15 August ~ Former Aston Villa striker Dalian Atkinson has reportedly died after being shot with a Taser by police in Telford. Atkinson, who was 48 years old, also played for Ipswich Town, Sheffield Wednesday, Real Sociedad and Fenerbahce. His brilliant solo goal for Aston Villa against Wimbledon on October 2, 1992 won Match of the Day’s Goal of the Season competition.
1 August ~ “Automatic promotion,” asserted Burnley fan Kevin Clarke ahead of the 2015-16 Championship season. “It goes against everything I believe in as a Burnley fan to predict this, but there really is no reason why not.” It took them a couple of games to get going but in the end Kevin’s confidence was well placed and his team sealed an immediate return to the Premier League, going up as champions by four points.
The untold story
of a football great
by Rob Sawyer
De Coubertin Books, £18.99
Reviewed by Simon Hart
From WSC 340 June 2015
It was 30 years ago in March that Harry Catterick died after suffering a heart attack at Everton’s FA Cup quarter-final against Ipswich Town. Five years earlier, Dixie Dean had also died at Goodison Park yet unlike the nationally famous striker, Catterick’s achievements – building two League title-winning teams – are today largely ignored beyond Merseyside.
Rob Sawyer has sought to redress the balance in a well-crafted biography that begins with a foreword from Colin Harvey, part of Catterick’s 1970 Championship side. “Don Revie, Bill Shankly, Bill Nicholson and Sir Matt Busby all get mentioned as being the great managers of the era while Harry doesn’t,” says Harvey of a man who won as many Leagues and FA Cups as Revie.
It is with Shankly, though, that Harvey makes the most telling comparison. For half of his 12-year reign, Catterick’s Everton drew the bigger crowds on Merseyside yet as Harvey recalls: “The press enjoyed being courted by Bill Shankly, but Harry was an introvert and snubbed them.” This is the crux of his image problem. Here was somebody who refused to allow the BBC cameras in to film Match of the Day until 1967 and had none of the charisma of his rival. Catterick was an aloof figure more akin to a modern-day director of football who – as his players would joke – put on a tracksuit only when the TV cameras or chairman John Moores appeared.
To achieve this insightful portrait, Sawyer pieced together interviews given by Catterick himself along with reminiscences of players and journalists and contemporary press cuttings. Alex Young recalls the coldness of a man not interested in courting popularity, saying: “I never got a pat on my head.” He had a devious side too, lying to the press and his own players; he told midfielder Brian Harris, for instance, that rumours of Tony Kay joining were false, only to swoop later that day for a player who had helped his Sheffield Wednesday side finish Division One runners-up in 1960-61.
Yet while his 1963 title-winners, built with the largesse of Littlewoods tycoon Moores, were dubbed “cheque-book champions”, the vision behind his youthful 1970 team would fit most current ideas of how to play the game. It was a 4-3-3 formation with the “holy trinity” of midfielders Howard Kendall, Harvey and Alan Ball at its heart. Dave Sexton, then Chelsea manager, applauded him for succeeding with a “set of small players up front” and Catterick’s own view was: “When it comes to the creation of something in tight corners, which midfield men have to do, give me the little ones.”
His players might have endured an old-fashioned factory-style clocking-in system but his planning of Everton’s Bellefield training ground – with an indoor pitch for small-sided matches – was another demonstration of foresight. Indeed in October 1970 Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly magazine dubbed the then 50-year-old “a manager for the Seventies”.
Sadly for Catterick – and his legacy – his Everton team soon fell apart. Sawyer recalls a pivotal week in March 1971 when they lost a European Cup quarter-final to Panathinaikos and FA Cup semi-final to Liverpool. After Ball left in controversial circumstances and Catterick himself suffered a heart attack, he was sacked in 1973. Not until 1985, two months after his death, would Everton win the League title again.
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
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
7 July ~ Sheffield Wednesday’s marketing team have come up with a new way of generating interest in their matchday hospitality packages – giving them away free when ordering of a forklift truck.
