Football Choreographer Simon Clifford Talks to 90min About 20 Years of Working on Films Like Bend it Like Beckham

The climatic cup final in There's Only One Jimmy Grimble, Jess Bhamra smashing home a free kick in Bend it Like Beckham and Fergus Suter weaving his way through the Old Etonians in The English Game.

What do these three things have in common? They're all iconic scenes in the footballing film canon and they were also all choreographed by the same man - Simon Clifford.

For the past 20 years, Clifford has acted as coach to the stars, training actors up to the required level of footballing competency for some of the most famous films ever made about the beautiful game.

Keira Knightley, Stephen Graham and Michael Sheen are among those who have benefitted from his advice over the past two decades - but before he crossed paths with those illustrious A-Listers he cut his teeth working with a far less established name.

The year was 1998 and Simon was becoming known across the United Kingdom for his innovative adoption of Brazilian coaching methods for kids. In the summer, he received a call from a small British film studio who wanted his assistance.

"Someone got in touch with me to say they were making a film in Manchester called There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble," Simon told 90min recently.

"The problem was it was getting pulled by the backers Pathé because the kid they’d cast couldn’t play football. They asked me if I could do anything with him. I said: ‘can he move? Can he walk alright? How old is he?’ After all that I said: ‘I can do it.’

"But when I went to the meeting and met Lewis McKenzie, I regretted saying it! He was the worst I’d ever seen in my life - but he’s still my friend to this day."

Once the actor had been given a crash course in the basics of football, Clifford was able move on to choreographing the football scenes for the film - which remains a cult classic.

"We did it in three months and the film got saved," Clifford remembered. "Empire magazine said: 'credit to McKenzie for his proficient performance as he has not doubt been cast due to his unbelievable ball skills'. I couldn't believe it."

A year later, Clifford's services would again be called upon, this time by Gurinder Chadha. Chadra told him she was planning to make a film about women's football but due to budget restraints there was not any money available to hire a coach.

Clifford agreed to do it for free, so long as lead actors Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra were fully committed to his training regime.

"I met Keira and told her that no matter what she was doing acting wise, the film would fall flat if the football doesn’t work. She was doing her GCSEs at the time but was on board and Parminder was on board also."

Like in Jimmy Grimble the cast of Bend It Like Beckham were set strict training regimes with actors even being set homework.

"I put them on a programme that they worked on in the evening as well as during the day," Clifford said.

"When I work on a film, you’re with me in the day for six hours or even eight hours - and then you’ve got more when you go home."

This scrupulous routine once again paid off with the film's football scenes impressing viewers and earning critical acclaim. Clifford recalls one training moment with particular fondness.

"We went to play a team in Germany and I said to Keira and Mindy to just play it as a regular match. If Gurinder says it’s choreography it’s not - we’re just going to take the Germans on! That match is in the film.

"Afterwards I asked the German coach for his top three players and he chose Keira as the second best out of both teams. She'd never even kicked the ball before!"

After his work on Bend it Like Beckham, Clifford acted as a consultant on Kicking and Screaming starring Will Ferrell, before being asked to contribute to The Damned United in 2009 - which retold the story of Brian Clough's ill-fated 44 days in charge of Leeds United.

It was a dream come true for an avid Clough fan who had even converted the Garforth Town clubhouse into a Cloughie museum during his time as owner of the West Yorkshire non-league side.

This was Clifford's most recent involvement in the showbiz world, before being tempted back by an offer to be both choreographer and coach for Netflix's recently released series, The English Game.

Directed by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, it tells the story of football in 1880s, just as it was about to be changed dramatically by the introduction of the Scottish passing game and the rise of working class teams from factory towns.

It was to be Clifford's biggest challenge yet as he conducted months of research in order to accurately represent what football looked like in Victorian times. His job was further complicated by the fact that the teams depicted in the series played wildly disparate styles of football.

The Old Etonians, made up of upper class former public schoolboys, played a variant of Eton field game which was a kind of rugby and football hybrid.

"You get a man on the ball called the bully. He runs forward and the team forms a semicircle around him," Clifford explained.

"The teammates support by knocking away anyone who comes in the bully’s way. If it ricochets to anyone else the semi circle then forms around that player.

"I saw a couple of comments about the English Game with people saying it didn’t look very much like modern football. Well the thing is, back then it wasn't!"

The Old Etonians' adversaries are Darwen and Blackburn, a fictional amalgamation of Blackburn Rovers and Blackburn Olympic - the latter of whom were the first working class side to win the FA Cup in 1883.

These two sides played a Scottish influenced combination game which focussed much more on passing. Clifford explained that this style was conceived north of the border as a response to the physical superiority of upper class sides such as the Old Etonians.

"We looked at the statistics for the England national team and the Scottish. The life expectancy was 20 years more in England than in Scotland," he said.

"England had public schoolboys playing and Scotland had the working class. There was also a difference of about seven or eight inches in size. So the Scottish developed a style for the smaller player that suited them."

Choreographing two completely different styles of football was not the only challenge that Clifford had to contend with while working on The English Game. During filming for the third episode, Edward Holcroft - who plays Etonian captain Arthur Kinnaird - suffered a wrist fracture which delayed filming by several months.

This meant Clifford was not available for the shooting of the final few episodes due to prior commitments, with fellow choreographer Mike Delaney stepping in to add his own flourishes to the sequences. Nevertheless, he looks back on his time on the project with great fondness.

"After we casted the non-speaking members, I got the entire team together and told them that no
one was more important than anybody else," he recalled.

"I said: 'I don’t care who’s the star, we’re all in it together.' Then, I appointed a couple of vice captains from the non-speaking cast and we got to work.

"I used a new method to work individually with all of the English Game cast that I call 'Integer Football'. I use it with all of my players I work with today, both young and professional.

"Kevin Guthrie (who portrayed Blackburn and Darwen star Fergus Suter) was at Celtic as a lad so he didn’t need any training from me! Ed had played a bit with mates and Gerard wasn't too bad, who played Marshall. I couldn’t give all those lads more credit."

His time spent working with the cast reminded Clifford what he loved about working on films, the remarkable team spirit that forms between the crew - not unlike a real football team.

"It was a wonderful time. Like with Bend it Like Beckham it really felt like we were a real team," Clifford beamed.

"The camaraderie is unbelievable. When you speak to the Bend it Like Beckham cast, their happiest memories are always of the football.

"At the end of the film, the cast came up to me and said: 'There’s no way we’re stopping playing football now, it’s part of our life, it’s in our DNA.'

"We had togetherness like you wouldn't believe. That's just the power of football."