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by Duncan Hamilton
Century, £14.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 313 March 2013

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A while ago at a book festival in Duncan Hamilton’s native Nottinghamshire I was asked why the literature of cricket tended towards nostalgia. The implication of the question was that the literature of other sports – football in particular – didn’t embrace the elegiac in quite the same way. I’d guess that’s true. Or at least it was until recently. The success of Gary Imlach’s excellent My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes, released in 2005, has proved that there is an audience for books about football that don’t simply focus on the here and now but drift back into the apparently perpetually mist-wreathed world of long ago. In football terms that is the 1950s (in cricket it would be the Edwardian era).

Duncan Hamilton’s The Footballer Who Could Fly follows two fine works on cricket and taps into a similar vein to Imlach’s book. It’s not just about football but also fathers and sons. Jim Hamilton was a Scottish pitman, an adopted Geordie who was forced by colliery closures to move to Nottinghamshire. He is laconic, his relationship with his stammering only child carried out more or less entirely through conversations about football: “Without football we were strangers under the same roof,” Hamilton observes.

From the opening account of a walk along the Tyne to Frank Brennan’s sports shop, the pages of The Footballer Who Could Fly – who was, as no Newcastle fan will need telling, Wyn “The Leap” Davies – are so rich with nostalgia that if you sniff them you can smell woodbines, blended Scotch, brown ale, coal smoke and the whiff of crushed expectations.

Hamilton senior idolises Jackie Milburn, a man so shy and self-deprecating public adulation seems to cause him almost physical pain (as the author discovers when he sits next to him one day in the St James’ Park press box and tries to engage him in conversation). He has great admiration too for Milburn’s nephew Bobby Charlton and there is a fine moment when, during a spell as a barman (one of Jim Hamilton’s many unsuccessful attempts to escape from a life underground), Jim Baxter spends an afternoon of lonely drinking in the rural pub where he’s working. Baxter, the father tells his son, does not seem to dwell on what might have been, which is just as well since: “If he’d thought too much about what he might have done with that talent I’m sure he would have driven himself mad.”

Though there’s a welcome and pithy assault on the vindictive way Newcastle chairman Stan Seymour treated long-serving centre-half Frank Brennan, generally the opinions of both Hamiltons don’t wander far from the orthodox. You know that when Bobby Moore appears you are going to find out that he wasn’t very quick but he could read the game superbly (which is true enough, clearly). But familiarity is what we want from nostalgia. If you are over 45, reading The Footballer Who Could Fly is the literary equivalent of tucking into a big bowl of treacle sponge and custard. It isn’t going to change anything but on a cold winter night it may be just what you need.

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by Richard Purden
Hachette Scotland, £8.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 311 January 2013

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Even Celtic supporters – some of us, anyway – are often irritated by the self-mythologising flannel regularly parped out by sections of the club’s fanbase. “A cause”, “a rebel club”, “different”: all these claims are routinely made, with not very much at all to back them up. At face value, Richard Purden’s collection of interviews with Celtic fans – some famous, some not – looks like an attempt to perpetuate this sort of empty puffery. There’s more to it than that, though, and Purden shows plenty of imagination in his choices of interviewee. One of the best chapters in the book is a conversation with Roberto Longobardi, a longstanding Celtic fan from Rome who is so dedicated he visited the grave of Johnny Doyle, a winger who died aged 30 in 1981, during an away trip to Kilmarnock.

Longobardi cannot stress enough how much he detests the “shameful” Paolo di Canio, who is still held in high regard by a lot of Celts. “The only thing worse than a mercenary is a fascist,” he says. “We shouldn’t celebrate Di Canio’s time at Celtic because the Nazis and the Holocaust still hang over us.” He also tells Purden that Enrico Annoni, a “very good servant”, took the time to learn about the club’s history; unlike Massimo Donati, who, when unable to answer Longobardi’s questions about Celtic, mumbled sheepishly: “I don’t live in Glasgow.”

Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr contributes a predictable but entertaining fusillade against the commercialisation of modern football, noting that “we know far too much” about the players’ wage packets and wives. He likens a pre-game ritual to a pre-gig one, not wanting to let the people down. Eddi Reader of Fairground Attraction tells how she tracked down her father’s old Rangers-supporting friends in a hardcore Bluenose pub. Composer James Macmillan’s heartfelt declaration that Catholicism is intrinsic to understanding the whole Celtic thing might raise eyebrows among those who regard the club as open to all.

Pat Nevin’s is the most distanced perspective, having started off as a Bhoys fan and ended up following Hibs. For some reason, he detests Martin O’Neill’s hugely successful 2000-05 side, deriding them as unwatchable and a “slightly more sophisticated version of [Wimbledon]”. Nevin claims incorrectly that the gifted Lubo Moravcik was frozen out: in fact, Moravcik played in two-thirds of league games under O’Neill then retired, not because he had been pushed to the margins by beefy-thighed warriors, but because he was 36 years old.

A few errors have slipped through, such as when Purden writes that Dermot “the Kaiser” Desmond is worth “145 billion euro”, a decimal point having vanished two points to the east at the crucial moment. He goes on to say that a “financial stake in Celtic isn’t just business”. Gordon Strachan, who was crucially denied the £800,000 required to sign Steven Fletcher in 2009, might disagree. Those aside, this is a diverting enough read, even if a number of the contributions stray the wrong side of maudlin, uncritical adoration.

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A long-suffering supporter’s search for the soul of Scottish football
by Iain Hyslop
Luath Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Archie MacGregor
From WSC 308 October 2012

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The tumultuous events of the last few months in Scottish football have made any effort to offer a narrative on the longer term implications a hazardous affair, even for those providing the most up to the minute commentaries on the unfolding litany of farce, ultimatums and actual drama. Pity then Iain Hyslop, who set out the season before last to research and write this overview on the state of the Scottish game. Though he has tried manfully to keep his manuscript as up to date possible by adding brief references here and there on the Ibrox crisis, the sheer pace and scale of what has taken place leave his efforts looking hopelessly Canute-like.

Hyslop is actually a Rangers fan himself and the downfall of his club fowled by the emergence of “Newco” has served up several unforeseen ironies, not least the fact that here is a Rangers follower undertaking a safari tour of the grounds of all 42 senior clubs in Scotland. Like most of us he probably never imagined that his team would soon be following in his footsteps, paying visits to Annan, Berwick and Montrose.

Hyslop makes the case for some radical changes to the structure of the Scottish game, including that hardy annual suggestion – League reconstruction. In a desperately cynical throw of the dice, the chief executives of the SPL and SFA, Neil Doncaster and Stewart Regan, belatedly embraced all manner of changes to the league structure but only as a means of facilitating a soft landing for Rangers into Division One. The days of smoke-filled rooms having long since gone, everyone saw through that one.

Unfortunately it is not just the aftermath of the Rangers saga that leaves a sense of things not quite hitting the mark with this book. The format of visiting all the League grounds in Scotland has been just about done to death in recent years and observations about run-down facilities and sub-standard catering are hardly revelatory. There is little colour or insight afforded on the individual clubs, so the reader might as well head for the last 20 pages and consider Hyslop’s suggested prescription for getting Scottish football off its knees.

Even here there is a sense of frustration. Few would disagree with clubs developing stronger ties with their local communities, greater supporter involvement or reduced admission prices. Rather than taking up space describing the texture of meat pies and cost of Bovril around the country, however, it would have been far more informative to have spent time examining why these worthy initiatives have worked at some clubs, but not in all instances. If summer football is indeed the way ahead why not take stock of the impact it has had on the League of Ireland? If earlier kick-offs really are more supporter-friendly as the author suggests, surely put it to the test by canvassing some opinions? The baw may not be burst, but the reader is certainly left more than a tad deflated.

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Mark Poole on the controversy which should lead to the SFA updating their disciplinary procedures

Video evidence is all the rage. It seems that every time a manager or pundit is unhappy with a decision they ask why we cannot use video evidence, at least to retrospectively punish the opposition. The Scottish Football Association (SFA) are addressing the issue.

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A new documentary about QPR makes or fascinating if not flattering viewing, writes Anthony Hobbs

The Four Year Plan is a fly-on-the-wall account of a turbulent period of QPR’s history, following our takeover by wealthy backers, in particular one Flavio Briatore. Over three seasons, the film plots a path through boardroom-generated mayhem, destruction and chaos, before somehow delivering a happy ending with Rangers’ promotion to the Premier League.

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