Book reviews

Clough’s champion
by Roy McFarland and Will Price
Sportsbooks, £8.99
Reviewed by Charles Robinson
From WSC 331 September 2014

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Following a home defeat to Reading and a couple of beers, the young Tranmere Rovers defender Roy McFarland goes to bed. A couple of hours later he is woken up by his mum with the news that “there’s two men downstairs to see you, Roy, and one of them is Brian Clough”. The other, of course, is Derby County assistant Peter Taylor. As McFarland enters the kitchen in his striped pyjamas, “looking like a convict”, he finds that Clough has managed to charm Mr and Mrs McFarland, and the deal is already halfway done.

Roy is unconvinced and harbours hopes of playing for his boyhood club, Liverpool, but soon he will win two Championships with his new team, as well as 28 England caps in an international career cut short by injury. This is a player not unaware of his worth, not to mention stoical and unsentimental. Coming from a solidly affluent working-class background, McFarland initially rejects trials at Wolves and Tranmere, throwing away the invitation letters and instead taking up a job as a trainee accountant at a local tobacco company. The reader is left to wonder whether the game was in the young man’s blood from the beginning, but any reflection has to wait as McFarland’s career takes off.

And it really does take off. After signing as a professional with Tranmere on his 18th birthday, within a year he is captain of second-tier Derby, albeit for one initial game. In his second season the Rams are promoted and, already, McFarland can sense the “wind of change” blowing through the club. Soon, he is a Championship winner and England regular. Throughout, McFarland’s affection for Clough and Taylor, but especially the former, is evident, even as Clough descends into alcoholism, a subject that McFarland doesn’t shy away from and relates in the strictly matter-of-fact tone that characterises the whole book.

The event at the heart of McFarland’s story is the resignation of Clough and Taylor in October 1973. His insider view gives a fresh perspective to an incident which still breaks the hearts of Derby supporters and, evidently, McFarland himself. As the news filters through, he admits that his emotions were “all over the place”, thinking it “the end”, only two days before England’s 1-1 draw with Poland that meant they failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup. However, he simply resolves to get on with the job under new manager Dave Mackay, and soon after wins another Championship and more England caps.

The final chapters detail McFarland’s rather unspectacular managerial career, the highlights being a play-off final with Derby in 1994 and promotion with Burton Albion in 2009, having taken over from a Derby-bound Nigel Clough. As well as the short paragraphs and tales of dressing room “banter” that pockmark such autobiographies, the cliches and constant footballer-speak do grate. Like many of the matches detailed here, even McFarland’s wedding is “a great success”, and wife Lin puts in “a monumental shift” while giving birth to their first child. Nonetheless, the fascinating story of McFarland’s rise largely alongside Clough and Taylor is enough to see Derby fans and Cloughie completists through to the end.

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The teams that shaped our obsession
edited by Rob Macdonald and Adam Bushby
Ockley Books, £11.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 331 September 2014

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My Favourite Year, the 1993 anthology co-published by WSC and edited by Nick Hornby, celebrated like never before the obscure, personal details of how supporters become smitten. Superficially Falling for Football seems little more than an equivalent for the Twitter generation, those for whom Chris Waddle and inflatable bananas represent earliest memories. The bloggers deserve a wider audience, though, and talented writers and editors such as Rob Langham (The Two Unfortunates) and Ian King (Twohundredpercent) have forced complacent broadsheets to up their game.

A great strength of this new volume is its broader scope in both the teams and the backgrounds of their fans. It is a delight to witness Ash Hashim falling for Spain in 2002 – reassured about their World Cup prospects by her Welsh grandfather, while her Arabic mother cheers for South Korea – and then share in Glen Wilson’s memories of Rossington FC, the pit village club where his dad was manager, groundsman, secretary, coach, programme editor and substitute.

It’s intriguing, too, how the two distinct approaches to English fandom articulated here seem to analogise with social class. Broadly speaking it’s the working-class fan who adopts their parents’ club, while the neophyte who selects from a field is often freed up to do so by their roots in a white-collar family where no one likes football. The latter is embodied here by Alex Douglas – a Red unconnected to Manchester, who arrived with United via Sheffield Wednesday and Paris Saint-Germain – and his unintentionally hilarious question “Whom would I support?” Readers must decide for themselves whether it’s the sense of choice and entitlement or the painfully correct pronoun declension that makes this towering middle-class quandary such a hoot.

The quality of writing is variable, too, but the more capable authors find ways to avoid cliche. Daniel Grey pitches a curveball by focusing on the famous but fictitious Barnstoneworth United of Ripping Yarns infamy. We can assume that Stefano Gulizia’s academic treatise on Juventus and the naming of colours is a sort of intellectual joke (it quotes Jacques Derrida), but it contrives to enrich the volume while being entirely unreadable.

In the hands of the weaker writers, the short, blogpost-style chapters can become formulaic, sometimes wearyingly so. But there’s an authenticity about the ungainly prose here which some will find more satisfying than the slicker stuff, and older readers will be reassured to find resilience and continuity in the symbolic power of Bovril. Falling For Football finds new angles on football’s oldest story, and the good outweighs the bad. You’ll probably know someone who’s experienced a football epiphany during this year’s World Cup. Buy them this and they’ll know they’re not alone

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Rangers, Britain & Scottish independence
edited by Alan Bisset and Alasdair McKillop
Luath Press, £8.99
Reviewed by Gordon Cairns
From WSC 331 September 2014

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The editors of Born Under A Union Flag have taken on an ambitious task: to quantify Rangers fans’ relationship not only with Scotland but the United Kingdom as a whole. A difficult terrain to map, as historically the club has been considered the team of a union that may be dissolving. That Rangers are in this position as a Unionist team in a country falling out of love with the UK is due to a particular set of circumstances which occurred at the turn of the last century, when a challenger was sought for a successful team of immigrants. The fanbase of this new champion just happened to be drawn from the Catholic-free zone of the Govan shipyards.

As Scotland has moved from being strongly identified with Britain, the position of Rangers has shifted too, from the establishment team to that of outsiders, while ironically it is the “rebel” club Celtic who have had one of the UK’s most right-wing home secretaries of recent memory, John Reid, on their board. The 14 authors, representing both opinions on the issue of Scottish independence and all bar one fans of the club, examine Rangers’ place in the UK with varying degrees of success, using a mixture of personal experience and historical perspective, with the latter the more persuasive to this non-Old Firm fan.

Historian Graham Walker convincingly charts the shift from Rangers as the establishment team to “becoming at odds with the country as a whole”, and casts light on how the support evolved to deal with this change, illustrated through the recasting of God Save the Queen as a subversive anthem. The song gained popularity in the 1980s as the club fell out of favour with mainstream opinion. Although the purpose is to wind up the anti-monarchy opposition, and I must admit it has this effect on me, Walker describes a rendition of the national anthem to illustrate his argument that many fellow fans are more concerned with showing their loyalty than supporting the team. Rangers’ last game in Europe was a must win against NK Maribor in 2011; as the team pushed for the decisive goal in the last few minutes, the crowd began to chorus the dirge-like anthem rather than the Ibrox roar, destroying the momentum on the pitch while creating an atmosphere of resignation and defeat, and so the team failed to progress.

While calling for a constitution to be created for the club, editor Alasdair McKillop looks to Barcelona as a model. He argues that “Celtic have a morally infused narrative that is entwined with the socio-economic progress of the community”, backing up their claims to be “more than a club”. In my opinion, as Rangers’ estrangement from Scottish society grows and their fans continue to utilise British symbolism and song, they could mirror Barcelona’s “other” club, Espanyol (ie “the Spanish”), and become the quintessentially British club, or that of the outsiders – especially if Scotland breaks from the union.

“Better Together” or “Yes” campaigning pollsters will be sorely disappointed if they read this book hoping to get an insight into how this considerable section of Scottish society might vote on September 18. However what it does do is take the temperature of Rangers fans at an important juncture of Scottish history.

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by Andrea Pirlo with Alessandro Alciato
BackPage Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 329 July 2014

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Reading this autobiography of a playmaker nicknamed “Mozart” is like going to the opera: some bloke comes on and sings very loudly in Italian at you for a couple of hours, it’s all very dramatic and enjoyable, but you don’t always know quite what’s going on. In no discernible order, its voluble and intelligent subject, who “has an opinion about everything and I’m not ashamed to express it”, launches into an erratic, extended and idiosyncratic monologue. There are even (mostly much needed) footnotes to explain some of the passing references, although glossing ultras as “the self-styled, most passionate, vocal and committed supporters” was probably unnecessary.

Many of Andrea Pirlo’s lines do sound as if they could have come from, say, Don Giovanni. When his ten years with AC Milan end with the gift of a pen (how many domestic footballers are presented with something to write with when shown the door?) he declares: “Still, I raised a smile because I know how to laugh, long and loud.” (Cue ear-splitting Rabelaisian guffaws.) Various club presidents and managers memorably strut the stage. Marcello Lippi theatrically denounces the Italian dressing room: “Bunch of bastards, bunch of spies”; Antonio Conte hurls water bottles at Juve bellowing: “It’s time we stopped being crap.”

The reader is never in doubt that the text was originally in Italian, making it refreshingly different from the prosaic platitudes of the standard British footballer’s life. True, the highly charged style occasionally strays into Swiss Toni territory: “When you’re in love, it’s time you need. When the feeling’s gone, having an excuse can help.” Again, no British footballer could ever get away with statements such as Pirlo’s lament after Alex Ferguson “unleashes” the ferocious Park Ji-Sung to shadow the Italian midfielder in a Champions League tie: “He’s essentially a man without blemish, but he ruined that purity just for a moment… a fleeting shabbiness came over the legend that night.”

However, usually the purple prose fits the subject matter perfectly. Pirlo’s visceral reaction to losing the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul will delight not only Liverpool supporters. Not for him the mealy mouthed “gutted”. After this “mass suicide where we all jumped off the Bosphorus Bridge… I no longer felt like a player… But even worse, I no longer felt like a man.” Walking up to take the first penalty in the 2006 World Cup final shootout is “barely 50 metres. But it’s a truly terrible journey, right through the heart of your fear.”

Certain footballers’ preoccupations transcend nationalities. Pirlo’s favourite pursuits, we learn, at some length, are mickey-taking, PlayStation (“after the wheel, the best invention of all time”) and wine, albeit from his father’s vineyards. With a grand flourish he turns down €40 million (£32m) to join Qatar’s Al-Sadd, preferring instead one last bow for his country in the 2014 World Cup. As he says earlier: “Take someone like Antonio Cassano. He says he’s slept with 700 women in his time, but he doesn’t get picked for Italy any more. Deep down, can he really be happy?”

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by James Ruppert
Foresight Publications, £9.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 329 July 2014

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In 1970 the Ford Motor Company loaned every member of the England World Cup squad a car ahead of the forthcoming Mexico World Cup. With the exception of Jack Charlton – who requested a Ford Zodiac because he needed a bigger boot for his fishing tackle – they each received a Cortina 1600E. This is the story of how motoring journalist James Ruppert sets out to track down the 24 original “World Cup Cortinas”.

Except it isn’t. That element takes up a single chapter. The rest of the book involves something far more remarkable: someone who confesses to knowing very little about football writing quite a long book about football. Alarm bells begin to ring as early as the contents page (“it’s end-to-end stuff!”) while by the introduction the author appears to be having a full-blown crisis of confidence, admitting: “If you like football, there isn’t nearly enough detail, informed comment, or analysis about the game. If you like cars, well there is far too much football not nearly enough nitty gritty about camshafts… I’m not sure who will enjoy it really.”

The problem is that while Ruppert’s quest is a perfectly good idea for an article or photo essay there is nowhere near enough material for a book. His solution is a 200-page digression – a “social history” of football viewed through the cars that players drive. His conclusion? As footballers became better paid they could afford more expensive cars.

This might not be such an issue if the book was engagingly written but the prose is pitched awkwardly between lads’-mag insouciance and the nostalgic banality of a Saint & Greavsie annual. So while readers will be unsurprised to discover that George Best had “brooding good looks” but was “deeply flawed”, some bits simply make no sense at all. “Mark Hughes was a great leader on the pitch and he certainly needed a commanding one off it, hence the Range Rover Vogue SE.” Eh? At one point he questions the reliability of a source because they spell Nobby Stiles’s name incorrectly. In a book that introduces us to “Cristano Renaldo” that takes a certain amount of nerve.

Occasionally the author moves disastrously into the world of opinion. So we learn that “if fate had not intervened it is more than likely that Duncan Edwards would have been part of an England victory in the 1962 World Cup, led them to the title again in 1966 and made it a hat-trick in 1970”. Even this starts to sound like a trenchant insight compared to his baffling description of the “supremely talented” Jody Morris.

As if to reinforce the lightweight nature of the concept, Ruppert manages to sell it to The One Show as a five-minute TV feature. In the big finale, Franny Lee is reunited with his restored car in front of an expectant camera crew, before spoiling things by admitting that it was actually his wife who drove the Cortina because he had a Jag. It’s a fitting end to a book that is fatally underpowered from start to finish.

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