[untitled: Football Portrait #10]

graphite & putty eraser/30x20cm

Continuing with the drawings processed from photocopies (enlarged & somewhat degraded in image quality) of reproductions of photographic portraits found in a vintage football annual, the portrait subject being one Terry Garbett, then (in 1970) & for some years of Watford, for whom he made the greater number of his total Football League appearances, another player of whom or whose career I have no personal recollection yet amongst those who ‘haunted’ that particular idealised period just prior to the development of my own interest in the game.
Although 1970 was something of an iconic year in terms of football history, featuring as it did the exotic glamour of the sublime Brazilian team triumphing in all its attacking glory at the World Cup held in Mexico, with also that tournament’s classic quarter final between England & West Germany, the England v. Brazil group match, Gordon Bank’s breath-taking save from Pele in that game, etc, still such stalwarts of the structure of domestic football beneath the higher echelons, such as Terry Garbett & the majority of the other players thus far portrayed in this series, & the teams for whom they played, exert their own particular inverse, perverse sense of glamour too, perhaps more so to those of us who have spent our time & passion supporting such lower division clubs, investing the project with yet more ‘redolence’.