superstars, some of them taking home £250,000 a week and more, can trace their good fortune back to Hill’s decisive contribution to that necessary struggle.
The range of his involvement in the game made him a unique figure, one who brought an urge to innovate fuelled by vast reserves of energy to each of his roles. A player first, with Brentford and then Fulham, a successful manager at Coventry City, where he later became manager-director, he went on to be appointed Charlton Athletic’s chairman before assuming the same function at Fulham. As a broadcaster he introduced the slow-motion replays and expert panels of former players that continue, in the digital age, to define television’s analytical approach to football.
His various campaigns to increase the game’s entertainment value included a passionate advocacy of awarding three points for a win, rather than two, in order to reduce the scope for pre-arranged stalemates. Statisticians may continue to argue, but all fans know that when this formula was adopted in England in 1981, although not becoming standard around the world until after the 1994 World Cup, it virtually eliminated the stodgy, safety-first attitude that had so damaged football as a spectacle.
Born in Balham, south London, the son of William, a milk and bread delivery man who had served in the first world war, and his wife, Alice (nee Wyatt), Jimmy attended the Henry Thornton grammar school in Clapham (later becoming president of its old boys’ association) and was a fan of Crystal Palace. On leaving school he went to work at the Stock Exchange, but his period of national service, in which he served as a clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps and played football alongside professionals, saw the first stirrings of interest in a different kind of career.
In 1949 he played a few games for Folkestone, a non-league club, and had a trial with Reading. The offer of a first professional contract, however, came from Brentford, then in the second division. He spent two years at Griffin Park, playing 83 league matches and scoring 10 goals with the future England manager Ron Greenwood as a teammate before moving, in 1952, to Fulham, also in the second division, for the respectable fee of £25,000.
He had started his career as a left half, or what would now be called a left-sided midfielder, a position with defensive responsibilities in which his size and strength – he was 6ft and weighed 12-and-a-half stone – were a distinct asset. Gradually he developed into an inside right, working alongside Haynes, who was the inside left and principal creative influence on the side.
Hill played 276 league matches in nine seasons at Craven Cottage, scoring 41 goals. When Fulham reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup in 1958, he scored in every round. The following season, however, when they achieved promotion to the top flight, he failed to get on the scoresheet at all until Good Friday, when he scored a hat-trick – all three with headers, from corners taken by Tosh Chamberlain – as the team came from behind to beat Sheffield Wednesday 6-2.
In 1957 he had succeeded Jimmy Guthrie as chairman of the players’ union, continuing the long fight for an end to the maximum wage. Encouraged by Cliff Lloyd, the union’s secretary and a former Fulham player, he forced the clubs to capitulate in 1961. Two years later another battle would be won when, after George Eastham had protested against Newcastle United’s refusal to allow him to join Arsenal, the clubs lost their quasi-feudal right to hang on to the ownership of players after the expiry of their contracts.
By that time Hill had retired as a player, at the age of 32, to become the manager of Coventry City, then languishing in the old third division. He might have waited another year before hanging up his boots, he later concluded, but spectacular success awaited him in his new role. With the financial support of the club’s chairman, Derrick Robins, he gave the team a new all-blue kit, rechristened them the Sky Blues, introduced pre-match and half-time entertainment, provided free soft drinks and snacks for children, laid on a Sky Blue train to take supporters to away fixtures, and even co-wrote the club song, the Sky Blue Anthem, sung to the tune of the Eton boating song.
The reward for his enterprise came with promotion to the second division in 1964 and thence to the top flight, in 1967, for the first time in the club’s history. Before they could make their debut in the first division, however, Hill resigned. In an abrupt career change, he had decided to move into television, first acting as technical adviser to a BBC series before, in 1968, joining London Weekend Television as head of sport. It was there, two years later, that he assembled a panel of well-known figures to analyse matches from the 1970 World Cup finals in Mexico. The studio disagreements between Derek Dougan, Malcolm Allison, Bob McNab and others became obligatory viewing, and Hill had invented modern sporting punditry.
In 1972 he switched back to the BBC to present Match of the Day, where he encouraged the employment of slow-motion replays, using them not just as a way of looking at highlights, such as goals, but to examine incorrect decisions by match officials. He made more than 600 appearances on the show, becoming a national figure in the process.
As a pundit Hill was never afraid to make criticisms, challenge referees’ decisions or float theories. Lasting enmity north of the border came his way when he dismissed the shot with which David Narey gave Scotland the lead against Brazil in the 1982 World Cup finals as a “toe-poke” (Brazil won 4-1, which hardly salved the wound). And he earned more widespread scorn when, after the entire Romania squad suddenly decided to dye their hair blond during the 1998 World Cup finals, he suggested the move might help them pick each other out when passing the ball. Outside television, in 2004 he defended the former Manchester United manager Ron Atkinson over a racist comment Atkinson had made about the France footballer Marcel Desailly, claiming that “nigger” was merely “the language of the football field” and hardly worse than someone calling him “chinny”.
Hill had returned to Coventry City in 1975, first as managing director and then as chairman. When he delayed the kick-off of a vital relegation battle against Bristol City for 10 minutes at the end of the 1976-77 season, he was accused of taking the decision not out of consideration for fans still trying to get into the ground but because it would allow his players to know the result of the other match affecting relegation, involving Sunderland at Goodison Park. Sunderland lost and were relegated, and a Football League inquiry allowed the result to stand.
An involvement with football in Saudi Arabia had made him money, but much of it – and some of Coventry’s, too – was lost when the club unsuccessfully attempted to extend its commercial interests to soccer in the US, through a franchise arrangement with the Washington Diplomats. In 1981 he made Coventry’s Highfield Road the first all-seater stadium in English football, and in 1982 he attempted to lead a tour of English professional players to South Africa, at the time of the sporting boycott against the apartheid regime. The following year, with Coventry’s fortunes in rapid decline, he was forced to stand down, moving on to become, briefly, chairman of Charlton Athletic.
There was drama of a happier kind after he returned to Fulham as chairman in 1987, staving off the threat of bankruptcy and a merger with Queens Park Rangers before paving the way for a period of success and stability under a new owner, Mohamed Al Fayed. It cemented his place in the hearts of Fulham’s supporters, grateful for his success in saving the club from extinction and preventing their beloved ground from falling into the hands of property developers.
He was appointed OBE for services to football in 1994. Leaving the BBC in 1999, he moved to Sky Sports, where for seven years he presented Jimmy Hill’s Sunday Supplement, a discussion programme on which he was joined by three football reporters. A statue of him was unveiled outside Coventry’s ground in 2011.
Perhaps no incident better sums up Hill’s multifaceted life in football than the one that occurred at Highbury in September 1972, after a linesman, Dennis Drewitt, had left the field with a pulled muscle during the match between Arsenal and Liverpool. Since the match could not be completed without a full complement of qualified officials, an appeal was made over the tannoy. There to answer it, having attended the match as a spectator, was the familiar figure of Hill – suddenly revealed to be a fully qualified referee. Changing into a tracksuit, he ran the line for the remainder of a match between two teams destined to finish first and second at the end of the season. Somehow, nothing could have been less surprising.
In 1950 Hill married Gloria, with whom he had two sons, Duncan and Graham, and a daughter, Alison; in 1962, Heather, with whom he had a son, Jamie, and a daughter, Joanna; and in 1991, Bryony Jarvis. The first two marriages ended in divorce, and he is survived by Bryony and his children.
Jimmy Hill: the punditry trailblazer who wore hostility as a badge of honour
By Martin Kelner, The GuardianWhile Jimmy Hill’s football career recedes into a monochrome era of Woodbines and reinforced toecaps – he was a wing half, which tells you everything you need to know – his later role as a TV football pundit will be more readily recalled.
Hill was the first former professional to do the job, a trailblazer as he was in so many areas of the national game, and more forthright in his views than many of those who followed.
Not that this made him a national treasure. Jimmy wore hostility like a badge of honour. The current presenter of Match of the Day, Gary Lineker, told me about a match at Goodison, where Des Lynam and Alan Hansen were gently barracked, as is traditional, on their way to the TV gantry, but when Jimmy appeared the good-natured banter turned venomous. “Jimmy Hill, you’re a wanker, you’re a wanker” was the refrain. Jimmy turned to his colleagues, beaming. “There you are, that’s fame for you,” he said.
“To Jimmy, it was justification for what he did on TV,” Lineker told me. “He knew football, having had experience of every role in the game; fan, player, coach, chairman, director – he was a qualified referee for goodness sake – but he also knew television, and his view was there was no point in being mealy-mouthed. It wasn’t an act. He was passionate about the game and had strong opinions he believed in expressing. Sometimes, of course, they came from left of field.”
But not from the political left. If your experience of Jimmy on TV dates no further back than his latter days at the BBC – who terminated his contract amid some acrimony at the end of the 1990s – and his Sunday Supplement on Sky from 1999 to 2007, you may view him as a grumpy old man with values distilled in the 19th hole at a suburban golf club, a kind of Peter Alliss-lite.
That is not to say the Supplement was not enjoyable, like pretty well every project of Hill’s in 40 years of television. Admittedly, some of the fun came from Jimmy’s pretence that the Sunday morning paper review was broadcast from his lovely rural home. To foster this illusion, he used to introduce the commercial breaks saying he had to attend to some domestic duty, many of which seemed straight from a Carry On script. “Well, I’m off to peel the turnips now,” he would announce, or: “It’s high time I went and basted my meat.”
But late-period Hill misrepresents the man grievously. From a pretty decent footballing career with Brentford and Fulham, aided by a speed of thought not always present in his team-mates, through his successful campaign, as chairman of the PFA, to topple the feudal regime under which footballers were kept, his innovative management at Coventry City, and his time as head of sport at London Weekend Television from 1968 to 1972, Hill was nothing less than a revolutionary.
The effects of Jimmy’s revolutions in football and broadcasting are still being felt today. Take the panel of four outspoken pundits he introduced to ITV for the World Cup in 1970. Quite apart from its effect on football punditry, it’s a format that thrives more than 40 years later on programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing and X-Factor.
Also at ITV he brought the much-loved Brian Moore, authoritative without being strident, to London Weekend, to commentate and to host On The Ball, a Saturday lunchtime football magazine show way ahead of anything the BBC was doing at the time. “We devised as many innovative ideas as possible to attract a young audience,” Jimmy wrote in his autobiography. “One idea was a penalty competition where kids took spot-kicks against professional goalkeepers,” a tradition that lives on in programmes such as Sky’s Soccer AM.
Under Hill’s stewardship World Of Sport, of blessed memory, was spruced up, too, with the introduction of the ITV Seven, combining the races covered into a handy betting format.
Away from TV, Hill’s innovations as manager of Coventry City in the 1960s – his espousal of all-seat stadiums and proper readable match programmes, and his rewriting of the Eton Boating Song as the Sky Blue Song – have passed into legend in that part of the Midlands (A statue of Hill at the Ricoh Arena was unveiled by the man himself in 2011). What is less well advertised are Jimmy’s “pop and crisps” nights at Highfield Road, when he got his players to stay behind and sign autographs and hand out free snacks to hundreds of young fans – not a million miles away from the “community work” football makes such a fuss of these days.
Decades before fans’ forums, footballers’ Twitter feeds, and radio ’phone-ins, Jimmy was an advocate of interaction with fans, which did not always go as smoothly as Jimmy wished. In his early days on Match of the Day, he introduced a feature in which a supporter got to interview the manager of his club, but was requested not to ask anything too personal or controversial, a plan that was scuppered by the Spurs fan who kicked off his chat with then manager Keith Burkinshaw by asking: “Why, did you sell Pat Jennings to Arsenal? Why?”
Jimmy was what is sometimes described as “a real football man,” but he was a real TV man as well. He is undoubtedly godfather to Gary Neville, until this month making waves as a Sky analyst, as well as Lineker at the BBC.
“My first presenting job was the Euro 96 highlights,” said Gary, “Jimmy was my pundit and he was hugely helpful to me. I was shaking like a leaf, of course, but he was very encouraging. He was totally involved in all aspects of the programme, and gave me lots of advice, some of which was obvious, some not, telling me to slow down, when to listen more, that kind of thing.”
The former Arsenal goalkeeper Bob Wilson is among many broadcasters who pay tribute to Hill in their autobiographies. Wilson praises Hill’s versatility, recalling that when the 1971 Arsenal Double team needed a Cup final song – all teams had one back then – Jimmy altered the lyrics of Rule Britannia to “Good old Arsenal, we’re proud to say that name, While we sing this song, we’ll win the game,” for which, given his massive contribution to football and broadcasting, he should be forgiven.
Martin Kelner is the author of Sit Down and Cheer, a History of Sport on TV, published by Wisden Sports Writing.
