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The secret history of women’s football
by Tim Tate
John Blake, £17.99
Reviewed by Georgina Turner
From WSC 324 February 2014

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“The secret history of women’s football” seems a tall promise for those of us who are interested in the women’s game. The story of the pioneering team formed in the yard of the Dick, Kerr factory in Preston in 1917, which is the one the author highlights from the book’s start, is not a “secret” to anyone who has read Gail Newsham or Barbara Jacobs’ books on the subject. Happily, both authors are among those credited in later chapters – by which point Tim Tate’s assurance that his is a “more rounded” account of the early days has been well met.

Told in 14 short chapters, the book hops this way and that across the globe. The episodic structure allows tales of social conditions – cotton famine, for example, class friction, suffrage, world war, factory life, Spanish flu, enduring misogyny – to sit alongside and contextualise the various attempts to establish women’s football in the UK before the FA’s outright ban in 1921 made things next to impossible.

The correlation between the FA’s decision and Dick, Kerr’s landmark match at Goodison Park on Boxing Day 1920 is probably one of the most well-known moments in this history. With the FA already irked at its billing as a cup final, the match attracted a crowd of 53,000, with at least 10,000 more out in the streets – at a time when some men’s league matches were struggling for double figures. It was one in the eye, all right, but the book does a good job of fleshing out the FA’s relationship with the women’s game, one that bore the brunt of the FA’s frustration at its own haplessness. Having been shown up by illegal payments and match-fixing in men’s football, the FA set its jaw at signs that the Dick, Kerr manager might be taking home more than his expenses.

There are excerpts from contemporary records and write-ups throughout the book, whose cadence (not to mention their moral outrage) transports you back in time. “The husbands – what about them!” yelps a reporter from the Westminster Gazette in 1895, as the mythical Nettie Honeyball explains that several players at the British Ladies’ Football Club are married. These curios allow the book to chart an interesting shift in press commentary, from the contemptible wagon circling ahead of BLFC’s first fixture to the generally positive coverage of Dick, Kerr’s charity matches, and sometimes thoughtful reaction to new developments. When a woman applied for a place on a referees’ course, for instance, the papers thought it a question worth pondering. Alas they soon succumbed to the briefings of men concerned about the innards of the next generation of mothers, and the FA’s refusal to accept female applicants settled in to fact.

Reading this book feels much like walking around an exhibition: Tate has curated a collection of artefacts that can be enjoyed for themselves but together offer the reader a real feel for the journey that women’s football has been on. There is considerable overuse of the phrase “would come back to haunt the sport”, but this probably says more about that journey, set back and off course by the same troubles over and again, than it does about the author. For an illustration of the suffocating habits of committees of “old farts”, look no further.

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The Azadi Stadium in Tehran is home to Iran’s national team as well as the country’s most successful club, Persepolis, and their city rivals Esteghlal. The Azadi was built for the Asian Games in 1974 and has a record attendance of over 128,000, which was set for a 1998 World Cup qualifier against Australia. The current capacity is lower at 91,623.

The story of Welsh football
by Phil Stead
Y Lolfa, £14.95
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 319 September 2013

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The condition of Welsh football is often serious but never dull, and the same can be said of Phil Stead’s engagingly readable chronicle. It is history as one thing after another, stronger on anecdote than analysis. The prose is more solid than stylish but with flourishes such as the characterisation of Jerry Sherman, briefly and disastrously Newport County’s owner, as having “the shifty-eyed evasiveness of a potion seller at a wild west show”.

Clubs are not neglected. We learn how Wrexham got their “Robins” nickname, that Cardiff possibly sacrificed the 1924 League title to Wales call-ups and that West Ham’s “Bubbles” anthem may have been borrowed from Swansea – but this is essentially the story of the Wales team and the Football Association of Wales (FAW).

The anecdotal style works well in the early years. It introduces debonair goalkeeper Leigh Roose, who dated music hall star Marie Lloyd and conceded a Scottish winner because he was talking to a spectator, and an earlier keeper who played against England with his forearms in plaster. There are two one-armed players, a schoolmaster accidentally shot dead by a pupil and evidence of the national surname shortage, with different players called Oswald Davies on consecutive pages. One FAW secretary is imprisoned for forgery and its second president is sacked for providing insufficient support – he was the nephew of the MP and magistrate who became founding president after licensing a pub lock-in at the first meeting.

Running themes do emerge. The FAW are perennially skint, so opt for income over team priorities in locating key qualifiers. They are beset by English club obstructionism over player release, localised factionalism – Oswestry v Wrexham prefiguring Swansea v Cardiff – and they treat Llanelli’s ambitions as unsympathetically in 1958 as in 2013.

They are baffled by foreign travel. Players routinely forget passports and it is hard to forgive the official who could have averted Vinnie Jones’s Wales debut, but let him play with limited documentation. The infamous incident when player Gil Reece was bumped from a flight packed with committee men is merely the culmination of traditions exemplified by taking only 18 players, but 25 officials including the FAW secretary’s sister, to the 1958 World Cup. And then there are the qualification near-misses, that litany of dodgy Scottish penalties and doped-up Russians for which the sad but inescapable explanation is that even good Wales teams are usually not quite good enough.

Red Dragons really should have an index but there are few factual glitches. Stead elevates Wrexham to Division Two 45 years too early, while the Trevor Ford who gave vital evidence at the manslaughter trial after a South Wales Transport player died on the pitch in 1934 was almost certainly not the rumbustious centre-forward, ten at the time, but his father.

But these are minor quibbles. Stead doubtless once dreamed of playing for Wales, but with this book serves his nation better than many who achieved that ambition.

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The life of Stanley Matthews
by Jon Henderson
Yellow Jersey, £18.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 316 June 2013

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Stanley Matthews is one of those figures who looms so large in the consciousness of the nation there’s a tendency to think we already know all there is to know about him. The truth, which becomes apparent while reading Jon Henderson’s vivid biography, is that what most of us actually know about a player whose career spanned 29 seasons is confined to the salient facts about a couple of famous matches and a whole heap of the sort of cliches (including the one about how he always crossed the ball so that the laces didn’t hit the forward’s head) that were the 1960s equivalent of YouTube.

As you might expect, the truth, as it emerges in this well-researched and cannily written book, is more complex and interesting than the well-worn phrases about body swerve, dropping a cross on a postage stamp and the 1953 FA Cup final might have led us to expect. Matthews himself was a difficult character to read, on good terms with his team-mates yet always distant from them. Like many men of his generation and background he was not given to talking about his feelings, or to public displays of emotion. Even the obvious affection of football fans across the world could not draw him out. “He never interacted with the crowd,” Blackpool team-mate Jimmy Armfield recalls. “It just wasn’t his way.”

Matthews’s dribbling was so phenomenal that after one particularly spectacular run and goal against Belgium, the opposition players spontaneously applauded him as he ran back to the halfway line. Yet, for all the brightness he brought to the game, he was a rigid, almost Spartan figure – a non-drinker and non-smoker who sat quietly in the corner while his Stoke City team-mates were swigging beer from a hotel chamber pot, during surreptitious late-night sessions, and took cold showers before matches to help him focus. Locked in an unhappy marriage, frustrated by a succession of club and international managers who regarded him as a temperamental “show off” and by the financial constraints imposed by a job that, despite his celebrity, never paid him more than £20 a week, he clearly felt the strain. One day, sitting in a first-class railway carriage with his Stoke colleagues, he watched a luggage porter going about his work and remarked wistfully: “There’s something about normal life, isn’t there?”

As Henderson clearly demonstrates, whatever Matthews’s wishes – whether he was dazzling Hitler’s henchmen with a breathtaking display in Berlin following the shameful “Nazi salute” business, arguing bitterly over a loyalty bonus at Stoke, being reprimanded by the War Office for selling coffee on the black market in Brussels or eloping with “the true love of my life” Mila Winterova, a Czech who it emerged had once been a spy – his was a life that was destined never to be normal.

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Seb Patrick mantains that it is becoming harder to admire or support a player who has lots of skill but repeatedly damages his club’s image

It’s difficult not to imagine that Luis Suárez has a “goodwill meter” that he lets fill up to a certain point before jettisoning all of it in one go. Having arrived in England fresh from serving a ban for biting PSV’s Otman Bakkal – and with his part in Ghana’s exit from the 2010 World Cup still fresh in the memory – it took a quick adjustment to English football for people to start thinking maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

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