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Clough’s champion
by Roy McFarland and Will Price
Sportsbooks, £8.99
Reviewed by Charles Robinson
From WSC 331 September 2014

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Following a home defeat to Reading and a couple of beers, the young Tranmere Rovers defender Roy McFarland goes to bed. A couple of hours later he is woken up by his mum with the news that “there’s two men downstairs to see you, Roy, and one of them is Brian Clough”. The other, of course, is Derby County assistant Peter Taylor. As McFarland enters the kitchen in his striped pyjamas, “looking like a convict”, he finds that Clough has managed to charm Mr and Mrs McFarland, and the deal is already halfway done.

Roy is unconvinced and harbours hopes of playing for his boyhood club, Liverpool, but soon he will win two Championships with his new team, as well as 28 England caps in an international career cut short by injury. This is a player not unaware of his worth, not to mention stoical and unsentimental. Coming from a solidly affluent working-class background, McFarland initially rejects trials at Wolves and Tranmere, throwing away the invitation letters and instead taking up a job as a trainee accountant at a local tobacco company. The reader is left to wonder whether the game was in the young man’s blood from the beginning, but any reflection has to wait as McFarland’s career takes off.

And it really does take off. After signing as a professional with Tranmere on his 18th birthday, within a year he is captain of second-tier Derby, albeit for one initial game. In his second season the Rams are promoted and, already, McFarland can sense the “wind of change” blowing through the club. Soon, he is a Championship winner and England regular. Throughout, McFarland’s affection for Clough and Taylor, but especially the former, is evident, even as Clough descends into alcoholism, a subject that McFarland doesn’t shy away from and relates in the strictly matter-of-fact tone that characterises the whole book.

The event at the heart of McFarland’s story is the resignation of Clough and Taylor in October 1973. His insider view gives a fresh perspective to an incident which still breaks the hearts of Derby supporters and, evidently, McFarland himself. As the news filters through, he admits that his emotions were “all over the place”, thinking it “the end”, only two days before England’s 1-1 draw with Poland that meant they failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup. However, he simply resolves to get on with the job under new manager Dave Mackay, and soon after wins another Championship and more England caps.

The final chapters detail McFarland’s rather unspectacular managerial career, the highlights being a play-off final with Derby in 1994 and promotion with Burton Albion in 2009, having taken over from a Derby-bound Nigel Clough. As well as the short paragraphs and tales of dressing room “banter” that pockmark such autobiographies, the cliches and constant footballer-speak do grate. Like many of the matches detailed here, even McFarland’s wedding is “a great success”, and wife Lin puts in “a monumental shift” while giving birth to their first child. Nonetheless, the fascinating story of McFarland’s rise largely alongside Clough and Taylor is enough to see Derby fans and Cloughie completists through to the end.

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The teams that shaped our obsession
edited by Rob Macdonald and Adam Bushby
Ockley Books, £11.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 331 September 2014

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My Favourite Year, the 1993 anthology co-published by WSC and edited by Nick Hornby, celebrated like never before the obscure, personal details of how supporters become smitten. Superficially Falling for Football seems little more than an equivalent for the Twitter generation, those for whom Chris Waddle and inflatable bananas represent earliest memories. The bloggers deserve a wider audience, though, and talented writers and editors such as Rob Langham (The Two Unfortunates) and Ian King (Twohundredpercent) have forced complacent broadsheets to up their game.

A great strength of this new volume is its broader scope in both the teams and the backgrounds of their fans. It is a delight to witness Ash Hashim falling for Spain in 2002 – reassured about their World Cup prospects by her Welsh grandfather, while her Arabic mother cheers for South Korea – and then share in Glen Wilson’s memories of Rossington FC, the pit village club where his dad was manager, groundsman, secretary, coach, programme editor and substitute.

It’s intriguing, too, how the two distinct approaches to English fandom articulated here seem to analogise with social class. Broadly speaking it’s the working-class fan who adopts their parents’ club, while the neophyte who selects from a field is often freed up to do so by their roots in a white-collar family where no one likes football. The latter is embodied here by Alex Douglas – a Red unconnected to Manchester, who arrived with United via Sheffield Wednesday and Paris Saint-Germain – and his unintentionally hilarious question “Whom would I support?” Readers must decide for themselves whether it’s the sense of choice and entitlement or the painfully correct pronoun declension that makes this towering middle-class quandary such a hoot.

The quality of writing is variable, too, but the more capable authors find ways to avoid cliche. Daniel Grey pitches a curveball by focusing on the famous but fictitious Barnstoneworth United of Ripping Yarns infamy. We can assume that Stefano Gulizia’s academic treatise on Juventus and the naming of colours is a sort of intellectual joke (it quotes Jacques Derrida), but it contrives to enrich the volume while being entirely unreadable.

In the hands of the weaker writers, the short, blogpost-style chapters can become formulaic, sometimes wearyingly so. But there’s an authenticity about the ungainly prose here which some will find more satisfying than the slicker stuff, and older readers will be reassured to find resilience and continuity in the symbolic power of Bovril. Falling For Football finds new angles on football’s oldest story, and the good outweighs the bad. You’ll probably know someone who’s experienced a football epiphany during this year’s World Cup. Buy them this and they’ll know they’re not alone

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by Andrea Pirlo with Alessandro Alciato
BackPage Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 329 July 2014

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Reading this autobiography of a playmaker nicknamed “Mozart” is like going to the opera: some bloke comes on and sings very loudly in Italian at you for a couple of hours, it’s all very dramatic and enjoyable, but you don’t always know quite what’s going on. In no discernible order, its voluble and intelligent subject, who “has an opinion about everything and I’m not ashamed to express it”, launches into an erratic, extended and idiosyncratic monologue. There are even (mostly much needed) footnotes to explain some of the passing references, although glossing ultras as “the self-styled, most passionate, vocal and committed supporters” was probably unnecessary.

Many of Andrea Pirlo’s lines do sound as if they could have come from, say, Don Giovanni. When his ten years with AC Milan end with the gift of a pen (how many domestic footballers are presented with something to write with when shown the door?) he declares: “Still, I raised a smile because I know how to laugh, long and loud.” (Cue ear-splitting Rabelaisian guffaws.) Various club presidents and managers memorably strut the stage. Marcello Lippi theatrically denounces the Italian dressing room: “Bunch of bastards, bunch of spies”; Antonio Conte hurls water bottles at Juve bellowing: “It’s time we stopped being crap.”

The reader is never in doubt that the text was originally in Italian, making it refreshingly different from the prosaic platitudes of the standard British footballer’s life. True, the highly charged style occasionally strays into Swiss Toni territory: “When you’re in love, it’s time you need. When the feeling’s gone, having an excuse can help.” Again, no British footballer could ever get away with statements such as Pirlo’s lament after Alex Ferguson “unleashes” the ferocious Park Ji-Sung to shadow the Italian midfielder in a Champions League tie: “He’s essentially a man without blemish, but he ruined that purity just for a moment… a fleeting shabbiness came over the legend that night.”

However, usually the purple prose fits the subject matter perfectly. Pirlo’s visceral reaction to losing the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul will delight not only Liverpool supporters. Not for him the mealy mouthed “gutted”. After this “mass suicide where we all jumped off the Bosphorus Bridge… I no longer felt like a player… But even worse, I no longer felt like a man.” Walking up to take the first penalty in the 2006 World Cup final shootout is “barely 50 metres. But it’s a truly terrible journey, right through the heart of your fear.”

Certain footballers’ preoccupations transcend nationalities. Pirlo’s favourite pursuits, we learn, at some length, are mickey-taking, PlayStation (“after the wheel, the best invention of all time”) and wine, albeit from his father’s vineyards. With a grand flourish he turns down €40 million (£32m) to join Qatar’s Al-Sadd, preferring instead one last bow for his country in the 2014 World Cup. As he says earlier: “Take someone like Antonio Cassano. He says he’s slept with 700 women in his time, but he doesn’t get picked for Italy any more. Deep down, can he really be happy?”

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Ledley King: My autobiography
by Ledley King 
and Mat Snow
Quercus, £18.99
Reviewed by Alan Fisher
From WSC 328 June 2014

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The title of the opening chapter of Ledley King’s autobiography sums it up in two little words: “What If?” He was the perfect contemporary centre-half, with pace, strength, total application and his trademark timing in the tackle as he eased the ball away from onrushing forwards. It was a talent that should have brought him worldwide fame. Instead he spent half his career on the treatment table.

His fortitude in pain and loyalty to the only club he has ever played for has earned him the enduring respect of Spurs fans. An unending saga of breakdown and comeback meant his hopes were rebuilt then crushed as often as his knee, yet King does not show a trace of self-pity; despite agony, disappointment and upheaval at his club, he was grateful for the chance to play.

For virtually half his career King did not train. When his knee was rebuilt, he remodelled his running style. One report suggested that toward the end, his knee was so bad he couldn’t have a garden kickabout with his young son yet come matchday he was often a match for the very best.

Co-author, journalist and Spurs fan Mat Snow utilises a conversational style which gives the book a sense of authenticity, especially in the early passages about King’s upbringing on an east London council estate by a single mother and surrounded by a supportive network of family friends. King has some interesting reflections on the fine margins between success and failure at this level, concluding that attitude and family stability are more significant than ability.

It seems to be out of character to be critical of those around him so expect few revelations. Nonetheless, King sheds some light on the footballing culture differences between Fabio Capello and his squad and confirms years of managerial turmoil at Tottenham, with Glenn Hoddle distant and unable to communicate while first-team coaches Martin Jol and Gus Poyet actively undermined their managers, Jacques Santini and Juande Ramos respectively.

While there’s plenty of interest to Spurs supporters, King played during a largely undistinguished period in the history of club and country so other potential readers may be deterred by a book where the highlight is a League Cup final win and a world tour of physiotherapists. Gradually the dreary routine of daily treatment catches up on body and mind. He plays down the two nightclub altercations that thrust him uncharacteristically into the headlines but there’s no doubt they were linked to the loss of what had mattered most to him since he was a boy – the realisation that he can’t play on and the end of his camaraderie with team-mates. If King has regrets, he hides them well. It’s left to the reader to speculate about those “what ifs?” on his behalf.

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The autobiography of Kevin Kilbane
by Kevin Kilbane
Aurum, £18.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 327 May 2014

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Sixteen and a half years on, it seems surreal to recall that when Kevin Kilbane initially broke into the Ireland squad, he was touted as a bright, shining young hope who could give Damien Duff a serious run for his money on the wing. Things didn’t pan out that way, of course. But only one of them appeared in 66 competitive internationals in a row, and it wasn’t Duffer.

That extraordinary stat (in the history of international football, only Billy Wright managed a longer streak) sums up Kilbane’s entire career. Never more than ordinary on a technical level – I once saw him lose possession against Israel at Lansdowne Road by doing an inexplicable 360-degree pirouette while the ball trundled slowly towards him – he built himself a decent and rewarding career through sheer hard work and force of will.

Football memoirs don’t always reflect the subject’s own persona (read Gordon Strachan’s for proof, or rather don’t) but this one does. Killa is a stolid, honest and meticulous read. Generous-spirited, too, in more ways than one: all the proceeds go to a Down’s Syndrome charity. Kilbane is the sort of player who can still remember what he had for breakfast on the morning of a game in Reykjavik in 1997, and who said what to whom after a match against Macedonia aeons ago. Either that or he kept a detailed diary.

His otherwise happy 1980s Preston childhood was darkened by an alcoholic father who “pissed away all his wages”, and whose eventual departure from the family home “made no difference to my life”. Kilbane himself briefly became something of a drunkard in 1994, a pattern which came to an abrupt end when he was caught stealing a car stereo and a police sergeant gave him “the longest bollocking of my life”.

The tone is generally positive and sunny (I lost count of the number of times players or teams were referred to as “great lads”), but there are sporadic glints of anger. Cesc Fàbregas’s reputation for arrogance is added to here as Kilbane relays his obnoxious comments during an Arsenal v Huddersfield cup tie (“This team are shit!”). Later in the book, a Coventry fan screams at Kilbane that he deserves to have a handicapped daughter (Elsie has Down’s Syndrome). Kilbane tells him to fuck off, but is then pressurised by the club into making a public apology. Kilbane offers the fan the chance to hear the apology face to face, secretly hoping in vain that he turns up because “an apology was the last thing I was going to offer him”.

A few more interesting nuggets pop up – David Moyes supposedly finds it near-impossible to relax even on squad getaway breaks; hard man Thomas Gravesen privately cringed at the idea of being tackled hard; and Kilbane claims that Ireland’s players came up with the tactical gameplan for the fateful World Cup play-off in Paris behind Giovanni Trapattoni’s back. In the main, however, Killa mirrors its subject almost exactly, taking few chances and diligently plugging away. It passes a few hours agreeably enough, but that’s all.

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