A sharper focus on football life

SOCCER: Peter Robinson has long been regarded as one of the finest football photographers of his generation and Football Days, his collection of classic photographs spanning over 30 years, gives a fair indication as to why he is held in such high esteem. Mary Hannigan finds the other side of football's famous stories in a new collection of photographs.

He began his career in 1967, starting off as a documentary photographer "trying to tell stories with photos", his work "rooted in his love of cinema", as the introduction to his interview explains. He has no interest in "celebratory imagery of sports events" nor in photographs of the "the decisive moment", the fixation with which, he claims, is press photography's weakness.

The enduring image, for example, from the 1994 World Cup final was of Roberto Baggio's despair when he missed the penalty that resulted in Brazil being crowned world champions.

Robinson, though, offers an alternative image to depict the story and mood of that day, a portrait of a doleful Franco Baresi accepting his loser's medal from a stony-faced UEFA president Lennart Johansson, his expression indicating he appreciates Baresi's gloom. A "hostess", holding the tray of silver medals, grins cheesily at the Italian captain, oblivious to his sadness, and in the bottom left corner sits a glistening World Cup, waiting to be collected by the victors, at which Baresi, his eyes fixed on Johansson, cannot bare to glance.

Robinson chooses the Baresi portrait, one of 350 colour and black and white photographs included in the book, as the one that "best sums up his style", one that requires reading, studying and savouring, and not simply "viewing".

He has, though, photographed endless decisive or memorable moments in his time, despite his preference for more oblique imagery, not least that occasion at the 1994 World Cup when the fourth official delayed John Aldridge's arrival on the pitch as a substitute against Mexico - Aldridge's enraged exasperation with officialdom is captured quite wonderfully.

The book is divided in to eight chapters - "Strip", "Home", "Touchline", "Fan", "Pitch", "Away", "Politics" and "Fame" - representing every element of the game and each taking us on the dizzying journey football has taken since Robinson first picked up a camera.

There is a photo of Luther Blissett playing for Watford in 1983, with the sponsor's name on his shirt blacked out because of advertising restrictions on the BBC. Back then, television wrote the rules. By 1996 the kits of the players of Honved and Ferencvaros, pictured in a Hungarian club match, were so plastered in advertising logos they had to fit in some of them on the seats of their shorts. By then, the "commercialisation" of football was a law unto itself - and Robinson's two simple photographs told the story. Who needs words, after all, when you have Robinson's eye?

Peter Robinson: Football Days - Classic Football Photographs by Peter Robinson, Mitchell Beazley 352 pp, €43