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The Albert Johanneson story
by Paul Harrison
Vertical, £15.99
Reviewed by Ashley Clark
From WSC 306 August 2012

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Paul Harrison’s The Black Flash attempts, through a combination of autobiography, oral history and the author’s own observation, to unspool the tragic tale of Albert Johanneson. The South African-born Leeds United forward endured racism on and off the field, became the first black footballer to play in an FA Cup final (in 1965), and eventually succumbed to alcoholism and an early death in 1995.

The meat of this frequently depressing but compelling book is comprised of large chunks of unexpurgated testimony from Johanneson, framed by explanatory passages from Harrison. It is at its best when its subject’s voice is at the forefront.

Johanneson, looking back on his life following the collapse of his career, paints a vividly evocative picture of his youth in a divided South Africa, where racist violence was commonplace and police were viewed as little more than “paid killers”.

Johanneson was scouted and offered the opportunity to play in England but as soon as he stepped off the plane he was branded a “nigger” by a passerby at London Airport. Though team-mates Billy Bremner and Grenville Hair looked out for him, and he found a friend in fellow black South African Gerry Francis, the impression is of a lonely, shy soul thrown to the wolves.

It is harrowing to read about the constant abuse Johanneson received. It is not difficult to imagine how the deep psychological scars from this continued mistreatment might have contributed to his eventual fate.

Though Harrison is clearly reluctant to demonise his Leeds heroes – including Don Revie, who comes across as a cold bully – The Black Flash paints a grim picture of a wider footballing community who hadn’t the first idea how to engage seriously with the pressures faced by Johanneson.

Sadly, the book is beset by structural problems. Harrison is inclined to interject with his own largely irrelevant opinions on the state of modern football and subjects such as political correctness. Key elements of Johanneson’s experience (his marriage, divorce, descent into alcoholism and early death) are sprinted through in a matter of mere pages toward the book’s conclusion.

Though obtaining information must have been difficult – Johanneson was essentially a homeless drunk by the time of his death – and the man’s wishes not to discuss his family should be respected, the book feels as though it is missing a sizeable, vital element.

There is also a conspicuous lack of attention to detail. In one particularly flagrant case, a significant passage of Johanneson’s testimony is repeated twice within the space of 16 pages. The Black Flash feels like it has missed out on a final edit.

Despite its flaws, the books is a worthwhile, instructive and often shocking read, especially in the context of a challenging year for football, when racism has once again made headlines. Harrison’s decency and commitment shine through in a tale that adds flesh to the bones of the story of a key figure in British football history – a man who slipped through the cracks, but helped to pave the way for future black footballers.

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A journey through Spanish football
by Jimmy Burns
Simon & Schuster, £18.99
Reviewed by Dermot Corrigan
From WSC 305 July 2012

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The current golden era for Spain’s national team is also a boom time for publishers and authors producing books in English about the Spanish game. La Roja by Jimmy Burns is nicely timed for Euro 2012.

Burns has deeper links within Spanish society than most observers. His father Tom was a spy in Madrid during the Second World War and a Madrid metro station is named after his grandfather Gregorio Marañon. His closeness to issues outside sport soon emerges. Don Quixote shows up on page one and General Franco, ETA, recent president José Luis Zapatero and 19th century English travelwriter Richard Ford are all mentioned early on. None of them played much football, but they help argue that Spanish politics and culture shaped the country’s football team.

Whereas in Phil Ball’s Morbo you hear from taxi-drivers and local barmen, Burns draws in Federico García Lorca, Wilfred the Hairy and St Ignatius of Loyola. At times there are too many digressions into bullfighting theory and references to Quixote tilting at windmills. Another minor quibble is the recycling of anecdotes and interviews from Burns’s previous books on Barcelona, Diego Maradona and David Beckham. Ardal O’Hanlon’s thoughts on Catalan nationalism could have been left out.

But when a club president (Barcelona’s Josep Sunyol) can be shot for his political beliefs or a stadium can become the safest place for voicing political dissent (Athletic Bilbao’s San Mames), a broad approach makes sense. Many of the central influences on Spain’s footballing development, from Santiago Bernabéu to Johan Cruyff, were not shy about voicing strong political opinions. A paragraph in a football book that begins with the inauguration of Real Madrid’s new stadium and ends with a military coup is novel. The story of how Athletic players heard about the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Guernica while on a tour of France is moving.

Burns’s central point makes sense; Spain ditched its cultural and historical baggage, found its own football identity and suddenly became very, very good. For the entire 20th century, the national team was la furia Española – virile, aggressive and played by men with big cojones. When Luís Aragones changed the nickname to La Roja, some thought immediately of the losing “reds” from the civil war, but for Aragones it was just a colour like Italy’s Azzurri or Holland’s Oranje. Then Vicente del Bosque – from a republican family but a successful player and coach at Real Madrid – built his World Cup-winning team around a core of tiki-taka-loving Catalans.

The book is about this cultural shift. There are interviews with central figures, including Cruyff, Del Bosque, Jorge Valdano and Ladislav Kubala, but not much time is spent analysing tactics or youth systems. Burns’s central concern is not whether David Silva can play as a false nine, but how Spain’s football team represent the people (or peoples) found within its current borders. He succeeds in telling that story.

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The making of the greatest team in the world
by Graham Hunter
BackPage Press, £12.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien 
From WSC 304 June 2012

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Graham Hunter’s new book about Barcelona arrives at a moment when the European and Spanish champions have been looking noticeably shaky for the first time in almost four years, dropping some very cheap points against La Liga’s minnows and going out of the Champions League to Chelsea. The 2005 publication of a similar book about Real Madrid, John Carlin’s White Angels, was immediately followed by the Merengues embarking on one of the worst runs in their history, so the club will not thank Hunter for his timing.

Like Carlin’s book, this one adopts a distinctly obsequious and worshipful attitude to its subject. Barcelona might play the most satisfying football witnessed on European fields since the days of Michel Hidalgo’s France, but they have a habit of reducing those who write about them to mushy superlatives and awestruck religious conversions. There is a fair bit of that here too, the details of which I will spare you.

Still, Hunter is not purporting to offer up a warts-and-all exposé, though plenty of dirt is dished about the decay that enveloped Joan Laporta’s presidency after the 2006 Champions League triumph. He can be partly excused on the grounds that there is so much about Barcelona that can be praised: the breathtaking football, the far-sighted youth policy and, not least, their charismatic yet contemplative outgoing manager.

The summer of 2008, when Guardiola was appointed, is shown to be a pivotal point in Barcelona’s history, not just because of his subsequent extraordinary feats, but also because the club came very close to giving the job to José Mourinho, who was then, as he remains now, the club’s sourest foe. When interviewed by board members Txiki Begiristain and Marc Ingla, Mourinho gave a “dazzling” presentation, but blew it by scoffing at the idea he would have to water down his behaviour at Barcelona. “I just don’t like him,” Ingla said to Begiristain afterwards.

So Guardiola it was. A scarcely credible run of nine major trophies out of a possible 12 ensued. Hunter centres the book on this “man of vision”, who sits up all night watch- ing football videos, never drinks, cries after important wins and lost his remaining hair rapidly after taking the manager’s job, yet shows utter ruthlessness when panning players who are not up to it (such as the hapless Aliaksandr Hleb, Dmytro Chygrynskyi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who, for all his flicks and tricks, proved horribly ill-suited to Barcelona’s dizzyingly complex system).

This is not a biography of Guardiola, but he dominates the book. The chapters on the star players are much shorter and relatively unrevealing. Hunter based those chapters on face-to-face interviews, which sounds great in theory, but modern footballers give little away at the best of times. So you are left with a flawed but fascinating study of a team moulded very much in its manager’s image – a team that, its recent stumbles notwithstanding, has reshaped the technical limits of modern football in a way that scarcely seemed possible beforehand.

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If Matt Nation could relive his youth again he would like to be as mature as young footballers

As anybody who has ever read about footballers letting off fireworks in their bathroom, visiting nightspots midweek or doing any number of things involving shopping trolleys and trousers round the ankles knows, it is down to their “lack of maturity”. Footballers, who are often “cocooned” in “bubbles”, will simply not grow up because the clubs will not let them.

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After financial crises, the 2012 season could emerge as an unlikely success story for Peru’s Primera División, says Nick Dorrington

2011 was a terrible year for Peruvian football. The football federation’s flaccid attempts at regulating the financial difficulties suffered by the majority of first division clubs turned the national league into a farce. The death of Alianza Lima supporter Walter Oyarce, who was pushed off a stand by rival fans, highlighted the growing problem of football-related violence. Stricter enforcement was required if 2012 was to offer any improvement.

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