Book reviews

by Michael Blackburn
Grosvenor House, £7.99
Reviewed by Tom Greene
From WSC 310 December 2012

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I was 100 pages into reading Agents, Rovers and Cricket Loving Owners when Steve Kean resigned from Blackburn Rovers. The author, Michael Blackburn, pours so much of his heart and soul into describing the pain both Kean and Venky’s have caused the club’s support that my first thought on hearing the news was for him. His book is a history of Venky’s takeover from the perspective of an exasperated fan living through it.

The story is certainly there to be told – Rovers have gone from one of the best run clubs in the League, operating successfully on very little external funding in one of the poorest parts of the UK, to an utter shambles. The catalogue of mismanagement, PR embarrassments and total lack of direction described in the book continues to this day. At the time of writing, despite Kean’s resignation almost a month ago, there is still no new manager in place. When Venky’s took over Kean was Sam Allardyce’s first-team coach. Currently in charge is Kean’s assistant, Eric Black: anyone is in with a chance of the manager’s job at Ewood Park.

The book is a chronological story from the day the Venky’s took over in November 2010 to eventual relegation last May. The structure is both a strength and weakness. On the positive side, no detail of the fans’ experience has gone undocumented and almost every game of Kean’s reign is described in painstaking detail. However, his poor team selection, delusional post-match analysis and never-ending optimism about his own and the team’s position is not enough to engage the reader throughout.

My favourite sections of the book are where we get pure unadulterated Kean. Although the author is scornful of Kean’s playing and managerial experience, this was not what made him a disastrous manager. His Comical Ali-style post-match debriefs are catalogued with some verve, although I was disappointed that a personal favourite – where Kean blamed a David Dunn shot hitting the post on a lack of dew on the grass – was not included in the author’s top ten. However, because we do not hear from Venky’s or their ex-manager directly (no doubt not for want of trying by the author) we are left with the same longing for the true story as Rovers fans will have felt living through it.

This book will not shed any new light on the Venky’s debacle for anybody who has followed the era closely. However, you could not get a more comprehensive account of what it has felt like to be a Rovers fan over the last two years. For those fans of Premier League teams not content with mid- to lower-table obscurity, read this book and it will show you that things could be worse. A lot worse.

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My life watching 
West Ham through 
a camera lens
by Steve Bacon & Kirk Blows
Biteback, £15.99
Reviewed by Neil Fairchild
From WSC 310 December 2012

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When Steve Bacon was appointed West Ham club photographer in 1980, John Lyall was only the fifth West Ham manager of the 20th century. In the 23 years since Lyall’s departure, there have been nine different permanent managers and almost as many promotions and relegations. For Hammers fans the familiar rotund figure of Bacon waddling across the pitch on matchdays has become a reassuring constant in an uncertain world.

Until Alan Pardew arrived in 2003 Bacon would travel to away matches on the team coach. He would even be present in the dressing room during team talks. There’s Only One Stevie Bacon is a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the dysfunctional world of West Ham over three decades, with a chapter dedicated to the tenure of each manager from Lyall to Gianfranco Zola.

Although Bacon’s subjectivity gives the book a partial and at times spiteful feel – Paul Kitson is a “weasel”, Brian Kidd a “horrible little shit” – his refusal to pander to fans’ preconceptions makes for a refreshing viewpoint. Ron Greenwood is an “awkward bugger” and Pardew, who was the last manager to have his name sung by West Ham fans, is repeatedly dismissed as arrogant and mocked for his use of psychology and motivational techniques. Lou Macari, loved by neither fans nor players, is portrayed in a surprisingly compassionate light. Others are depicted in exactly the way you would expect: old-fashioned Billy Bonds, for example, struggles with the modern world. Following rumours about the close relationship between Ian Bishop and Trevor Morley, Bonds calls both players into his office and asks: “Well, are you or ain’t you?” It turns out they ain’t.

Kirk Blows, author of various books on West Ham, has been enlisted to bring a sense of cohesion to these anecdotes. Blows appears to have viewed his role as that of articulating Bacon’s thoughts rather than challenging them. At times some editing would have been kind. Bacon’s bafflement at the poor quality of televisions in a department store in 1980s communist Romania (“the arsehole of the universe” as he charmingly calls it) would have been a useful omission.

Bacon is the first to admit that he is no football expert and this book sheds little light on why the FA Cup that was won just before his arrival was the club’s last piece of major silverware. Nevertheless there are plenty of interesting and funny tales: the team coach stopping on the way to a match at Stoke to allow the kit manager to put a bet on for Macari; a naked John Moncur jumping out of a locker during one of Harry Redknapp’s team talks; a frightened Paolo di Canio telling a stewardess “I don’t want to die” before getting off a plane that is about to take off.

Far too often the tone of the book is brought down by stories that would be better left in the pub. His fondness of Mark Ward’s wife’s “big boobs” and a players’ masturbation competition on the team coach (yes, really) are two examples. Then again, given the niche target market for this book, perhaps Bacon simply has a good understanding of his audience.

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Lonely at the top: 
A biography
by Philippe Auclair
Macmillan, £17.99
Reviewed by David Stubbs
From WSC 310 December 2012

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“I don’t recognise myself in the players I see today,” George Best said in his very last interview, conducted, as it happens, with Philippe Auclair himself. “There’s only one who excites me, and that is Thierry Henry. He’s not just a great footballer, he’s a showman, an entertainer.”

Henry, however, is not exactly in the Best tradition. He has both more and less about him than the ultimately ruined Manchester United superstar. Henry’s sheer quantity, as well as quality, of achievements at both league and international level dwarf Best’s but for all that he hasn’t quite blazed in the firmament in the same way. A lifelong teetotaller, he yields little or nothing in the way of a volatile private life, while his personality ranges from affable to aloof. For all those va-va-voom ads, he is simply not as scintillating a character off the field as he was on it in his prime. Maybe that’s why there has only been one full-length study of the player published in the UK – Oliver Derbyshire’s Thierry Henry: The amazing life of the greatest footballer on earth – a book as abysmal as its title, almost Piers Morganesque in the low it sets in Arsenal-related discourse.

Auclair admits not being drawn to Henry the way he was to Eric Cantona, his pre-
vious subject in the acclaimed The Man Who Would Be King. However, Lonely At The Top is probably about as shrewd and in-depth a profile as we’re likely to get of Henry, who seems to have been moulded by the drive of his father, a highly influential figure in his life until he made a botched attempt to effect a transfer for his son to Real Madrid. The book tracks his development from a speedy but slight youngster reluctant to track back to the machine of panache he was at Arsenal. Auclair adds his own flourish with allusions to the likes of Philip Larkin and Gustave Flaubert which will raise the blood temperature of the compiler of Pseuds Corner but otherwise will only distract the most determinedly Philistine reader.

Auclair poses questions he’s not always able to answer, such as why Henry never seemed to get along with Zinedine Zidane and truly fulfil his potential at international level, or why Arsène Wenger is so beset at times with tactical ineptitude despite his success at Arsenal. Viewing matters from a French perspective, he regards Henry’s fateful handball against the Republic of Ireland as an unfortunate crowning moment in his career given the probably unfair antipathy it triggered against him, though Arsenal fans in particular would hardly see this as quite so defining of the player.

The access he has had, some forbidden to UK journalists, does yield insightful, incidental nuggets along the way: into the character of Emmanuel Petit, for instance, profoundly affected by a personal tragedy; Patrick Vieira’s excessively informative quote that the cheers of the Highbury throng gave him “a hard on”; as well as the partying habits of the French squad in the 2002 World Cup. This occasionally gives the impression that, fine and thoughtful as Lonely At The Top is, its author would secretly prefer to be writing about somebody or something else.

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The history of Swansea City AFC
by Geraint H Jenkins
Yr Lolfa, £14.95
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 309 November 2012

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Whatever else can be said about Swansea City, it cannot be denied that we attract a decent class of club historian. The centenary biography is by Geraint Jenkins, a Professor of Welsh History. It follows in the 30-year-old footprints of the club’s previous chronicler David Farmer, a Professor of Management Studies. Proud to be a Swan has the virtues of that academic provenance. It is well and widely researched – to the point of penance, judging by some of the titles in the bibliography – factually reliable and judicious rather than hyperbolic.

Jenkins ranges more widely than Farmer, whose dogged season-by-season account rarely looked beyond the preoccupations and content of the back page of the South Wales Evening Post. The club’s history is related to the context formed by the progress of its host community and the fortunes of its economy and society. Swansea’s copper and tinplate industries and the 1941 blitz take their place alongside the Vetch Field, Robbie James and the FA Cup semi-finals of 1926 and 1964. If you are one of many fans the Swans have gained in recent years, or a supporter of another club wanting to know more about an opponent which has compelled attention, this is a decent introduction.

Jenkins obeys the injunction to leave readers wanting more but not entirely in a way that they might want. He is largely cliche-averse but may have found himself muttering the one about quarts and pint pots. Given 30 more years and a wider frame of reference than Farmer, he is forced to tell the story in little more than three-quarters of the length.

One hundred and eighty-six pages is not remotely enough to do real justice to the first 100 years of any club, never mind one whose fortunes encompass the extremes of two periods of extraordinary upward mobility, a post-war era that included an exceptionally fertile generation of talent and at least three near-death experiences.

Jenkins is too scrupulous a historian to deny that the bad years have far outweighed the good. He ensures that they and their personalities receive proper weight alongside the peaks attained in recent years as well as under John Toshack and the achievements of giants like Ivor Allchurch and Cliff Jones. Perhaps the best passage in the book describes Herbie Williams – “The unlikeliest of soccer idols. Tall, gangling and unprepossessing” – a gifted player who was preternaturally unlucky in the timing of his career.

Those constraints of space force Jenkins to maintain a brisk tempo which leaves only limited scope for reflection or the wealth of anecdote generated by a club which abounds in idiosyncrasy. The result is an account which describes rather than evokes and seems slightly monochrome given the rich colour at its disposal.

He is perhaps unlucky that another centenary project – the online club archive at Swansea University – was under construction rather than fully available while he was writing. That promises to be a rich resource for any future historian – so long, of course, as they get enough space.

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by Neville Southall
De Coubertin Books, £18.99
Reviewed by Mark O’Brien
From WSC 309 November 2012

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The standard format for modern sports biographies is to start on the cusp of the subject’s defining moment – the race, the fight, the match of their life – and then flash back to their childhood to tell the story of their rise to the top. Neville Southall, record-breaking goalkeeper for Everton and Wales, kicks off his autobiography on a football pitch but instead of a glorious match at Goodison, Wembley or Cardiff Arms Park it’s the present day and he is being called a “fucking fat knobhead” by one of the troubled youngsters he now works with.

It quickly becomes clear that Southall has done everything slightly differently to other sportsmen. He states early on that he wants to show people that there is more to his personality than just the grumpy caricature that he became in many eyes and he succeeds up to a point.

From his beginnings in Llandudno through to the glittering heights at Everton, where he became the club’s most decorated player, then on a tour of English football’s less glamorous outposts when he ended his career as a wandering pair of gloves for hire, Southall talks constantly of a single-minded, overwhelming desire to improve as a keeper. After a while it’s hard not to wonder whether this obsession, especially with training, is born of a deep-seated lack of confidence.

Like Henry Skrimshander, the fictional baseball star in Chad Harbach’s The Art Of Fielding, Southall only ever seems at home in a sporting environment, one where social interaction is reduced to piss-taking and the rules are very simple: play, train, improve and play again.

He still seems quite guarded and loath to criticise too many of his former colleagues, apart from Everton’s disastrous management duo of Mike Walker and Dave Williams, but still he has a dry sense of humour and tells plenty of funny anecdotes, especially about the misadventures of the Welsh national team which appears to have been run like Dad’s Army.

Even when describing the rather melancholy end to his 751-game Everton career Southall manages to see the funny side. Told that Howard Kendall wants to speak to him ahead of a game at Elland Road he goes to the manager’s hotel room.

“‘You do know I love you,’ he said when I came in.  He looked awful, like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. To be honest, this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Howard Kendall stood in his dressing gown with his bollocks hanging out telling you he loves you is not a good sight.”

Another of football’s less conventional characters, Pat Nevin, is spot on when he describes Southall as the classic eccentric with a complex personality. As a result The Binman Chronicles is a more interesting read than the average footballer’s life story.

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