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Ledley King: My autobiography
by Ledley King 
and Mat Snow
Quercus, £18.99
Reviewed by Alan Fisher
From WSC 328 June 2014

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The title of the opening chapter of Ledley King’s autobiography sums it up in two little words: “What If?” He was the perfect contemporary centre-half, with pace, strength, total application and his trademark timing in the tackle as he eased the ball away from onrushing forwards. It was a talent that should have brought him worldwide fame. Instead he spent half his career on the treatment table.

His fortitude in pain and loyalty to the only club he has ever played for has earned him the enduring respect of Spurs fans. An unending saga of breakdown and comeback meant his hopes were rebuilt then crushed as often as his knee, yet King does not show a trace of self-pity; despite agony, disappointment and upheaval at his club, he was grateful for the chance to play.

For virtually half his career King did not train. When his knee was rebuilt, he remodelled his running style. One report suggested that toward the end, his knee was so bad he couldn’t have a garden kickabout with his young son yet come matchday he was often a match for the very best.

Co-author, journalist and Spurs fan Mat Snow utilises a conversational style which gives the book a sense of authenticity, especially in the early passages about King’s upbringing on an east London council estate by a single mother and surrounded by a supportive network of family friends. King has some interesting reflections on the fine margins between success and failure at this level, concluding that attitude and family stability are more significant than ability.

It seems to be out of character to be critical of those around him so expect few revelations. Nonetheless, King sheds some light on the footballing culture differences between Fabio Capello and his squad and confirms years of managerial turmoil at Tottenham, with Glenn Hoddle distant and unable to communicate while first-team coaches Martin Jol and Gus Poyet actively undermined their managers, Jacques Santini and Juande Ramos respectively.

While there’s plenty of interest to Spurs supporters, King played during a largely undistinguished period in the history of club and country so other potential readers may be deterred by a book where the highlight is a League Cup final win and a world tour of physiotherapists. Gradually the dreary routine of daily treatment catches up on body and mind. He plays down the two nightclub altercations that thrust him uncharacteristically into the headlines but there’s no doubt they were linked to the loss of what had mattered most to him since he was a boy – the realisation that he can’t play on and the end of his camaraderie with team-mates. If King has regrets, he hides them well. It’s left to the reader to speculate about those “what ifs?” on his behalf.

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by The Secret Footballer
Guardian Faber, £12.99
Reviewed by John Earls
From WSC 328 June 2014

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At the end of 2012’s entertaining first volume, the Secret Footballer (TSF) was binge-eating in a deliberate attempt to end his career. Nearly 18 months later he’s still playing, although the nature of his increasingly tiresome secret identity means it’s hard to gauge at what level. This time round, he’s still trying to fathom an alternative career, but his loathing of football’s machinations is making it hard to pick one.

It’s tricky to work out who TSF has most contempt for. He dismisses fans for being clueless about what really goes on in football (ironic, as his previous book was marketed as letting us rubes acquire such insider knowledge). But he also wants to avoid managing, as that involves dealing with annoying players who need constant mollycoddling “like me”. Yet the book is at its best when discussing coaching, as our man eloquently explains various tactics while taking his badges. A section on the FA’s centre of excellence is also revealing – it’s superbly stocked but effectively useless as poor design means physios can’t actually see injured 
players using the equipment.

Such nuggets mean it hurries along and mostly avoids feeling like offcuts not good enough for the first book, bar a pointless chapter on why his favourite player is Paul Gascoigne. Fairly conclusive evidence shortly before publication appeared to reveal TSF is Dave Kitson. So you feel conflicted when reading about an inept chairman trying to get players to waive their wages, wondering which of Kitson’s clubs it’s referring to. Or is it not Kitson, and we’re unfair in assuming it’s Portsmouth?

There is more about TSF’s personal life than before, but his vague identity means it’s hard to care about a relatively routine teenage MDMA comedown when you don’t know who’s enduring it. Whoever TSF is, he comes across as more boorish than the first book’s apparently cultured aesthete. A tale about crashing a yacht with four newly met women on board is told in a spirit of laddish high-jinx, but is as crass and misogynistic as anything TSF’s nemesis Ashley Cole could create. Nor do constant moans about paying tax make the reader think the author could be mistaken for Noam Chomsky. Every moving passage about depression is countered by one leering at players cheating on their partners. It would have been a more effective book if TSF had dropped the S, stopped trying to be a Popbitch-style nark and gone into more detail about his complex attitudes to football and his own driven nature.

If you’re after further gossipy froth such as the League Two club who cry poverty every close season yet pay their manager three times more than the rest of the division, then TSF has triumphed again. But this book’s main aftertaste is one of unease. This self-entitled author feels too liberal to bond with most of his fellow players, which paints a more undernourished image of football’s culture than any number of tabloid splashes.

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Partizan pleasure, pain and paranoia
by James Moor
Pitch Publishing, £12.99
Reviewed by Marcus Haydon
From WSC 322 December 2013

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The collapse of communist-era structures had a profound effect on football in central and eastern Europe, but the ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia created even deeper fault lines. Modern-day Serbia, which was home to Europe’s best team 22 years ago, now has the continent’s 25th best (or 29th worst, depending on your perspective) league according to the UEFA coefficients. Its historic powers, Partizan and Red Star Belgrade, perpetually battle for supremacy in a competition whose numbers are topped up by minnows from the country’s provinces and capital’s suburbs.

With the competitiveness of the Yugoslav era gone, the corruption and off-field problems that blight the game seem to carry added importance. Clubs are no longer arms of the state but continue to be exploited for political and commercial reasons. On the terraces xenophobia is a persistent issue, leading to attacks founded on race or, as is more common in this part of Europe, ethnicity. For James Moor, an Arsenal fan posted in Belgrade by the Foreign Office, football presented him with a conduit through which to observe and attempt to decode Serbia’s complexities. Initially it is his way of making local friends – it is they who are responsible for his allegiance to Partizan – but it ends up taking him across the country to experience firsthand the varied ethnic tapestry and supporter culture.

The book is presented chronologically, following Partizan during a season in which they are eliminated from the Champions League qualifiers by Shamrock Rovers, lose three times to rivals Red Star, sack their management team mid-season and see their two main supporters’ groups at constant loggerheads. Oh, and they win the league. Taking his posting seriously, Moor engages quickly with the country and its language, and while his anecdotes about watching Arsenal title successes on television and a clumsy description of the “English Championship League One” can leave you suspicious of his credentials, he makes up for it in the context of his new surroundings with a strong awareness of regional history and contemporary politics. A trip to Novi Pazar, where the population has a Bosniak (Slav Muslim) majority, is carefully framed with valuable non-footballing context and his detailed translations of chants, banners and terrace conversations add cultural currency to what are otherwise just descriptions of Serbian league matches from two years ago.

Despite making a living from diplomacy, Moor manages to avoid the occupational trait of using a great number of words to say very little of note on complex or controversial issues. Equally, he is also not guilty of simply feeding the reader polemics from his terrace acquaintances without first coupling them with some objective analysis of his own. The prose can at times get drawn a little too much into the “banter” of the matchday experience – a questionably large number of things are “awesome” – but the enduring feeling is that it’s heartening to see work such as this published.

As Jonathan Wilson points out in the foreword, this is essentially “a book about the second most famous team in Belgrade” and, accordingly, both Moor and his publisher deserve great credit for bringing it to print at all. Hopefully the knowledge and insight offered in this example will inspire more publishers to show similar faith.

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A life in the 
football wilderness
by Justin Bryant
Bennion Kearny, £6.99
Reviewed by Ian Plenderleith
From WSC 320 October 2013

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Unknown American goalkeeper Justin Bryant begins his memoir in the middle of a nature reserve watching alligators, describing the “sheer improbability [of] these Jurassic river dragons”. That’s the first thing that strikes you about Bryant – he doesn’t need a ghostwriter. And he’d be the first to admit that’s just as well, because his football career didn’t pay him enough to afford one.

There have been a good number of books by lower-level players in recent years describing the nitty-gritty of life at the game’s hard end, and long may struggling ex-pros continue to counter the egregious banality of the mailed-in Premier League star’s cynical book, hacked out in a few days for a six-figure advance. Small Time is an excellent prototype for any former player with a good story to tell. Bryant is honest, thoughtful, economic and introspective enough to realise his own shortcomings as a player and a person.

Growing up a fan of the Tampa Bay Rowdies in the North American Soccer League, and idolising goalkeeper Winston DuBose, Bryant becomes a decent high school goalkeeper and wins a scholarship to Radford University in Virginia. There his “sudden, terrible temper” during games wins him few friends and his scholarship is rescinded because of low grades. He returns to Florida, “a college flameout with no job”, and starts to play for the Orlando Lions, a team of college and ex-pro players that includes DuBose. From here on it’s a fragmented, frustrated career that takes him to various clubs including Brentford, Boreham Wood and Dunfermline Athletic, punctuated by spells back in Florida, all the time on low wages (if he gets paid at all), working supplementary menial jobs, and indulging in sporadic bouts of heavy drinking to drown his self-doubt.

While there are just enough glimpses of success and professional satisfaction to keep him motivated, Bryant’s career suffers because of his unwillingness to put in the extra training he knows is necessary to improve and impress, and because of his chronic pre-game nerves. His crippling fear of making an error and costing his team the game – a full-time burden that only a goalkeeper has to bear – leads to a debilitating, and undiagnosed, stomach condition that he carries with him for years and which only subsides when he steps back from football. Making a comeback for the Lions in his 30s after being lured by the prospect of $50 a game just for sitting on the bench, Bryant suddenly finds he is the first-choice keeper and writes: “My gut rippled with excitement and dread, a feeling I hadn’t had in years. Nothing about it was pleasant.” When he plays well, he’s above all else “relieved that I hadn’t made an idiot of myself”.

However, there’s far more to this book than the author’s insecurities. This is a finely written chronicle of butt-end semi-pro football, its moronic dressing-room culture, the tedium of travel, the philosophy of goalkeeping, the political perils of ever-changing coaches and team-mates and the constant, pressing need to prove yourself, game after game, only to realise after several years that “being part of a team… apparently didn’t suit my personality”. Being a writer, though, clearly does.

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In 
Britain And Ireland
by Shaun Tyas
Paul Watkins, £19.95
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 319 September 2013

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Shaun Tyas opens a new area in the examination of the minutiae of football culture. We’ve had stadiums, haircuts, kits, programmes, even Subbuteo; why not club nicknames? I would not have thought that it was an overly promising proposition but by dint of thorough desk research, extensive use of Wikipedia and taking the whole of the British Isles (including Isle of Man) as his canvas he generates over 350 pages of entries. He quotes a beautiful 19th-century aphorism – “a nickname is a biography in a word” – as a kind of justification for the study. Not only do so many clubs share the same nickname (I note to my surprise 11 cases of the Royals) but some clubs have many nicknames.

The main entertainment value lies in the archaic and the unofficial nicknames rather than the official and the well-known stories. To give an idea of the scope here are all the nicknames he found associated with Bristol City: Babes, Cider Army, City, Eighty-Twoers, Reds, Robins, Slave Traders, Turnips and Wurzels. As you might well imagine a number of these have been bestowed by fans of rival clubs and are sourced from a 2003 fans’ survey. Old football annuals and cigarette cards provide much of the source material.

Tyas has tackled his subject more from the top down – that is using official and often national sources, rather than from individual club histories and fan interviews. The inevitable and forgivable consequence is some omissions, common to the first edition of any dictionary. For instance, Reading have also been known as the R’s which has mutated into URZ and been in common usage over the past decade; the apparently unknown derivation of Spanners (a Charlton nickname for Millwall) dates to a spanner-throwing incident at Elm Park in August 1995.

Small gaps perhaps but Tyas has approached his task in a determinedly scholarly way with a full complement of appendices, indices, bibliography and cross-references that allow the reader to skip easily around the main body of the text. If that were not sufficient he offers a detailed four-step classification of nicknames into 50 categories so that in “name-based on locality/human history/language/proverbial sayings” you will find “The Bairns” (Falkirk) and three possible derivations thereof.

There are times when one could feel that this is a lightweight subject taken rather too seriously but then nobody nowadays would dismiss the 1960s folklore work of Peter and Iona Opie on children’s nursery rhymes and playground games which at the time may have appeared inconsequential. Moreover, while Tyas is methodical and, as far as I can tell, factually very sound, he writes with real joy and positivity about his chosen subject. This dictionary is an entertaining volume to dip into and there cannot be a fan who would fail to learn something of interest or amusement. I’d never heard of the Old Farm derby (Norwich v Ipswich) or this neat, modern biography in a word: Jackburn for Blackburn.

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