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by Guillem Balague
Orion, £20
Reviewed by Tim Stannard
From WSC 313 March 2013

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If Pep Guardiola thought a sabbatical year spent hiding in plain sight in New York would offer a much needed respite from football, he was being a touch naive. Over four hairline-damaging years, Guardiola was in the news for what he had won with Barcelona. Since announcing his departure from the Nou Camp in April 2012, headlines have been dominated by what Guardiola might achieve next. The news that Bayern Munich are set to be the next port of call merely quadrupled the chatter, such is the fascination with the future of the former Barça boss.

In Another Way Of Winning, Spanish football journalist Guillem Balague offers a timely indication of whether Guardiola will ever be able to repeat his La Liga success in the Bundesliga. As well as recalling a stereotypical fairytale story of a gangly Nou Camp ballboy becoming the Barcelona boss via an outstanding playing career, the biography attempts to dissect Guardiola’s psyche to discover how a managerial rookie transformed Barça into one of the best club teams in the history of football.

Through testimonials from friends, colleagues, players and Guardiola himself, Balague describes a contradictory character who has both enormous confidence in his coaching abilities and philosophies on football, as well as frequent moments of self doubt and insecurity. Guardiola struggled to cope with conflict and confrontation, a necessary evil of his job, but still had the courage to jettison dressing room heavyweights such as Ronaldinho, Samuel Eto’o, Deco and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, for the simple reason that he had no connection or “feeling” 
with the players.

For an emotional personality, handling the expectations of supporters and media demanding constant success, keeping the team’s tactics fresh, the endless provocation from José Mourinho and the illnesses suffered by Éric Abidal and Tito Vilanova took too much of a toll. Guardiola struggled to separate his personal life from the job, a feat that one of his mentors in the game, Alex Ferguson (who writes the introduction), has been able to achieve. The physical transformation of the former Barça boss between his first and last day at his job is startling.

While the question of why Guardiola left the best club in the world was an easy one to answer for Balague, the poser of whether his success can be repeated elsewhere is a tougher one to tackle. The answer is positive. Guardiola did have outstanding talents at his disposal but his development of Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets, Pedro and to some extent the transformation of Lionel Messi into a pure goalscorer are often overlooked. As are the absolute commitment and passion that Guardiola would bring to any role.

Trying to break down the inner workings of someone’s psyche is a tough ask, especially one as complex as Guardiola who himself struggles to live with his conflicting characteristics. Nonetheless, Balague’s attempt is an intriguing and enlightening read on a figure who is still only in his early 40s and whose next challenge is about to begin.

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General rules

Accents
Put them in on French, German, Spanish and Portuguese words where we’re certain they’re right. Leave them off all other languages except in occasional instances when it’s polite, eg with a contributor’s name. Use discretion when the whole article contains accents and they are definitely correct and consistent. Leave them off common English words like cliche and protege. But do put them on words that could otherwise be confusing eg exposé.

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How the English Premier League came to dominate the world
by Mihir Bose
Marshall Cavendish Business, £14.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 311 January 2013

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Mihir Bose is an authentic journalistic heavyweight. Before becoming the BBC’s first sports editor he made his mark as Britain’s pioneer of serious sports business journalism. He has been ringside for every major sports story of the past 30 years and ranges well beyond that, with a catalogue including subjects such as Bollywood, the financial crash of 1987-88 and Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation).

So it is hard to think of anybody better qualified to attempt a definitive account of the Premier League. Sadly the attempt rather fails – maybe he knows too much. Some detail, like the reminder that Sky were forced by smaller clubs on the giants, who generally favoured ITV, is highly relevant. Much more is head-spinningly complex and some – such as what was eaten at important lunches – simply unnecessary.

It is oddly structured, with a long diversion into essays on Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho. None is bad in itself, and Ferguson is vividly portrayed, but in covering such excessively well-trodden ground the narrative loses a momentum it never really regains.

It starts badly with a chapter on football in the 1980s that fails to address the fact that crowds rose steadily from their 1986 lowpoint, making it possible that the Premier League inherited, rather than created, the upturn, and mentions the 1990 World Cup only in passing. If he is to convince that football was irredeemably horrible then he needs better witnesses than Tim Lovejoy and Piers Morgan. Hearing that a teenage Piers was clocked by a pint of piss at Highbury in 1983 will make more readers cheer than wince.

That typifies a problem with sources. Bose is not an unconditional admirer of the league but he appears not to have read its most cogent critics – the bibliography cites GQ and a welter of biographies but nothing by the Guardian‘s David Conn.

He has little time for organised fans and is critical of Manchester United’s followers, while giving plenty of space to City advocates for the Glazers. Those voices are worth hearing but they’ll have to do better than arguing that “If the Glazers walk away from United tomorrow, United is a sustainable business. You haven’t got an uneconomic club like Chelsea”, entirely ignoring that “a sustainable business” is what the Glazers took over.

Similarly, quoting figures to show that Wigan’s turnover is proportionately closer to United’s than it used to be ignores that one club has risen three divisions while the other stayed where it was. Numbers purporting to prove that the Premier League is outpacing its rivals actually show La Liga and the Bundesliga keeping up in absolute terms and making ground proportionately.

Apparently written in haste, this book desperately needed a rigorous editor. There’s a decent read in here somewhere, probably around two-thirds the length plus the index which, unforgivably for a serious factual work, this lacks.

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WSC advent calendar day 15

Construction began on the Stadion an der Gellerstrasse in July 1933, on former horseriding grounds to the north-west of the German city of Chemnitz. When it was opened in 1934 over 25,000 people crammed in to watch the first match there between PSV Chemnitz and SpVgg Greuther Fürth, which finished 5-1 to the home side. It now has an official capacity of 16,061 and is home to Chemnitzer FC of the 3rd Liga.

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Sex, booze and sendings off: The life of Britain’s wildest footballer
by Roy McDonough with Bernie Friend
Vision Sports, £12.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 309 November 2012

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The football hard man is still a familiar figure, even if he is receding increasingly quickly into the game’s recent past. Popular culture tends to remember those who played at the highest level, where violent tackles and unsavoury moustaches were brought to a national television audience. For every Graeme Souness or Tommy Smith there were less well-known contemporaries in the the lower leagues. One such player was Roy McDonough, who accumulated a British record 22 early baths.

Apparently assembled from a bin of spare “Soccer’s Hard Men” tropes (the mullet and tache, the drinking and womanising, the failed marriage, the distant father he’s desperate to impress) McDonough is such an unrelenting stereotype that the obligatory career photos have presumably been included to reassure readers that they are not the victims of an elaborate spoof. Driven by limitless quantities of self-belief and an almost psychotic relish for physical confrontation, McDonough played just two first-team games during unhappy spells as a centre-forward at Aston Villa, Birmingham City and Chelsea. At the age of 22 he claims to have made a conscious decision to cruise through lower-league football as a way of funding his fondness for nightclubs.

A man who once promised a horrified physio that he would cut down to “just” 70 pints a week should be heading for a spectacular fall but it is the tragic suicide of Colchester team-mate John Lyons that, briefly, throws the boozing and one-night stands into stark relief. Alcohol permeates almost every page of this book but alcoholism is mentioned only once – when McDonough categorically rejects it as a description of his own drinking.

He is more honest in recounting the football side of his career, with team-mates, opponents, referees, supporters, managers and boardroom “suits” all subjected to withering assessments. There’s also a refreshing lack of dressing room omerta. It’s doubtful that Mark Kinsella will thank him for revealing a teenage fling with his landlady, though McDonough stops short of naming the team-mate who goaded Ian Holloway on the pitch by insulting his cancer-stricken wife.

He’s generous to those he respects too, without ever allowing it to affect his behaviour during a game. He idolises Southend boss Bobby Moore and when the manager gets wind of an unsettled score with Newport County’s Tony Pulis he pleads with McDonough not to let the team down. He is duly sent off after just seven minutes following a self-confessed attempt to decapitate the future Stoke manager.

Ghostwriter Bernie Friend has a great eye for period detail (there has surely never been a more evocatively named central-defensive partnership than Peterborough’s Neil Firm and Trevor Slack) and there are hilarious insights into some of the more eccentric characters of the era: Exeter boss Jim Iley’s fondness for games of hide and seek during training, for instance. In describing McDonough’s nocturnal activities the book occasionally slips into the kind of graphic detail that wouldn’t be out of place on the top shelf of a backstreet 1980s newsagent but this is still a fascinating voyage through a career described as “a violent trawl through the rough seas of the lower divisions”.

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