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The Oakwell years
by John Dennis and Matthew Murray
Wharncliffe Books, £12.99
Reviewed by Richard Darn 
From WSC 304 June 2012

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I met John Dennis once, in 1989. He was standing at the Oakwell office door wearing a moth-eaten wool jumper. At first I mistook him for the groundsman. He went on to defend Barnsley’s decision to sack manager Allan Clarke, the issue that had resulted in me writing an angry letter to the local paper and subsequently receiving a phonecall from the club. “Come down to the ground and we’ll have a chat,” they suggested. No words said then or written now in this autobiography by the ex-Barnsley chairman have altered my opinion on that question. Clarke was sacked for being an awkward guy to deal with, rather than for footballing reasons. But the incident was pivotal.

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Jörg Haider’s attempts to use football to further his own political career led to the destruction of three Austrian clubs, writes Paul Joyce

The Austrian state of Carinthia (Kärnten) is best known for being the political stronghold of Jörg Haider, the right-wing populist who died in a car accident in 2008. That the region is less well known for its football is also Haider’s legacy. The attempts by the former governor of Carinthia to use local sport as a publicity tool led to the demise of three different clubs and a series of criminal investigations.

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Instead of trying to mimic their richer neighbours, small clubs in Switzerland can succeed by serving their local communities, says Paul Knott

The normally sober francophone Swiss newspaper Le Temps was recently moved to ask whether there is any point in continuing with domestic professional football. The editorial in question was partly a howl of anguish at a calamitous season for the clubs in the paper’s catchment area. But it also raised a valid question about how clubs in the smaller European countries can remain viable when bigger outfits from elsewhere offer greater glamour by exploiting their status as “the most indebted clubs in the world”.

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Apparently Coventry City only had to win their five remaining home games to save themselves from relegation to League One, but that proved to be easier said than done, writes Ed Wilson

Forget fancy notions of skill and tactics. Relegation battles, the professionals tell us, are all about belief. Nobody – not the manager, players or supporters – believes Coventry can stay up more than the psychotically optimistic radio presenter I am listening to on the way to today’s game. For him, survival is almost guaranteed. “All we have to do,” he insists, “is win our remaining five home games.” He is not deflated by the knowledge they have managed only seven victories all season. They are due a change of fortune. You begin to wonder what it would take to undermine his chirpiness. His wife could ask for a divorce during Donna and Althea’s Uptown Top Ranking and he would be back on air seconds later, joshing his way through the traffic and travel.

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The fortunes of Sheffield Wednesday and the club’s former chairman, Dave Richards, have differed wildly in the past 20 years, writes Tom Hocking

When Bert McGee, who had been the Sheffield Wednesday chairman since the mid-1970s, stepped down in 1990, it was left to a local businessman and fan of the club, Dave Richards, to continue his predecessor’s good work. Over the following two decades, Richards’s rise in football was as meteoric as Wednesday’s fall. The contrast has been so remarkable it prompted the Guardian’s David Conn to call Wednesday “the picture of Dorian Gray in Sir Dave Richards’s attic”.

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