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Manchester City have been mocked for low attendances but the criticism is a cheap shot which ignores glaring facts about their supporters, states Matthew James

Back in Manchester City’s darkest days of the late 1990s, as they battled the likes of Macclesfield to escape the third tier, the odd article began appearing in the press mocking attendances at certain home games. They caused outrage among City fans, always sensitive to media bias. They even generated sympathy in neutral readers, who regarded them as unnecessarily mean-spirited and unfair, given the traumas the club had experienced and the fact that crowds had generally been good.

A decade and a half later and the numbers are under scrutiny again, except this time with no lower-league mitigation. Now the issue is that only 37,500 turned out for a Champions League match against Roma, and the reaction was immediate. Rio Ferdinand, inevitably, took to Twitter to treat us to his instant opinion, ridiculing the expansion of the Etihad, while on ITV the increasingly Keane-esque Paul Scholes criticised what he saw as the supporters’ apathy towards the competition.

Fan loyalty is always a sensitive issue, and reaction is naturally defiant when the criticism comes from the enemy, but did they have a point? On the surface, the stadium enlargement might look a folly if you can’t fill it for a Champions League game, but it should be noted there is a waiting list for season tickets. As for the Scholes comments I would say it probably is true that the fans have yet to fall in love with the competition, due to a lack of special nights in their first three campaigns.

If you’re looking for excuses you can point out that it was the third home game in ten days, and then there is the ever-present issue of cost, but in reality it looks like an anomaly, plain and simple. The attendance was back up to 45,000 for the CSKA Moscow debacle, while there has been no pro-rata drop-off in interest in the other competitions. League games are played to full houses, while the two League Cup matches either side of Roma drew a creditable average of 36,500.

Behind all this discussion are the questions of how many supporters City have, how many do people think they have, and how many do those people think they should have. There is an assumption that trophies and star signings would attract them in droves. One of the key indicators used to chart the rise of a newly successful club is the number of replica shirts cropping up in pubs and playgrounds, particularly beyond the usual catchment area, and the light blue has certainly become a more common sight. But while impressionable kids and needy adults in far-off towns may be happy to suddenly claim allegiance, and even spring for a shirt as the price of reflected glory, there is a huge step up in commitment to being willing to board a coach and trek to the stadium. City simply do not have reservist armies of fans ready to step in.

And why should they? City are traditionally a parochial club, drawing their support almost exclusively from Greater Manchester, including some of its poorest areas, and building beyond that to the point where tickets become like gold dust could take a decade or more of success. With City’s recent history prior to the foreign takeovers it’s impressive that they even maintained the foothold they did, given people had an option across town that would actually bring them some happiness. Fans of, say, Newcastle United are rightly lauded for their commitment, but it has to be noted they don’t have to share their city with anyone, let alone the Manchester United empire. A market analyst who was ignorant of the peculiarities of fandom would be amazed City didn’t go the way of Bebo and Betamax long before their current renaissance.

The crowd for the first Champions League home game of the season was undoubtedly underwhelming, and given City’s financial situation it is understandable that people would seize an opportunity to take them down a peg. But I believe the support deserves to be cut some slack, thanks to dues paid over years of disappointments. One thing is for sure, if all that cash were to disappear and the club imploded once again, the same people would be there for Rochdale as they were for Roma.

From WSC 335 January 2015

My autobiography
by Rio Ferdinand
Blink Publishing, £20
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 334 December 2014

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At the time of writing, media speculation was rife that Rio Ferdinand’s brief spell at Loftus Road would soon be brought to an end, with QPR reportedly left cold by the 35-year-old’s efforts since he joined them from Manchester United last July. Should the press scuttlebutt be true, it will be a somewhat shabby end to what’s been an excellent career. For all his intermittent inanity off the pitch, Ferdinand remains, alongside Tony Adams, the best centre-half produced by English football since Bobby Moore.

It’s hard to tell whether #2Sides would have been a superior book had Ferdinand employed a different ghostwriter (the one he did hire, David Winner, has taken an unconventional approach to the form, as we shall see). The title, a nod to his fondness for spending hours on Twitter, immediately makes the heart sink – and for the most part, the contents are similarly disappointing. In fact, it’s less a memoir and more a succession of disparate polemics on Ferdinand’s most cherished (or, in the case of John Terry, least cherished) topics, presented with few concessions to the concept of basic chronology.

Ferdinand has been a sufficiently voluble presence in the media over the years for you to more or less know in advance what his take on each subject will be. Fabio Capello and Roy Hodgson are duly slammed. So is David Moyes for his miserable ten months as Manchester United manager, though in this case Ferdinand does leaven the harsh criticism with unstinting praise for Moyes as a person (as well as revealing that the alleged “Do it like Phil Jagielka would” exchange on the training ground never actually happened). The details of his now-terminal rift with Ashley Cole, ignited when Cole gave evidence in favour of Terry, are rendered in almost sorrowful terms.

But #2Sides suffers woefully from its utter absence of structure. No sooner has Ferdinand finished talking about the Terry racist abuse trial or the 2008 Champions League final or a title race, than we’re off into a digression about the restaurant he co-owns, or his favourite music (grime and corporate rock), or something equally thrilling. There’s even a chapter devoted solely to that Twitter account, entitled “5.7 Million And Counting”. It’s not up to much.

If you’re wondering why #2Sides has little discernible structure or cohesion, it’s worth mentioning that Winner has form for this approach. In Brilliant Orange, his award-winning 2001 study of Dutch football, the author gave the chapters random “squad numbers” for whimsical reasons. It worked very well on that occasion, but a number of his more recent books – Those Feet, Around The World In 90 Minutes – have been misfires, and so is this. Winner ghostwrote #2Sides immediately after finishing Dennis Bergkamp’s memoir Stillness And Speed, so there may or may not have been an element of racing to beat the clock.

By far the most substantial chapter comes early on, where Ferdinand explains his approach to the art of defending, going into fascinating detail about how he could “smell out” one kind of attacking danger and his long-time partner Nemanja Vidic could scent another. A penny for Tony Fernandes and Harry Redknapp’s thoughts if they read it.

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The art & psychology of the perfect penalty
by Ben Lyttleton
Bantam Press, £14.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 333 November 2014

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The glib explanation for the English fascination with penalties is because they lose so many shootouts and are thus mesmerised by the idea of actually being good at them, somewhat like a gormless youth trying to work out the secret of successfully conversing with an attractive woman. Of course, just as a confident man is likely to have more success in a nightclub than a self-conscious one, if they (by which I mean England players) spent less time thinking about penalties, they’d probably fare a little better at them.

Ben Lyttleton explores this theme at length in Twelve Yards, a book which covers much the same ground as Andrew Anthony’s 2000 effort On Penalties (though it’s roughly twice as long). His conversation with Ricardo Pereira, the former Portugal goalkeeper whose penalty saves knocked England out of two different tournaments, soon becomes a faintly farcical catalogue of neurosis, jittery body language and general mental collapse.

Ricardo – who memorably took off the gloves to save Darius Vassell’s effort at Euro 2004 and then blasted in the winner himself – describes Vassell as “very nervous” in the run-up, notes that Steven Gerrard couldn’t look him in the eye and claims that Jamie Carragher’s “mind was fucked up” when the defender took what transpired to be his team’s final penalty in Gelsenkirchen in 2006. He finishes by giving three simple tips to England penalty-takers: focus on the positive, don’t think about the media and forget about the history. One of these might be easier to execute than the other two.

Lyttleton’s scope is nothing if not wide. He travels to South America to interview two penalty-taking keepers, José Luis Chilavert and Rogério Ceni, who ended their careers with well over 100 goals between them. “I was always calm,” Chilavert tells him with no discernible sarcasm. “I was playing a role on the pitch… Look, I could hardly be the hero with this face!”

He meets up with Antonin Panenka, scorer of the most famous penalty ever, outside a village pub near Prague, and discovers that while the legendary midfielder is justifiably proud of the clever little chip which won Euro 76, he also feels it has overshadowed everything else in his long career. Panenka theorises that the main reason for his worldwide fame is because his name “sounds the same in any language”.

But at times, you can sense Lyttleton straining to reach the word count (the book may have had more impact at a shorter length). One entire chapter is a retelling of the France v West Germany match in Seville in 1982, translated directly from a feature in France Football – it’s a very good read, admittedly, but relatively little of it has anything to do with penalties. There’s also a small handful of very bad mistakes – to pick one at random, Spain’s legendary keeper in the 1930s was named Ricardo Zamora, not Schavio Zamora. But this is a readable study of an almost unknowable art, as long as you don’t mind stumbling over yet another graph or table of stats every ten pages or so.

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by Maarten Meijer
Ebury Press, £14.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 333 November 2014

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“When you traced the roots of the successful teams at the 2010 World Cup, every clue pointed back to one man: Louis van Gaal.” Maarten Meijer’s carefully researched biography is not afraid to make big claims for its subject. While conceding that credit is also due to Joachim Löw, Bert van Marwijk and Vicente del Bosque, Meijer argues that the controversial coach’s influence, through his work at Bayern Munich, Ajax and Barcelona, principally shaped the personnel, playing style and tactics of three of the four semi-finalists in South Africa. The book was finished before Holland’s unexpectedly barnstorming campaign in Brazil this summer and Germany’s victory (albeit also the Spanish collapse), which might serve as additional support for Meijer’s thesis on the extent of Van Gaal’s impact on European football.

It remains to be seen whether Van Gaal’s tenure at Old Trafford will provide further proof of the genius of “one of football’s most gifted architects”. The brief coda which deals with his United appointment, while stating the obvious that the £200 million “war chest” supposedly on offer “may have been an additional attraction” for Van Gaal, goes on to make the equally obvious observation that “he needs a new defence and a new midfield”. The final paragraph speculates that United will be his last management job and “he will want to go out with a bang, knowing that this is how he will be remembered not only in Manchester but in the entire world of football”, but reserves judgment on what sort of explosion Van Gaal will cause.

Meijer’s primary purpose in writing this heavyweight, thoughtful study, following his two previous biographies of Dick Advocaat and Guus Hiddink, is to balance the media caricature of Van Gaal, the crude stereotype of a lumbering, bombastic, dictatorial ex-PE teacher, ranting at the press and indulging in eccentric and bizarre behaviour (trouser-dropping, self-penned, excruciating poetry-reading) occasionally deemed akin to madness. Like Alex Ferguson, Meijer argues, Van Gaal is a man so out of style that he has become a “poster boy for the old-school, omnipotent, teacher-knows-best style of management”. So often following the boots of Johan Cruyff, as both player and coach, he has been cast as the anti-Cruyff, whereas his work should often be seen as complementary, Pep Guardiola’s all-conquering Barcelona being an amalgam of the philosophy of both coaches. In consequence there has been serious underestimation, if not misrepresentation, of Van Gaal’s talents and achievements. The real Van Gaal is more flexible and democratic in management and tactics, more humane and caring one-to-one.

Not that Meijer’s generally sympathetic account whitewashes over Van Gaal’s failings, or the barrage of criticism he has received, dealing with both at length. The most entertaining chapter predictably concerns Van Gaal’s fractious relations with the press. As boss of Ajax, he received a deliciously pompous letter from the Dutch Reporters’ Association, complaining press conferences were being “disgraced by vulgar shouting matches. This aggressive approach perhaps guarantees success with young, docile players but it is inappropriate at a press conference at which adult people are present”. At the next conference, in classic teacher mode, he asked those who signed it to put up their hands. Not one “adult” person did.

As a compatriot, Meijer could perhaps be forgiven his own excursions into national stereotypes. Van Gaal, he says, must be fundamentally understood as a typical Amsterdamer and Dutchman – hardnosed, unshakeably convinced he is right, highly focused, pig-headed, difficult to get along with and rebellious. Or as one journalist put it more succinctly: “An asshole, but certainly a competent asshole.”

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My life from left field
by Kevin Sheedy
SportMedia, £14.99
Reviewed by Mark O’Brien
From WSC 332 October 2014

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Paul McGrath and Tony Cascarino’s autobiographies are renowned as two of the most caustic and revealing footballing books in recent times. Their former Republic of Ireland international team-mate Kevin Sheedy has written his life story now but anyone expecting soul searching in the same vein as Back From The Brink or Full Time is likely to be disappointed.

Sheedy’s story is told in a fashion that could most politely be described as “breezy”. From a youngster at Hereford to a bit-part player at Liverpool before becoming a key part in the all-conquering Everton side of the mid-1980s – then rounding off his playing career at Newcastle United and Blackpool – it’s all dealt with in the same cheery, almost 
matter-of-fact fashion.

It’s quite an old-school approach, even throwing in some “any other business” chapters near the end, where Sheedy gives his opinions on the perils of social media facing today’s young players and picks a best XI from his former Everton and Ireland team-mates. Among that throwaway page-filler then it’s a shock to come across a section which deals with his recent treatment for bowel cancer. A more modern style might have made that the touchstone for the whole book, reflecting on his career in the light of the grave news of his illness, but maintaining the light-hearted tone Sheedy concentrates instead on a nurse pulling back the sheets following his operation and declaring: “Oh my god, they’ve cut your cock off!”

He comes across as a thoroughly nice fella then, but it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. While Evertonians have probably read just about everything it’s possible to know about Rotterdam and the League wins under Howard Kendall, Sheedy was privy to the break-up of that great side and the start of the club’s decline and it would have been illuminating to know more about that process. He was in fact part of an infamous incident that is seen as emblematic of the chaos that reigned at Goodison during Kendall’s second spell in charge, when he had a fight with Martin Keown in a Chinese restaurant. He brushes it aside though, blaming his behaviour on the fact that he was unaware that the players had been buying him glasses of wine when normally he only drank it with soda. Seems plausible.

He tells his own collection of Jack Charlton anecdotes too – the Ireland manager left him out of a squad altogether for a match and then added insult to injury by trying to send him on as a sub – and the Italia 90 section is probably the best bit of the book.

The title, by the way, refers to an incident at Goodison in March 1985. Sheedy lashed a free-kick past Ipswich’s Paul Cooper and into the top-right corner. When ordered to be retaken he simply placed it in the top left. So good he did it twice. Unfortunately though, once is more than enough when it comes to reading his book.

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