Search: ' Sheffield Wednesday'

by Terry Curran 
with John Brindley
Vertical Editions £16.99
Reviewed by Andy Hockley
From WSC 317 July 2013

Buy this book

The blurb on the inside cover of this book ends with the words “Warning: Terry Curran’s story may offend the politically correct”. This, coupled with the dreaded word “Maverick” in the title, meant that I approached the book with trepidation.

Happily, I can report that in this case first impressions are wrong. Terry Curran is an engaging story-teller, who chooses to focus on a few interesting periods of his career rather than just launch into a tedious retelling of the whole. He’s perhaps best remembered for his spell at Sheffield Wednesday and especially for his role in the legendary 1979 “Boxing Day Massacre”, when a record 49,309 turned up for a Third Division match at Hillsborough to see top-of-the-league Sheffield United dispatched 4-0, in a match which Curran dominated, scoring one and setting up another. But ultimately he was a journeyman, playing at 16 different clubs in his all-too-short career. Twice he even managed what few do once, transferring between bitter rivals – from Nottingham Forest to Derby County and from Wednesday to United.

Such was his promiscuousness that he ended up playing under a virtual who’s who of late 1970s and early 1980s management. Brian Clough, Tommy Docherty, Lawrie McMenemy, Jack Charlton, Howard Kendall and a considerable number of others had what would appear to be the dubious pleasure of attempting to get the best out of the talented but lippy Curran, the self-styled “poor man’s George Best”.

In many ways this is where the book succeeds – providing a glimpse into the experiences of playing under all those managers with their vastly different playing styles and approaches to man management. The chapter on Clough is particularly rich and it’s clear that Curran had a huge amount of time for him. This didn’t stop the headstrong (sorry, maverick) Curran walking out on Forest just when they got to the First Division. Other former bosses are described significantly less positively, most notably McMenemy.

Curran is not averse to listing his mistakes, though since most of the titular regrets are related to walking out on clubs where he felt he was not getting enough playing time, it is notable that he never really addresses the question of why that might have been. You didn’t necessarily have to be a top manager to find him a frustrating player at times.  

In case you were wondering about that initial warning, it’s actually quite difficult to know what exactly we are being alerted to. I can only suppose that it relates to Curran’s womanising and “PC” is being used to mean “prudish”. But there’s nothing here that could be described as offensive, even to those of us with a sensitive disposition.

It’s hard not to warm to Curran, despite his admitted failings, and by the end of the book it’s gratifying to find him happy and fulfilled and working as a youth coach at Doncaster Rovers, musing on England’s lack of success. Rather than, say, following in the footsteps of the real George Best.

Buy this book

Surviving football’s money business
by Brian Laws with Alan Biggs
Vertical Editions, £16.99
Reviewed by Graham Stevenson
From WSC 316 June 2013

Buy this book

For a manager who has spent over a decade employed by Scunthorpe United in three spells, it’s disappointing to find only 19 pages in Brian Laws’s autobiography about his time at Glanford Park. He’s led the club to a couple of promotions and a couple of relegations, so it’s not as if there is a dearth of interesting history between them, despite the balance sheet currently reading roughly “nil”.

Scunthorpe are now broke, broken and back in the basement division for the first time in several years – which is exactly where they were when Laws first arrived in 1997. For the small steel-town club he was a relatively big appointment and made an immediate impression. Rumours spread quickly of dressing-room dust-ups and car-park dusting-downs, but “Ol’ Big Hair” and his journalist co-writer don’t take many opportunities to fill in much colour between the lines here.

The Machiavellian boardroom-level manoeuvres during a bizarre three weeks in 2004, for instance, are dealt with in just over a paragraph. This involved Laws being fired by a new chairman, before the previous one stepped in to take back control of the club and reinstated him. “The whole thing got quite nasty,” Brian says. But nasty how? Were horses’ heads involved?

It’s much the same elsewhere throughout this (terribly titled) book. Laws’s time at Grimsby Town is over quite quickly and the aftermath of an injury caused by his launching a plate of chicken wings into Italian midfielder Ivano Bonetti’s face reads like only two-thirds of a story. The lessons learned seem to have been to do with Laws’s handling of the media rather than the handling of his players. Later managerial roles at Sheffield Wednesday and Burnley are similarly done-and-dusted in mere pages and key incidents at all of his clubs feel as if they are dealt with like clearances to be booted into row Z. Much more care is taken in detailing why Laws got the nickname “Ernie” during his playing days. It’s as simple as you imagine – team-mates’ reference to comedian Ernie Wise being short and wearing a wig.

Laws’s years on the pitch dominate – obviously none more so than successful ones at Nottingham Forest (during which he drank Mick Hucknall’s backstage bar dry and wet himself walking out at Wembley for a Cup final – events unrelated). A series of anecdotes about Brian Clough’s eccentricities add more to the mythos but it’s actually Laws himself who surprises with some poignant recollections of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, such as his continuing embarrassment at not realising the seriousness of events and hurling verbal abuse at the first few Liverpool fans out onto the pitch.

It’s clear Clough had something of a soft spot for Laws and it’s easy enough to figure out why. Laws comes across as reasonably principled and workmanlike – qualities he showed as a player. He also seems prone to let his feelings boil over from time to time, an attribute he clearly takes into the dressing room as a manager.

Buy this book

Damning evidence about the state of their ground makes tough reading for Owls fans, admits Tom Hocking

In late 1898 officials from The Wednesday FC learned that the lease on Olive Grove, their home for a decade, could not be renewed. The land was needed for a railway expansion and they had until the end of the season to find a replacement. With few locations available they settled on High Bridge, Owlerton. The plot of meadowland to the north of Sheffield was uneven, a long way from the city centre and poorly served by public transport.

Read more…

The long search for truth by the Hillsborough campaigners has been vindicated but, as Rob Hughes writers, time will tell whether they now get the justice they deserve

And so the wait is over. On September 12, some 23 years on, previously unseen government and police documents, in tandem with the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s report into the tragedy, were finally released to the public. The results were damning. As the families of the victims had insisted all along, Liverpool fans were found to be blameless for what happened on that horrifying afternoon in April 1989.

Read more…

Day six of the WSC advent calendar and we’ve got snowballs for you. When Division Three’s Sheffield Wednesday hosted top-tier Arsenal in the FA Cup in 1979, the pitch was cleared of snow but the open Kop wasn’t. It gave Owls fans plenty of ammunition to hurl at Arsenal keeper Pat Jennings as the second half began – not behaviour we condone, obviously. The game was drawn 1-1, the reply at Highbury 2-2, the second and third replays at Filbert Street 2-2 and 3-3 before Arsenal finally won 2-0 in the fourth replay.

Skip to 5m20s for snowballs

{youtube}YK0HkGEPmxI{/youtube}