Book reviews

The story of football’s greatest cult team
by Rob Smyth, Lars Eriksen and Mike Gibbons
Bloomsbury,  £12.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 328 June 2014

Buy this book

If you wanted entertaining football from a European national side in the mid-1980s,  the pickings on offer were slim. Spain were a shower of hackers, Germany ruthless but uninspired, Italy suffering a post-1982 hangover, Holland in the doldrums – and England were England. There were only three shows in town: France, the USSR and Denmark.

Michel Hidalgo’s marvellous France team chiselled their names down in history by winning the 1984 European Championship, and the USSR lit up Mexico 86 in tremendous style. The Danes were left with nothing after a pair of traumatic defeats by Spain in Lyon and Querétaro. The memory of the sizzling football remains, though, and this reappraisal of them is long overdue. Despite its tendency to write subsequent Denmark teams out of history, Danish Dynamite, which grew out of a 2009 article on the Guardian‘s website, is largely terrific.

With the exceptions of Frank Arnesen and Jan Molby, all the players are interviewed, as is manager Sepp Piontek, now aged 74 and still full of combative vigour. A ruthless hatchet-man as a player in the Bundesliga,  Piontek brought a dash of cold-water efficiency to Danish football’s free-spirit mentality and coaxed results out of them that would have seemed utterly implausible just five or six years previously. The team was full of offbeat, off-kilter characters: Soren Lerby, so ferociously competitive that Morten Olsen dubbed him Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Preben Elkjaer, the party animal who never drank beer; Ole Qvist,  the goalkeeper who played out of his skin at Euro 84 and then went straight back to his job as a motorcycle police officer in Copenhagen; Ivan Nielsen, the easygoing centre-back who is now a plumber and conducted his interview while sitting on an upturned bucket in his garage.

And the football was never less than blinding. As is mentioned here, Denmark played as if it was always the 85th minute and they were a goal down. Watch one of their games on DVD today – the 5-0 thrashing of Yugoslavia at Euro 84, for example, or the extraordinarily action-packed 4-2 victory over the USSR in Copenhagen a year later – and the footage looks like an animated cartoon on fast-forward, with players flooding into the midfield from all areas of the pitch, joining up with the attack in their droves, and scoring goals from the craziest of angles. The party was too good to last.

Just ten days after dismembering Uruguay at the 1986 World Cup, the Danes exited the competition in shattering, and somehow tragic, fashion when a solid but unexceptional Spain happily picked them off on the counter-attack and beat them 5-1, scarcely credibly. And that’s more or less where the story ends – Euro 88, where Piontek’s ageing team lost all three matches, is barely mentioned, and the subsequent glory of Euro 92 is covered in just a couple of pages. This comes across as laziness and a bad call, but in all other respects Danish Dynamite is a wonderful read and an exhilarating nostalgia trip.

Buy this book

by Steven Kay
1889 Books, £8.99
Reviewed by Paul Brown
From WSC 327 May 2014

Buy this book

Rabbi Howell was the first footballer of Romany origin to play for England. A slight but skilful half-back, he was a star of the excellent Sheffield United team of the 1890s, alongside the better-remembered likes of William “Fatty” Foulke and Ernest “Nudger” Needham. “A Gipsy by birth, [Howell] perhaps owes some of his inexhaustible vitality to his lucky parentage,” wrote Needham of his team-mate. That “inexhaustible vitality” won Howell the nickname the “Evergreen”. But in 1898, despite his talents, and with United on the verge of securing their first League championship, Howell was hurriedly sold to Liverpool for reasons that remain unclear.

The “Wikipedia version” of Rabbi (or Rab) Howell’s story, sourced from club history books, suggests that he was booted out of United after being accused of deliberately throwing a game against championship rivals Sunderland by scoring two own goals. Author Steven Kay has never believed this version of events, and has been unable to find any evidence of match-fixing. He has, however, uncovered suggestions of a very different kind of scandal. Kay’s research forms the basis for a novel, The Evergreen In Red And White, a fictional account of Howell’s pivotal 1897-98 season.

This is football fiction based on fact, much like David Peace’s recent Red Or Dead, albeit with fewer and further-removed sources. Nevertheless, The Evergreen feels suitably authentic, set in an evocatively realised Victorian Sheffield during football’s thriving early years. Kay’s Howell has a quirky sense of humour, extrapolated from contemporary interviews, and a voice coloured with the use of Romany and Sheffield dialects. He rubs embrocation on swollen knees and worries about his waning football career, but it’s his personal life that proves to be his downfall.

The facts, as Kay has found them, are that when Howell moved from Sheffield to Liverpool he left behind a wife and four children – one of them a new-born baby – for another woman. In the novel, Howell meets the “other woman”, Ada, in Sheffield as the city prepares for the Diamond Jubilee visit of Queen Victoria. Torn between Ada and his pregnant wife, his football performances suffer and his season becomes derailed, culminating with the climactic match at Sunderland’s hostile Newcastle Road ground, where a tormented Howell scores those two fateful own goals. “If tha don’t keep things steady in life, it affects thi game,” Needham tells Howell, who is dropped from the team and effectively exiled from his home city.

Despite the defeat at Sunderland, Sheffield United did win the Championship. Howell was a Liverpool player by then. He subsequently played for Preston North End, where his career was ended by a broken leg in 1903. He did apparently find stability in his personal life – he married Ada, and the couple had five children. We may never know the whole truth about Howell and his hurried departure from Sheffield United, but Steven Kay’s novel is so diligently researched and affectionately written that it’s easy to believe the author’s claim in his introduction that it is “as close to the truth as is possible”.

Buy this book

The autobiography of Kevin Kilbane
by Kevin Kilbane
Aurum, £18.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 327 May 2014

Buy this book

Sixteen and a half years on, it seems surreal to recall that when Kevin Kilbane initially broke into the Ireland squad, he was touted as a bright, shining young hope who could give Damien Duff a serious run for his money on the wing. Things didn’t pan out that way, of course. But only one of them appeared in 66 competitive internationals in a row, and it wasn’t Duffer.

That extraordinary stat (in the history of international football, only Billy Wright managed a longer streak) sums up Kilbane’s entire career. Never more than ordinary on a technical level – I once saw him lose possession against Israel at Lansdowne Road by doing an inexplicable 360-degree pirouette while the ball trundled slowly towards him – he built himself a decent and rewarding career through sheer hard work and force of will.

Football memoirs don’t always reflect the subject’s own persona (read Gordon Strachan’s for proof, or rather don’t) but this one does. Killa is a stolid, honest and meticulous read. Generous-spirited, too, in more ways than one: all the proceeds go to a Down’s Syndrome charity. Kilbane is the sort of player who can still remember what he had for breakfast on the morning of a game in Reykjavik in 1997, and who said what to whom after a match against Macedonia aeons ago. Either that or he kept a detailed diary.

His otherwise happy 1980s Preston childhood was darkened by an alcoholic father who “pissed away all his wages”, and whose eventual departure from the family home “made no difference to my life”. Kilbane himself briefly became something of a drunkard in 1994, a pattern which came to an abrupt end when he was caught stealing a car stereo and a police sergeant gave him “the longest bollocking of my life”.

The tone is generally positive and sunny (I lost count of the number of times players or teams were referred to as “great lads”), but there are sporadic glints of anger. Cesc Fàbregas’s reputation for arrogance is added to here as Kilbane relays his obnoxious comments during an Arsenal v Huddersfield cup tie (“This team are shit!”). Later in the book, a Coventry fan screams at Kilbane that he deserves to have a handicapped daughter (Elsie has Down’s Syndrome). Kilbane tells him to fuck off, but is then pressurised by the club into making a public apology. Kilbane offers the fan the chance to hear the apology face to face, secretly hoping in vain that he turns up because “an apology was the last thing I was going to offer him”.

A few more interesting nuggets pop up – David Moyes supposedly finds it near-impossible to relax even on squad getaway breaks; hard man Thomas Gravesen privately cringed at the idea of being tackled hard; and Kilbane claims that Ireland’s players came up with the tactical gameplan for the fateful World Cup play-off in Paris behind Giovanni Trapattoni’s back. In the main, however, Killa mirrors its subject almost exactly, taking few chances and diligently plugging away. It passes a few hours agreeably enough, but that’s all.

Buy this book

by Simon Astaire
Spellbinding Media, £18.99
Reviewed by Adam Powley
From WSC 327 May 2014

Buy this book

Major football biographies have taken a bit of a battering of late, with many publishers offering huge advances on books which failed to sell. Now, doubting commissioning editors are all looking for an “angle”. Sol Campbell’s biography, written by Simon Astaire, fits the bill. The headline grabber is inevitably only a small part of the story, but Campbell’s assertion that he was denied the England captaincy due to the colour of his skin has been a 
publicist’s dream.

It is also a serious accusation and one that has received widespread condemnation. One criticism is that it negates the more serious issues about lingering racism in football. It is also challengeable factually as well as being fodder for those who see Campbell as a whinger. As far as this book goes, it’s another example of Campbell’s lifelong grudge about being neglected.

At its heart, for all the extensive memoir of a hugely successful career, the book is primarily about Campbell’s resentments, and in particular the fractured relationship with his late father. Yet for someone so prone to self analysis, he shows a glaring lack of self awareness. He moans about the England manager Steve McClaren failing to call him but leaves his future wife in the lurch by not answering her calls for three months. And he agonises about his father’s distance while all but ignoring his own record as a parent who has had little or no contact with one 
of his children.

This will chime with the many Tottenham fans who still dislike Campbell for his move to Arsenal. There is some welcome context on the build-up to that event, and the pure logic of the move is evident. But his preening conviction – the other extreme of Campbell’s complex character – simply doesn’t countenance that it might not have been the most 
honourable of decisions.

Emerging from a difficult upbringing, Campbell shouldn’t be admonished for his ambition, but doesn’t appear to appreciate the consequences of his actions. He is now playing down the England captaincy accusation, like letting off a firework then complaining about the bang. In a Newsnight interview with non-football fan Jeremy Paxman, the message was hopelessly muddled – a result of Campbell trying to position himself as the intelligent footballer with something profound to say, but lacking articulacy.

Campbell fares better expressing himself via his biographer. He has interesting perspective on his experience at Lilleshall, while the chapter on life at Arsenal under Arsène Wenger and David Dein is enlightening. But the navel gazing overwhelms. The hitherto publicity-shy Campbell is laid bare as needy, introverted, a maddening mix of single-minded focus and debilitating reserve.

For all that, Astaire does a good job of keeping the narrative on track, while extracting genuine insight into playing at the elite level. The passages on the England v Argentina World Cup games convey the sheer intensity these contests generated. The antics of the Munto snake-oil salesmen who hijacked Notts County – and made a fool out of Campbell – make for a bleakly comic contrast.

This, however, is a biography only in name. It would have been productive, for example, to hear from the mother of Campbell’s first child, or what his 11 siblings have to say, yet, over nearly 300 pages, only three of them are even mentioned by name. “Why don’t people understand I’m just different to most professional footballers?” Sol pleads. He just wants to be loved, it seems – but he is hard work to warm to.

Buy this book

My autobiography
by Uwe Rösler & David Clayton
Trinity Mirror, £16.99
Reviewed by John Van Laer
From WSC 327 May 2014

Buy this book

Uwe Rösler is one of the best-known German footballers to have played in England but is widely regarded in his homeland as nothing more than a journeyman striker. Somewhat injury-prone and sporadically effective at various clubs in Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rösler’s cult status among Manchester City fans remains a mystery to those whose only memory of him is for playing in East Germany’s last-ever international fixture in 1990.

His autobiography is yet to appear in German (although each chapter has a title in his native language) but is certainly not just aimed at diehard City fans. As the title suggests, much of Knocking Down Walls deals with his childhood in East Germany and the opportunities afforded by the collapse of the communist system after 1989. He seems keenly aware of the important role in his personal development played by his years in the East German sporting system. Remarkably, neither of his parents were Communist Party members but that didn’t prevent the young Rösler from being offered a prized place in the academy system at Lokomotive Leipzig, one of the biggest names in East German football. Rigid discipline and pressure to succeed became part of daily life for all trainees, in a world where seniority was defined by the canteen tokens their performance merited rather than financial rewards.

However, Rösler’s temper and unwillingness to accept gradual progression to the first team in Leipzig resulted in his first managerial bust-up and a subsequent transfer to a lower-division team. Such impulsive behaviour became something of a feature of his career, colouring his image in Germany and flaring up most publicly in his outburst at then City manager Alan Ball, who had dropped Rösler from the starting XI for a Manchester derby.

His time in England certainly never featured anything as intimidating as being interviewed by the Stasi (East Germany’s secret police), who threatened to end his footballing career if he refused to become an informant. After this experience, Rösler rarely seems to have been fazed by any negative developments, not even the aggressive tumour in his chest that ended his playing career in Norway and left him with just a five per cent chance of survival.

Since recovering from cancer, his managerial career has described a gradual ascent – first at three clubs in the Norwegian top flight before being given the chance to return to English football at Brentford, a club for which Rösler seemed to have developed a real, and reciprocated, affection. One of the quirks of footballers’ autobiographies is that they often end on phrases such as “hopefully, we can really make things happen over the next few seasons” only for the author to move on shortly after publication. This book is no exception but Rösler’s departure was not acrimonious and his genial personality and professionalism won him many friends during his tenure at Griffin Park.

Indeed, the majority of chapters about his time playing and managing in England and Norway are written with great affection for his adopted homes. While much of his early career was very different to anything experienced by young professionals in England, there are sections of the book that follow a pattern common to many footballing autobiographies: anecdotes about favourite team-mates and unpopular managers, big matches and training ground incidents. However, the historical context and Rösler’s willingness to embrace challenges give Knocking Down Walls something a little different, and it will be interesting to see where his ambition and attitude can take him.

Buy this book