Book reviews

My story
by Alan Buckley with Paul Thundercliffe
Matador, £18.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 325 March 2014

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Alan Buckley sits just above Matt Busby in the League Managers Association’s Hall of Fame. Admittedly the list is organised alphabetically (it recognises the 18 managers who have taken charge of over 1,000 games in England) but Buckley’s story is certainly worthy of closer examination. Not simply because of his record – he took Third Division Walsall to a League Cup semi-final against Liverpool and achieved back-to-back promotions at Grimsby – but the manner in which his teams played. Buckley was a sort of anti-John Beck, achieving success at unfashionable clubs on shoestring budgets by playing an unusually attractive brand of passing football.

From his early days as an apprentice at Nottingham Forest it is clear that Buckley has one eye on his long-term future and he recounts the bafflement of Forest’s coaching staff when, at the age of 16, he casually announces that he has enrolled on an FA coaching course.Unable to establish himself at the City Ground, Buckley made his name as a prolific lower-league striker at Walsall, scoring over 20 goals in five consecutive seasons and earning a move to the First Division with Birmingham City in 1978. Persuaded to return to Fellows Park the following year, he became player-manager aged just 28, embarking on a 30-year career in management that included successful spells at Walsall and Grimsby as well as unhappier times at West Brom (his one shot at managing a “big” club), Lincoln and Rochdale.

Buckley is, by his own admission, an awkward character. Spiky, quick to anger and with little interest in what he dismisses as “the PR side of football” he spends a fair bit of time here recalling his bad behaviour and then apologising to those who were on the receiving end.

Many of the book’s best moments involve the late Walsall chairman Ken Wheldon. A scrap metal dealer by trade, Wheldon has a mysterious padlocked phone in his office and is described as looking “exactly like Poirot”, something confirmed by the inclusion of a photograph of him standing next to a man dressed as Elton John. The fact that, on closer inspection, it actually is Elton John reminds you what a reassuringly strange place football was in the 1980s. When Dave Mackay is linked with the Walsall job, Buckley demands to know whether there is any truth in the rumour. Wheldon spends half an hour rubbishing the stories and, suitably reassured, Buckley leaves his office – only to pass Mackay sitting in reception.

Buckley’s time at Grimsby is more successful on the pitch but not as entertaining off it and the closing chapters are the most personal; his career enters a flat spin and he writes eloquently about the turmoil of being unable to turn around a failing team. For his longevity Buckley deserves his place in managerial history. But it’s his dogged commitment to playing “the right way” that marks him out as one of the game’s more intriguing characters.

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by Stephen O’Donnell
Ringwood, £9.99
Reviewed by Mark Poole
From WSC 325 March 2014

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Football fiction generally has a bad reputation, which makes Paradise Road a moderately pleasant surprise. It’s competently written, with likeable characters and an enjoyable plot. It’s told from a range of perspectives but the loose storyline concentrates on Kevin McGarry, a Celtic fan dealing with the premature end of his own playing career and consequently seeking fulfilment following his team, socialising with his friends and family and working as a joiner for the council. The story provides an experience of life in the thick of the Celtic v Rangers rivalry, takes an occasional detour from Scotland to Prague and includes enjoyable chapters where McGarry fantasises about the details of his football career that got away.

It’s set in the late 1990s, when Celtic were fielding popular, relatively talented players, from John Collins to Jorge Cadete. The team were playing well but still, somehow, losing almost every major trophy to Rangers. It’s fertile ground for Celtic nostalgia, safe in the retrospective knowledge that the good times would soon be back.

The story is told with sharp humour that can make a fan throwing his beer can at an obnoxious policeman’s innocent horse seem funny while the interaction between the central character and his friends and family is engaging. As always with football fiction, there is a difficult balance to strike between telling a story and pontificating about issues affecting the game. Once or twice Paradise Road feels close to a lecture on subjects that will perhaps be too familiar to most of its readers. No matter how much you agree that Celtic and Rangers are not simply two sides of the same coin, or that Scotland’s national anthem, Flower of Scotland, is as potentially offensive as any Celtic songs, it’s still likely to be hard work to read about in anything but the most concise way. This is a shame because the book flows so well in other places that’s it’s clear the author is no boring obsessive.

Among the interesting topics it deals with is an honest appraisal of how thrashing Aberdeen, who had dominated Scottish football so recently, becomes much less satisfying in an era when contrasting incomes leave the clubs mismatched. And it provides a subtly impassioned reminder of how much more enjoyable the matchday experience was before the gentrification of football. It’s an argument that’s been heard frequently elsewhere, but fiction provides an excellent context for the value of one fan’s perspective. The book will appeal to many Celtic fans, while some of the more universal topics may make it of interest to fans of other clubs, particularly outside Scotland.

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A history in ten matches
by Jonathan Wilson with Scott Murray
Orion, £18.99
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 325 March 2014

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As author of Inverting The Pyramid and The Anatomy Of England, both of which cast a clinical eye over the cultural shifts in football tactics over the past century, Jonathan Wilson is well placed to take the same approach to Liverpool. This insightful, highly readable book attempts to map the evolution of the club through ten specific matches. The idea, he points out, is to choose games that aren’t necessarily the most memorable. Instead they’re the ones that “lie on the faultlines of history, marking the end of one era or the beginning of the next”.

Thus, we have the European Cup second round defeat to Red Star Belgrade in November 1973. Already trailing 2-1 from the first leg, a similar reverse at Anfield becomes the catalyst for a change in Bill Shankly’s philosophy. The realisation hits that traditional English attributes such as pace and power are no longer enough when it comes to playing continental teams with superior technical know-how. Shankly began refining his pass-and-move principles as a direct result of being booted out of Europe that year, resulting in a style that placed greater emphasis on patient build-up play and possession.

It was a method that paid dividends in the 3-1 defeat of Borussia Mönchengladbach in the 1977 final, by which time Bob Paisley was in charge. He is often painted as a more avuncular version of hardman Shankly, but Wilson posits the idea that both men were actually the exact opposite of their public personas. There’s little sentiment with Paisley, even banning Shankly from the Melwood training ground. If Shankly’s brand of football was an extension of his socialist principles, Paisley was far more prosaic. All that mattered was winning football matches.

Elsewhere, Kenny Dalglish’s sudden abdication after the 4-4 draw with Everton in February 1991 is seen as especially pivotal. Entertaining as it may have been to the neutral, the manner of the opposition goals exposed the cracks in a rapidly ageing Liverpool team whose last signing was the spectacularly ordinary Jimmy Carter. Dalglish had simply drained himself of all energy. With no readymade successor in the wings, Wilson makes a valid claim that this game (and the manager’s decision to resign straight after) “was a blow from which Liverpool have arguably never recovered”.

There’s also room, predictably, for the Champions League final in Istanbul. Much has been made of the Liverpool fans’ stirring rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone as the pep for their side’s improbable second-half comeback. But Wilson instead points at key moments on the field of play as the triggers, not least Sami Hyypia somehow escaping a red card after hauling down Kaká when the Brazilian was clean through to make it 4-0 just after the break.

Above all, The Anatomy Of Liverpool is an engrossing account of a sporting institution forging its identity through the post-war years. Some of the detail is priceless too (Shankly playing his Desert Island Discs show on the coach to the 1965 Cup final; Berti Vogts seeking out Kevin Keegan to buy him a drink in recognition of the Liverpool man giving him the complete runaround). Highly recommended.

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A new owner usually brings promises of lavish spending but Charlton fans need only look at examples in Belgium to see how their club will be run, says John Chapman

At the end of last season, thousands of football fans marched through the streets of Liège protesting about the president of the city’s major football club. The anger of fans, who forced their way into the stadium and interrupted a board meeting, was aimed at Roland Duchâtelet, the new owner of Charlton Athletic.

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The David Armstrong biography
by David Armstrong 
with Pat Symes
Pitch Publishing, £17.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 324 February 2014

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There was always something a little Dickensian about Middlesbrough and Southampton midfielder David Armstrong. Small, prematurely bald, slightly portly with a face that fell naturally into an expression of melancholy, he was more Oliver Twist than the 1970s footballer of popular mythology. Even his nickname Spike has a whiff of the Victorian workhouse about it.

The nickname, it transpires, was given to him by Middlesbrough team-mate Basil Stonehouse for no other reason than that Stonehouse thought someone in the squad should have it. It’s the kind of anticlimactic tale that seems to have characterised Spike’s career. A hard-working left-sided player and an excellent passer and crosser, Armstrong scored over 100 goals from midfield and was so robust at times he seemed indestructible (he made 356 consecutive appearances for Boro).

He was not a dribbler though, nor was he quick, both of which counted against him when it came to international honours – he was only capped twice by his country. Trophies too eluded him. At Ayresome Park Jack Charlton’s reluctance to spend money – faced with a choice between Trevor Francis or Alf Wood, Big Jack opts, naturally, for the latter – scotches Middlesbrough’s chances of silverware, while Southampton fall agonisingly short of a Double in 1983-84 with Armstrong playing in all 51 games.

While other footballers’ autobiographies are often brimming with bitterness or rancour, The Bald Facts is tinged with sadness and regret. Armstrong’s career ended by an ankle injury that was treated in so bungling a manner the player is barely able to stand up for several years, his finances in tatters, you come away from reading it with the impression that the midfielder feels let down, not necessarily by individuals, but by the game itself.

As is too often the case the player’s unworldliness has hardly helped his cause. You don’t need to be a genius to realise that when you are going to court for an alimony hearing driving into the car park in a brand new red Mercedes is not the best idea. That’s what Armstrong does though. The results are predictable – his wife gets the house and whacking great yearly maintenance payments. “I came out of that court and burst pathetically into tears,” Spike records. There are a lot of tears in these pages, the odd laugh too, and a rather puzzling story about dognapping and Joe Laidlaw. Ultimately though there’s a sense of promise unfulfilled and of tales half told.

I started reading The Bald Facts during the hullabaloo that followed FA chairman Greg Dyke’s comments on the number of foreign players in the Premier League weakening the national team. Armstrong, of course, played when there were very few non-British professionals in the English top flight so it is instructive to see the midfield Ron Greenwood selected for the game against West Germany in 1982. Alongside Armstrong were Alan Devonshire, Ricky Hill and Ray Wilkins. Is that the sort of line-up that would strike fear into the hearts of the current Spanish, German or Brazilian sides?

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