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Stories

Sven: My Story

323 Svenby Sven-Göran Eriksson
Headline, £20
Reviewed by Barney Ronay
From WSC 323 January 2014

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When it comes to blockbusting autumn autobiographies this was always destined to be the Other One. Ah, Sven. Is there a more glazed, jaded and – here at least – unexpectedly fascinating major player in English football’s most recent decade of plenty? Sven-Göran Eriksson may not have Alex Ferguson’s trophy haul, planetary-scale publisher’s advance or enduring sense of heft. He may have spent the last five seasons in retreat from the years of Peak Sven, when he seemed permanently ensconced among the sober suited managerial elite, catnip to the billionaire, darling of the tabloids, golden-handshaked by assorted FAs and fossil-fuel newbie-powers.

He may have emerged at the end of it all, at least judging by Sven: My Story, as an oddly chastened and soulful one-time master of the universe, assailed not just by law suits and malevolent ex-girlfriends but by doubts, fears and regrets. But he definitely has the more interesting book, and by some distance too. In fact My Story is a genuine treat from its oddly fractured opening pages, all present tense and angsty, existential regret – “it is early December and the first snow has just arrived” – the football manager’s autobiography as reimagined by Bret Easton Ellis.

As early as page six we find Sven being swindled out of his fortune by a financial adviser and dismissing Nancy Dell’Olio with “We met in Rome during my time at Lazio. She was irresistible, then”. This is the familiar softly spoken, equivocal Sven, but fretted now with melancholy and producing after some delicately sketched lines on his childhood (“I was born into secrecy”) one of the more memorable football books of recent years.

There is a brilliant, and at times rather forgotten, managerial story in here: from the rise to precocious success at IFK Gothenburg, to glory in Portugal and Italy, to the initially giddy England years. There are plenty of laughs, many of them unintentional (as a young man Sven wrote a doctoral thesis on the 4-4-2 formation, and its unbending application in all circumstances). And there is footballing insight too, from the “revolution against individualism” of Sweden’s tactical awakening in the 1970s (sped by the young Roy Hodgson), through Sven’s dealings with Boniek, Baggio, Beckham and the rest.

Plus there is of course lots of sex. Before long we’re hearing about Sven’s first girlfriend whose father “ran a support group for people who had been caught shooting moose illegally”. Later indiscretions include the occasion Sven was discovered reclining nude on the sofa of a cuckolded husband and ended up walking home through the streets of Stockholm without his trousers, through the familiar tabloid narrative of Nancy, Ulrika Jonsson and assorted others.

Throughout it is a strangely taut and vulnerable account, with a jarring skin of honesty. This is not so much a football book as the story of a man trapped in a series of scenes, a machinery of desire and ambition that seems at times to have overwhelmed him. Towards the end, while coaching in China, Sven describes going out for a bicycle ride on his own just after reading the proofs of My Story for the first time. “I felt depressed. Where had the years gone? My children? Friends? The women? Time? It hurt to think back.”

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Manchester United ~ Rising from the wreckage

321 ManUtd1958-68
by Iain McCartney
Amberley Books, £25
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 320 October 2013

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Whatever the other flaws of Manchester United: Rising from the wreckage 1958-68, you can’t accuse Iain McCartney of not putting in the hard yards. Don’t be fooled by the fact that it’s 350 pages in length: that figure could easily have been considerably higher, had the typesetter been only slightly more generous with the font size and spacing.

Books on the Munich disaster aren’t hard to come by. McCartney himself already has one to his credit, a well-reviewed biography of Roger Byrne, the United captain who died in the crash with 22 other people. This one is clearly his final word on the subject. Each page is crammed full of microscopic detail, from George Best’s car windscreen being defaced with lipstick by a lovelorn female fan, to the price of touted tickets for the Cup final, to assistant manager Jimmy Murphy’s preferred at-home listening (Chopin and Grieg).

McCartney must effectively have lived in the cuttings library for months to amass this much material. In its own way, the deluge of information reaches critical mass – and it’s not helped by the lack of subheadings to break up the text, meaning that the whole thing feels like a slog at times.

We all already know the narrative: the emotional aftershock of the crash, the slow rebuilding, the many painful defeats, the shaping of talented young players into gods of the game, the regaining of the title in 1965, won again two years later, the coronation against Benfica in 1968. McCartney uses the 1963 FA Cup final, in which United beat Leicester 3-1, as the turning point. The team narrowly avoided relegation that same month, finishing 19th, with many players still not psychologically recovered from Munich, dressing-room recriminations abounding (Noel Cantwell reputedly led the player-power faction) and Jack Crompton’s coaching methods being soundly criticised. It’s a reminder of how easily everything could have turned out differently.

With so much information crammed in, the prose tends towards the dryly matter-of-fact. Perhaps unavoidably, it settles into a laundry-list of match after match and win after win (though it never resorts to the Lego-brick approach of David Peace’s scarcely readable Red Or Dead). At times, it reads as if it were written in the late 1950s themselves. Perhaps this is McCartney’s way of getting into the spirit of the thing, eschewing the pseudy floweriness of so much current football writing for a just-the-facts approach that better suits the subject matter. Or perhaps that’s just the way he writes: not having read the Byrne book, it’s difficult to tell.

Despite its occasional drabness, it’s not hard to imagine Manchester United: Rising from the wreckage 1958-68 becoming the set text on the subject matter. If nothing else, it’s a remarkable feat of research and hugely admirable as an important contribution to the historical record – even if it’s not always easy to love as a piece of writing.

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Sir Walter Winterbottom

317 WinterbottomThe 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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Viva Sabella!

315 SabellaFrom 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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Surplus stock

wsc305Manchester City are the new champions but, as Tony Curran explains, their unethical hoarding of players has tarnished their Premier League victory

Harry Dowd was a goalkeeper who played for Manchester City during their glory years of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  He was a reasonable keeper but apparently an excellent plumber. Legend has it that he used to negotiate job offers with crowd members behind his goal, offering competitive rates for bathroom re-fits when play was at the other end.

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