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by Rafa Benítez
Headline, £20
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 312 February 2013

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While it’s still too early to judge Brendan Rodgers, the consensus on Liverpool’s post-war managers is pretty much in. Shankly and Paisley? Daft question. Dalglish? Still a legend, despite last season. Evans and Houllier? Both missed their chance and overstayed their time. Hodgson? Oh come on.

But no Liverpool chief has polarised opinion like Rafa Benítez. To some he remains the tactical giant who outmanoeuvred far superior teams on the way to Champions League nirvana in 2005 and whose plans for reasserting Liverpool’s dominance at home were only undone by the financial misdeeds of a pair of mad American owners. To others he’s the bloke who got lucky, made more disastrous transfer dealings than good ones, took us down into the Europa League and promptly buggered off to Milan with a £6 million pay-off.

Champions League Dreams is unlikely to make either camp scamper over to the other side. Aided by Telegraph writer Rory Smith, Benítez’s prose is often as clinical and perfunctory as his press conferences while he journeys through his six European campaigns at the club. It’s a smart narrative move. Ignoring his underwhelming achievements in the Premier League – only coming close in 2008-09 and that after an embarrassing post-Christmas collapse and the Robbie Keane fiasco – this book amounts to a Greatest Hits of Rafa’s time at Liverpool.

One thing it does shore up is his obsession for detail. Benítez happily reveals the extent of his DVD resource library, one that lined the walls at Melwood, filled the basement at home and even stuffed up the attic of his parents’ house in Madrid. Those DVDs and accompanying notes were filled with games, players and coaching sessions, all neatly categorised, numbered and instantly accessible through a database, what he describes as “not just a record of all the games I had managed and training sessions I had overseen in my career, but an extensive library of football around the world”. It was a system he applied to educate players about the opposition and how to improve.

Some of his written detail is enlightening, not least when explaining how Liverpool managed to outsmart Barcelona in 2007, pinching the win at the Nou Camp then, with a first 45 minutes of “possibly the best half of football, tactically, I saw in my time at Liverpool”, closing out the tie. Occasionally some of the incidental detail is precious. Steven Gerrard, for instance, catching a lift home from a passing milk float when unable to flag a taxi after celebrating the semi-final win against Chelsea that season.

The baffling sale of Xabi Alonso is dealt with, though hardly satisfactorily, with Benítez claiming he was backed into a corner by financial necessity and UEFA’s newly imposed overseas player ratios. While both hold a degree of truth, at no point does he concede that it was a colossal mistake or show any awareness of the huge demotivating effect Alonso’s departure had on the likes of Gerrard, Javier Mascherano 
and Fernando Torres.

If it’s tactical insight you’re after, this book might suit you fine. But those hoping to unlock the secrets and impulses of this complex individual will be little the wiser.

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A history of sport on TV
by Martin Kelner
John Wisden & Co, £18.99
Reviewed by David Harrison
From WSC 311 January 2013

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Having worked in broadcasting, I’m painfully aware that those on the inside can be guilty of attaching far too much importance to the social significance of their output. For the viewer, television remains essentially what you do when you get home and remove your shoes. But with average viewing holding steady at around four hours a day, there are so many opinions we’ve all accumulated – consciously or not. Consequently, donning our football hats, every one of us has a view on the relative merits of commentators, presenters, pundits and the like.

Martin Kelner has tapped into the great national pastimes of sport and TV with this extensively researched work. It covers the developing relationship between the two, from the early days – characterised primarily by suspicion and resentment – through to today when everything has changed, apart from the suspicion and resentment.

The opening chapters are fairly dull, accurately reflecting TV coverage of sport for most of the last century. Things don’t really get going, in real life or the book, until the FA Cup’s “Matthews Final” in 1953 when the first rights payment was made for coverage of a live sporting event. Kelner observes that this represented the first occurrence of footballers overtaking their cricketing counterparts in terms of public awareness. So many pioneering figures, on both sides of the camera, have helped drive televised sport to the intrusive position it holds today and Kelner is happy to acknowledge and credit, generally without attempting to compare – apart from the BBC incarnation of Des, his absolute favourite.

Age will determine where the reader’s affections and admirations lie, but they’re all here – from a football perspective commentators such as Captain Henry Blythe Thornhill “Teddy” Wakelam, who delivered Britain’s first live sports broadcasts in 1927, through massive figures like Raymond Glendenning, Peter Dimmock, Kenneth Wolstenholme, David Coleman, Brian Moore and beyond. Pundits, effectively a 1970 World Cup innovation, are acknowledged and discussed, as are the off-screen visionaries who made it happen – men like the heroic Dimmock, Angus Mackay, Paul Fox, Bryan Cowgill, John Bromley and many others. And then there’s Jimmy Hill, a man who could justifiably claim a place in all three groups.

The book is characterised by Kelner’s gags; many dismal, for which he consistently and wisely blames others, but some very funny. The factual stories also contribute greatly. In the weeks before the consummate Coleman took over as presenter of Grandstand, I particularly liked the account of Dimmock’s own attempts to read results from the teleprinter. Not a football man, Dimmock was confronted with “Cltc 3 Ptk Th 1” which, in the absence of any assistance through his earpiece, he delivered as “Celtic 3 Purr Thaaa 1”. Kelner wears his lack of actual match attendance as a badge of honour and the device works well. If this book appears under your Christmas tree, you may well finish it before the turkey sandwiches appear.

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Day 17 of the WSC Christmas advent calendar and we’ve got the joys of Christmas gifts for you. Today is the final day to order a UK WSC Christmas gift subscription and guarantee their personalised card arrives in time for the big day. You can order by following this link to our shop.

Give someone a subscription to When Saturday Comes this Christmas and you will save them from being stuck for a conversational topic throughout 2013. Is 4-5-1 an outmoded system? Will the seven years of trophyless heartache bravely endured by Arsenal fans come to an end at last? With the money he earns, why can’t Alan Shearer dress better than that? Reading WSC will ensure that they will never be short of opinions whenever such topics are raised. The new subscription will start with the issue sent out in January, so to ensure they don’t feel hard done by on Christmas Day, we’ll send them a card telling them all about it, complete with a message from you. You can give us the recipient’s name and address and leave your message when you check out.

If you’re looking for other presents we do plenty of books and T-shirts, too. Self-promotion over, more advent treats for you tomorrow.

For day nine of the WSC advent calendar we have a stop-motion Lego Christmas football match for you. The Morgan family, from Stavanger in Norway, have been making these every year since 2010. This time it features Arsenal v Manchester United, a giant Lego figure dance and a football-playing Father Christmas. Enjoy.

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Lifting the lid on the beautiful game
Guardian Books, £12.99
Reviewed by Taylor Parkes
From WSC 309 November 2012

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Who is the Secret Footballer? Does anybody really, truly give a toss? When the weekly column first appeared in the Guardian, offering insights into the life of an especially bright and articulate player, it was hard not to speculate on who exactly was writing this stuff but that was pretty much a side-issue. Lately, thanks to the magic of the internet, this dull masquerade has become the greater part of the point. A dedicated website examines the “clues”; hours of televised football are trawled for clips corresponding to events from the column, which are uploaded solemnly to YouTube. On the Guardian site you can watch a promotional video where someone in a hoodie sits with their back to the camera while a voice intones “Who am I? I’m the secret footballer…” Surely this is the point at which any reasonable human being rolls their eyes and ceases to care?

Maybe not. Football’s own Bruce Wayne has a best-selling book out now and for what it is, it’s actually not bad at all. There’s very little here – about pressure, decadence, the culture of the dressing room – which you wouldn’t have been able to guess, but it’s fairly well written and rarely boring and sometimes genuinely funny. There’s even a proper ending: past the unlikely quotes from Proust and Pink Floyd (and the many jabs at Robbie Savage) is an unsettling final chapter in which TSF discusses his depression, and claims to be overeating and drinking deliberately in an effort to finish his career: “I don’t want to go back. Don’t make me go back.” It’s all very convincing, particularly as letting go of the reins like this can be a side-effect of the antidepressants he’s taking (a fact of which he seems blissfully unaware).

The trouble is, it’s hard to trust a man with a brown paper bag on his head. You feel like you’re being messed with somehow, even if you’re not. Is this really a footballer, you wonder, or a journalist writing up insider stories collected from contacts and colleagues? He has to keep his identity secret to avoid being “ostracised”, he says – but so much detail is given away about overseas trips, Christmas parties and various incidents on the pitch that anyone who knew this bloke would recognise him instantly from skim-reading a couple of chapters. Then again, there does seem to be an awful lot of evidence pointing at one player in particular…

There you go. Before you even know it, you’ve fallen into a trap. But so has The Secret Footballer – all this infantile, hucksterish hoo-ha detracts greatly from the content of a book which will be widely read and enjoyed but will, I’d have thought, be used as a kind of riddle, a puzzle without a prize. Whoever The Secret Footballer might be, he/she/it deserves better than that.

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