Becks and Bobby

I wasn't going to write about football again for a while but a couple of photos in the press caught my eye. One - in the Guardian supplement on Saturday about the Munich crash - is a photo from 1958 of Bobby Charlton playing keepy-uppy with local lads in the back streets of Ashington. The other - the day before, also in the Guardian - is a current photo of David Beckham playing keepy-uppy on a beach in Brazil where he's just launched  a soccer academy.

 At first sight, the two photos are so very different. Becks, the global style icon with bare torso and tattoos. Bobby, the local lad, in collar and tie with a neat crease in his trousers and his cardigan carefully buttoned. Fifty years apart, each photo is perfectly of its time. Together, side by side, they illustrate strikingly the distance travelled by football - and by our society - from the post-war austerity of the Fifties to the global celebrity culture of today.

 But look more closely and the two photos aren't so different after all. In football terms, the two images are almost identical - body balanced, eyes on the ball, right foot flicking the ball into the air - with Becks and Bobby both displaying the same ability on the ball. It's all about skill - whether in the backstreets of Ashington or on the beach in Brazil - and it always has been. Manchester United (the club which connects Becks with Bobby, and the club many football folk will be thinking about this week on the fiftieth anniversary of Munich) have always played with skill - whether for the factory workers from Trafford Park in Matt Busby's day or for a worldwide TV audience with Fergie's current crop of globetrotters.

There is - of course - a parallel with our own rather more modest world of library and information services. The context of our work has changed hugely over time and, as with football, our profession has "gone global" with the emergence of an information society which transcends geagraphic distance and national boundaries - but our core skills and our professionalism remains essentially the same.

So, faced with continuous change during our career lifetimes, let's learn from Becks and Bobby. The society around us will change and we will need to respond to those changes. But the value we add in society remains unchanging, locally, nationally, and globally. So - like Becks and Bobby showing the same footballing skills in two very different societies - let's keep our eyes on the ball, practice our skills, and take pride in our professionalism. Library and information professionals - using our skills to add value in society whether in the backstreets or on the beach...