Book reviews

by Tony Cottee
Philip Evans Media, £14.99
Reviewed by Mark Segal
From WSC 317 July 2013

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Back in the day when you could phone footballers out of the blue for an interview, Tony Cottee was one of the few who didn’t hang up immediately or pretend they were busy and then turn their phone off at the time you were asked to phone back. Once he even gave me his home number. This, added to the fact he was a West Ham hero of mine, made him one of football’s nice guys but this side of his personality is sadly lacking in The Inside Story.

His second autobiography, the story begins as Cottee is winding down his career. A return to West Ham and a League Cup winner’s medal at Wembley with Leicester are the high points as he slowly slips down the leagues, ending up as player-manager at Barnet where it all went horribly wrong.

Like any centre-forward you’ve ever met or played with, Cottee is keen to let you know his scoring record but there seems little feeling behind the numbers. In fact the end of his career is not the real reason for the book, it’s the thing he needs to get out of the way before the main part – his attempt, and ultimate failure, to become West Ham chairman.

It was on the drive home from the 2004 play-off final defeat to Crystal Palace in Cardiff that Cottee decided to act, and the reader is taken through his attempts to put together a consortium to oust hated chairman Terry Brown from Upton Park. At first it’s a shambles, as he turns up to meetings without any kind of business plan, but slowly it begins to come together and each meeting, phone call and proposal is faithfully documented as the book becomes bogged down.

After realising he doesn’t have the money among West Ham supporters he spreads his net further and begins talking to a group of Icelandic bankers who eventually go it alone, buy the club and almost run it into the ground. Cottee is desperate for the reader to understand the time and effort he put into trying to save “his” club, which is why the progress of his consortium is documented in such detail. But in doing this he only glosses over the other areas of his life which were clearly suffering. He admits part of the reason his marriage failed was because of the time he dedicated to his consortium.

In a chapter about his work for Sky’s Soccer Saturday, Cottee claims his live reports are the next best thing to playing and perhaps it’s this transition from player to ex-player which could have been explored more. Many former pros talk about missing the buzz of the dressing room and maybe it’s even more acute for prolific strikers who are used to the adulation which comes with scoring goals. Cottee’s tireless work in trying to oust Brown could be a way of replacing this buzz, but it’s a shame the mechanics of his takeover are more in evidence than the human story.

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The father of modern English football
by Graham Morse
John Blake, £17.99
Reviewed by David Stubbs
From WSC 317 July 2013

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My earliest memory of Walter Winterbottom, manager of England from 1946 to 1962, is from a second-hand copy of the FA Book For Boys. His name spoke to my infant sense of humour, though I assumed he harked from a more didactic, purposeful age when no one had time to find the word “bottom” amusing. I also heard him providing co-commentary for the 1966 World Cup final, his vowels a strange mix of received English and suppressed Lancastrian. Like his successor, Alf Ramsey, Winterbottom had felt obliged to brush up on his elocution if he was to be taken seriously. Such class considerations abounded in his era, in all their absurdity – author Graham Morse recounts how FA secretary Stanley Rous had been reprimanded by the FA chairman for wearing plus fours when his predecessor, Sir Frederick Wall, had worn a top hat and frock coat to games.

Winterbottom himself was quite the modern man – an Oldham lad who had made his way in the world on academic merit, who understood the value of tactics, technique and advanced coaching skills. He gained a reputation as a “pedagogue” for trying to impose these methods on often-reluctant players, Stanley Matthews in particular, who thought the best way to play was to bloody well get on playing, and that skill was something you were born with. Winterbottom understood what he was up against – that in England the game had deep-rooted, violent beginnings which encouraged a crude approach, whereas in Europe and South America the game had been taken up at more middle-class levels, and was more open to theory-based technically sophisticated methods.

Winterbottom was England manager when the team lost 1-0 to the US at the 1950 World Cup. However, his hands were tied. He was never allowed to pick the team – a dubious panel of selectors did this job, whose whims once led them to grant 38-year-old Leslie Compton his first cap. He also had to put up with Matthews being ordered on a goodwill tour of Canada during the tournament. As for the 1953 defeat to Hungary, he was almost alone in understanding that the Magyars would be formidable opponents. Contemporaries such as Chelsea manager Ted Drake, however, continued to insist that England’s problem had been physical fitness rather than formation and tactics.

Morse is the son-in-law of Winterbottom, who would have been 100 this year, and his account is naturally sympathetic. It’s deservingly fulsome as well as being engagingly redolent of his era, in which Winterbottom was paid just over £1,000 a year, of players arriving at games by tram, laced balls carried around in nets, and courtships shyly conducting on hills overlooking mill chimneys. The title isn’t an overstatement – Ron Greenwood, Bobby Robson and Trevor Brooking all took on board Winterbottom’s philosophy. That England continue to fail is more to do with the institutional obtuseness Winterbottom himself never managed to break down, as opposed to his enlightened approach, whose time may not yet properly have come.

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by Richard Gordon
Black and White, £7.99
Reviewed by Dianne Millen
From WSC 316 June 2013

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Even now, 30 years on, if you mention the date May 11, 1983 to any Aberdonian, even the coldest north-eastern eyes will mist over as we mutter affectionately “Aye, Gothenburg”. For it was on that night that Aberdeen, led by Alex Ferguson, beat Real Madrid 2-1 to lift the Cup-Winners Cup. BBC journalist and lifelong Dons fan Richard Gordon has now commemorated the 30th anniversary of the club’s most famous triumph in this engaging account.

Structured around the journey to the final – and beyond it to the subsequent Super Cup victory over SV Hamburg – the chapters assess each game and the impressive domestic results which surrounded it, presenting a pen portrait of a single member of the legendary team. These interviews are often both hilarious and insightful and convey a sense of how those individuals operated, and how they managed to achieve what they did. Even if, as Eric Black recalls, it was considered no big deal: “I just thought that was how it was – you turned up, played a game, got shouted at a bit and won a trophy every year!” (Aside from the European triumph, Ferguson’s Aberdeen were Scottish champions three times and won five domestic cups.)

That collective energy, Ferguson’s ability to construct a team greater than the sum of its parts, lifted the Dons to the highest levels. Ferguson’s attention to detail and control-freak tendencies irked some players but, as Gordon Strachan puts it: “At Pittodrie every Monday morning there would be eight of us wanting to kill Fergie but by Tuesday we’re laughing and joking about it.”
The author lets the overall picture gradually emerge as we read each individual’s account. The result is a fascinating tale of how a group of talented, but otherwise fairly ordinary, blokes did something exceptional together. While there is plenty of information and several mini match reports in the book, Gordon’s pacey writing style ensures it doesn’t get bogged down with the kind of details only a hardcore fan would want to know. Perhaps the only disappointment is that while he touches on the factors which made the team’s success possible, without an interview with Ferguson himself (although his shadow falls on almost every page) the analysis is inevitably incomplete.

Celebrating Gothenburg has sometimes been seen as controversial. Certain commentators (and even some managers) accuse Aberdeen fans of living in the past – or use it as a stick with which to beat those of us who call for better than mid-table finishes, even in these changed days. Ultimately, however, this book reminds us of just how amazing the achievement was and that it is still worth celebrating. And that given the right set of people and circumstances, any of us can achieve more than we thought we could.

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Surviving football’s money business
by Brian Laws with Alan Biggs
Vertical Editions, £16.99
Reviewed by Graham Stevenson
From WSC 316 June 2013

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For a manager who has spent over a decade employed by Scunthorpe United in three spells, it’s disappointing to find only 19 pages in Brian Laws’s autobiography about his time at Glanford Park. He’s led the club to a couple of promotions and a couple of relegations, so it’s not as if there is a dearth of interesting history between them, despite the balance sheet currently reading roughly “nil”.

Scunthorpe are now broke, broken and back in the basement division for the first time in several years – which is exactly where they were when Laws first arrived in 1997. For the small steel-town club he was a relatively big appointment and made an immediate impression. Rumours spread quickly of dressing-room dust-ups and car-park dusting-downs, but “Ol’ Big Hair” and his journalist co-writer don’t take many opportunities to fill in much colour between the lines here.

The Machiavellian boardroom-level manoeuvres during a bizarre three weeks in 2004, for instance, are dealt with in just over a paragraph. This involved Laws being fired by a new chairman, before the previous one stepped in to take back control of the club and reinstated him. “The whole thing got quite nasty,” Brian says. But nasty how? Were horses’ heads involved?

It’s much the same elsewhere throughout this (terribly titled) book. Laws’s time at Grimsby Town is over quite quickly and the aftermath of an injury caused by his launching a plate of chicken wings into Italian midfielder Ivano Bonetti’s face reads like only two-thirds of a story. The lessons learned seem to have been to do with Laws’s handling of the media rather than the handling of his players. Later managerial roles at Sheffield Wednesday and Burnley are similarly done-and-dusted in mere pages and key incidents at all of his clubs feel as if they are dealt with like clearances to be booted into row Z. Much more care is taken in detailing why Laws got the nickname “Ernie” during his playing days. It’s as simple as you imagine – team-mates’ reference to comedian Ernie Wise being short and wearing a wig.

Laws’s years on the pitch dominate – obviously none more so than successful ones at Nottingham Forest (during which he drank Mick Hucknall’s backstage bar dry and wet himself walking out at Wembley for a Cup final – events unrelated). A series of anecdotes about Brian Clough’s eccentricities add more to the mythos but it’s actually Laws himself who surprises with some poignant recollections of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, such as his continuing embarrassment at not realising the seriousness of events and hurling verbal abuse at the first few Liverpool fans out onto the pitch.

It’s clear Clough had something of a soft spot for Laws and it’s easy enough to figure out why. Laws comes across as reasonably principled and workmanlike – qualities he showed as a player. He also seems prone to let his feelings boil over from time to time, an attribute he clearly takes into the dressing room as a manager.

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by Ashley Williams with David Brayley
Y Lolfa, £14.95
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 316 June 2013

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The first memory of Ashley Williams remains vivid. Late season 2008, driving a clearance down the right wing at the Liberty Stadium but checking his follow-through so that the ball dropped perfectly for a team-mate. This was clearly not your usual lower-league defender. Five years on he is vastly more familiar but retains the capacity to surprise. Prospective purchasers may (as this one did) quail at a 376-page diary and replace it on the shelves. Swansea fans or not, they should think again or miss something pretty impressive.

It is not that there is any single blinding revelation in his account of Swansea’s 2011-12 season. Instead there is an accumulation of detail, anecdote and observation, forming a compellingly credible picture of footballing life. Credit to David Brayley, who clearly asked the right questions in assembling a book whose clarity and easy conversational flow make for great readability. But co-writers are only as good as their material. It is clear from a terrific opening passage recalling Swansea’s promotion celebrations at Wembley Stadium – with champagne off-limits until Sky say so and Nathan Dyer absent until he does the necessary for a random drug test – that Ashley has the attributes of a good reporter.

He is thoughtful, acutely observant and perceptive. There’s also a sharp self-awareness evident where, for instance, he moans about play-acting by former team-mate Jordi Gómez, then adds “but I have to own up to double standards”, having been happy to accept the fruits of Gómez’s misdemeanours when he played for Swansea.

There’s sharper, clearer tactical analysis than in 100 editions of Match of the Day and intuitive observation of team-mates, notably a brilliant exposition of Leon Britton’s role in Swansea’s rise. No Manchester City fan can be shocked by his view of Scott Sinclair as a gifted player who “probably doesn’t believe in himself enough and actually lacks a bit of confidence”.

He’s refreshingly frank about likes and dislikes, notably of referees. His thoughts on Phil Dowd as “a referee with empathy for the game and the battles that form part of a competitive match” are highlighted by a joyous description of his interaction across a match with Dowd and Kevin Davies. And while no player ever lost by praising his manager, there is little doubt of his genuine admiration for Brendan Rodgers, depicted as a meticulous organiser and superb man-manager who “developed me in so many ways, probably off the field as much as on”.

He concludes by hinting at a sequel. And 2012-13 offers plenty of material: lifting Swansea’s first major trophy, provoking perhaps the silliest post-match whinge of Alex Ferguson’s career and getting tapped up, via the media, by Liverpool and Arsenal. It should be another decent read but still better would be the really good autobiography – taking in his early rejection by West Brom and climb to success via Hednesford, Stockport and Swansea – he clearly has within him.

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