Book reviews

The life of Stanley Matthews
by Jon Henderson
Yellow Jersey, £18.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 316 June 2013

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Stanley Matthews is one of those figures who looms so large in the consciousness of the nation there’s a tendency to think we already know all there is to know about him. The truth, which becomes apparent while reading Jon Henderson’s vivid biography, is that what most of us actually know about a player whose career spanned 29 seasons is confined to the salient facts about a couple of famous matches and a whole heap of the sort of cliches (including the one about how he always crossed the ball so that the laces didn’t hit the forward’s head) that were the 1960s equivalent of YouTube.

As you might expect, the truth, as it emerges in this well-researched and cannily written book, is more complex and interesting than the well-worn phrases about body swerve, dropping a cross on a postage stamp and the 1953 FA Cup final might have led us to expect. Matthews himself was a difficult character to read, on good terms with his team-mates yet always distant from them. Like many men of his generation and background he was not given to talking about his feelings, or to public displays of emotion. Even the obvious affection of football fans across the world could not draw him out. “He never interacted with the crowd,” Blackpool team-mate Jimmy Armfield recalls. “It just wasn’t his way.”

Matthews’s dribbling was so phenomenal that after one particularly spectacular run and goal against Belgium, the opposition players spontaneously applauded him as he ran back to the halfway line. Yet, for all the brightness he brought to the game, he was a rigid, almost Spartan figure – a non-drinker and non-smoker who sat quietly in the corner while his Stoke City team-mates were swigging beer from a hotel chamber pot, during surreptitious late-night sessions, and took cold showers before matches to help him focus. Locked in an unhappy marriage, frustrated by a succession of club and international managers who regarded him as a temperamental “show off” and by the financial constraints imposed by a job that, despite his celebrity, never paid him more than £20 a week, he clearly felt the strain. One day, sitting in a first-class railway carriage with his Stoke colleagues, he watched a luggage porter going about his work and remarked wistfully: “There’s something about normal life, isn’t there?”

As Henderson clearly demonstrates, whatever Matthews’s wishes – whether he was dazzling Hitler’s henchmen with a breathtaking display in Berlin following the shameful “Nazi salute” business, arguing bitterly over a loyalty bonus at Stoke, being reprimanded by the War Office for selling coffee on the black market in Brussels or eloping with “the true love of my life” Mila Winterova, a Czech who it emerged had once been a spy – his was a life that was destined never to be normal.

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Seb Patrick mantains that it is becoming harder to admire or support a player who has lots of skill but repeatedly damages his club’s image

It’s difficult not to imagine that Luis Suárez has a “goodwill meter” that he lets fill up to a certain point before jettisoning all of it in one go. Having arrived in England fresh from serving a ban for biting PSV’s Otman Bakkal – and with his part in Ghana’s exit from the 2010 World Cup still fresh in the memory – it took a quick adjustment to English football for people to start thinking maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

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From Buenos Aires to Bramall Lane and back
by Matthew Bell
ACM Retro, £12.95
Reviewed by Sam Kelly
From WSC 315 May 2013

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Today, Alejandro Sabella wears an Argentinian FA baseball cap to work, and is probably the international football manager most people would like to take under their arm and cuddle. He wasn’t always a softly spoken, grandfather-like figure, though. In 1978, he was part of a transfer saga which transformed British football. Sabella’s move from River Plate, where he was a fringe player, to Sheffield United is less well known than those of Ricardo Villa and Osvaldo Ardiles to Tottenham Hotspur (from Racing and Huracán, respectively). Viva Sabella! tells the story of how Sheffield United manager Harry Haslam brokered the Spurs deals, while making sure to return from his post-World Cup trip to Argentina with a player of his own.

The book goes into rather more detail about the 1978 World Cup than it really needs to, as it does with Estudiantes de La Plata’s Copa Libertadores and Intercontinental Cup triumphs in the late 1960s (Sabella managed Estudiantes later in life, winning the Libertadores himself in 2009, but wasn’t connected to them at that time). Not all of the Argentinian sections are quite on song – the stadium in which the author claims Estudiantes played home matches in the late 1960s wasn’t opened until 2003 – and on a couple of occasions he attributes derisive interpretations to Argentinian nicknames for teams or people which are in 
fact meant fondly.

Unfortunately, we can only guess as to why Haslam was happy to let Tottenham in on the Ardiles and Villa deals with seemingly nothing to gain for himself – clearly football in the late 1970s was a different world. Antonio Rattín, who had a fixer’s role in the transfers, is remembered exclusively in Britain for his red card against England during the 1966 World Cup. That makes it interesting to see him portrayed as the pleasant and charming gentleman he has a well-earned reputation for being in Argentina.

There are cameos from Carlos Bilardo, Don Revie and Juan Sebastián Verón among others and a good summary of Sabella’s playing time in England; he impressed on a personal level but his team-mates didn’t hit the same heights for Sheffield United and the club were relegated to Division Three in his first season. He then had a brief spell at Leeds United before returning to Argentina, where he played a few matches for the national team. Sabella’s life on his return home is well treated, especially his coaching and managerial career as assistant to Daniel Passarella at River Plate, Argentina and Uruguay, and his step up to the number-one spot first with Estudiantes and then as manager of Argentina.

Although Sabella’s name is in the title, and his face looks out from the cover, this isn’t really a book about him – it is more to do with the difficulties players can run into when moving to a new country and culture. It also as a testament to Harry Haslam, a man whose vision of the direction football was going in proved correct, even if it didn’t benefit his club.

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The inside stories of Albion’s amazing 21st century odyssey
by Chris Lepkowski
Shareholders for Albion, £16.99
Reviewed by James Baxter
From WSC 315 May 2013

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Written by West Bromwich Albion’s Birmingham Mail correspondent Chris Lepkowski, this book uses in-depth interviews with 12 players to present the inside line on “Albion’s amazing 21st century odyssey”. While the last 12 years have delivered four promotions, three relegations and the 2004-05 “great escape”, they have also seen Albion transformed from a chaotically run institution who gave Wolves fans something to joke about into one of the Premier League’s most forward-thinking clubs.

In its way, In Pastures Green reflects this transformation. The earlier interviews, especially those dealing with Gary Megson’s time, are genuinely revelatory in places. Dutch midfielder Richard Sneekes doesn’t bother to conceal his contempt for the manager, describing his style of football as requiring “running for the sake of running”. Striker Bob Taylor, meanwhile, was brought back to The Hawthorns by Megson in 2000 but, by the end of his final season three years later, he had been frozen out. He believes that Megson’s decision to allow him a start in the last fixture, at home to Newcastle, was made purely to humiliate him since he was nowhere near match fit. Taylor is further convinced that, as he was being helped off the field after sustaining an early injury,  Megson was laughing and joking – “milking the situation” – on the touchline. “As a person,” Taylor concludes, “[Megson] is a shithouse.”

At the end of the book there are further criticisms of a manager (or rather head coach) but Robert Koren and Paul Scharner are far more restrained in what they have to say about Roberto di Matteo, who “kept his distance” and “didn’t like to get too close to his players” according to Koren. Scharner’s chapter offers Albion fans little beyond a story most will recall from local media reports of January 2011. This was a period when the team were going through a poor run of form and Scharner suggested that the abandonment of the players’ self-policed system of fines for minor acts of indiscipline was among the reasons.

Cancer sufferer John Hartson, who left Albion in 2008 as his health went into decline, gives by far the most moving interview, expressing regret at ignoring an appointment with a specialist that was made for him by Albion’s club doctor, Kevin Conod. “Kevin did everything in his power to help me… but doctors aren’t going to hold your hand and take you to the specialist.” There is more to In Pastures Green, including a few throwaway, if entertaining, tales of dressing-room high-jinks. For his own part, Lepkowski is a discreet narrator who allows his interviewees to tell their stories without the need for too many interjections. Shareholders for Albion, who commissioned the book, break up the narrative with regular accounts of the state of the club’s finances. Those not interested in the intricacies of share issues and the like can safely skip the passages concerned. They certainly do not detract from a fine read – one you don’t need to be an Albion fan to appreciate.

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A life in football
by Paul Fletcher MBE with Dave Thomas
Vertical Editions, £14.99
Reviewed by Alan Tomlinson
From WSC 315 May 2013

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This is a book about life-changing moments, successful adaptations in life and survival in the football business, from player to executive. Paul Fletcher explains the title by saying that his “life and career has been magical; it’s as simple as that”. Fletcher’s three moments of life-changing experience were seeing a small player head the ball, inspiring him to practise jumping and heading aged 16; meeting his wife-to-be at Bolton’s Beachcomber Club; and attending a Dale Carnegie course in leadership training. The third Damascan moment was at the end of his playing career and, as a fan of Carnegie’s book How to win friends and influence people, Fletcher enrolled on a 12-week course in Bark Street, Bolton. There’s a deliberate evocation here of dead-end hopelessness, back in the stark, dark uncertainties of his early life in the town but now with a pair of worn-out knees and an unplanned future. The Carnegie programme changed all that for Fletcher, with the probing question: “Where do life’s opportunities lie, inside or outside of your comfort zone?”

Fletcher was born in Bolton and played football for his hometown club then Burnley and Blackpool, all in a state of decline or at best static during his playing days, which peaked in the mid-1970s. But the Carnegie course gave him the urge and the confidence to branch out into after-dinner speaking, from World Cup events to the Bacup Wheeltappers, India to Ramsbottom and an appearance at the Cambridge Union. He also moved into photography, the property business and marketing, which got him the job of commercial manager at Colne Dynamoes, a non-League outfit threatening Burnley’s local hegemony at the time.

After a year he was recommended for the commercial manager’s job at Huddersfield Town, where a derelict plot alongside the club’s old ground was available but undeveloped. He went there to introduce money-making ideas but found himself drawn into the process of modernisation of the game, by taking on responsibilities for the specifics of stadium design. The old Leeds Road ground was superseded by the modern McAlpine (now John Smith’s) Stadium and suddenly Fletcher was a man in demand – a former player with commercial nous and a pedigree of successful project management.

Fletcher’s is an engaging story with some good put-downs; Alan Ball, in charge at Blackpool, comes out as one of the worst managerial appointments of the era. But it’s a bit laddish, cultivating the spirit of the dressing-room and stand-up/after-dinner circuit. I’d have liked to know more about the minutiae of his departures from top jobs at Huddersfield, Bolton, Coventry, Wembley and Burnley (covering their season in the Premier League). But he holds back on that and tells another anecdote or reminds us that he’s a ukelele-playing stalwart of the George Formby Appreciation Society. “Magic” or “magical” gets a dozen or so mentions throughout the book and at the end “serendipity” too. Fletcher recognises that he was a chance-taker not just on the field; his life in football at his impressively wide levels of achievement is testimony to his determination, ambition, loyalty towards and sustained affiliation to his local roots.

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