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SOCCER TEAM SPIRIT

'Surely', somebody will say, 'we know all about team play and the team spirit.'

Do we all really understand it, however? I doubt it. And because I doubt it, I make no apology for my choice of the starting place. At first and at last - plus all the time between -football is a team game.

When people get stuck for an explanation of the success of this or that football team, they very often pick their feet out of the mud by saying that the side plays as a team: that it has the team spirit. But when the question is asked as to what is meant by the team spirit, there is a certain amount of fumbling with the answer.

I know what is so often meant by the use of the words team spirit. Every member of the side doing his best for the side from the first kick to the last: never letting up: never holding back one ounce of energy.

It is quite unnecessary, however, to go to a first-class match, played by the most energetic stars, to see the team spirit, if that is all it means. Take a trip with me to any spare piece of ground between Land's End and John o'Groat's, where a lot of lads are playing at football. There the team spirit, in its crude sense, will be most plainly in evidence. Those lads, full of enthusiasm, are racing all over the place; where the ball goes there you will see them - in twos or threes. They are after that ball.

Moreover it is true to a certain extent that they have the right idea. Some years back I happened to be present when the late Herbert Chapman, still referred to by knowing people as the best manager the game has ever known, was having his first talk with a young player whom he had just signed on.

'What is the first thing you do?' the manager asked.

The boy knew what to do all right. He had football in his boots. So, full of confidence, he started on what would have been a long explanation of what he would do: beginning with an explanation of how he would beat his nearest opponent. That would-be long speech, however, was suddenly cut short. 'But you haven't got the ball yet,' said the famous manager. 'That is the first thing to do - get the ball.'

Yes, the footballer has to get the ball before he can do anything with it. It may well be that amid the strain and stress of even a first-class match, the ebb and flow, some players will have to go out of their way to get that ball, just as those lads on that stray piece of ground, or in the back street chasing maybe a bundle of rags, go after it.

When a team has every player trying as hard as he possibly can, we say of that side - it has the team spirit. In passing, may I mention here the thing which always annoyed me most when I read the newspapers - not at all a bad thing to do, by the way - to see what the critics thought about how I had played in any particular game. It was the use by any critic of the words: 'Hulme tried his best.'

Talk about damning with faint praise! I wanted to kick that critic a little bit harder than I had kicked the ball throughout the match. There's no place in any football team for the fellow who doesn't try his best all the time. But if behind the use 01 the words 'he did his best' is the idea that consequently everything is forgiven, then it's all wrong to use them.

The world's biggest duffer can try, but the team spirit - the real team spirit - goes much deeper than that. The team spirit calls for every man doing his job, and is quite likely to call for him doing it — in the interests of the team - in a way he is not particularly keen about.