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by Keith Gillespie
Sport Media, £16.99
Reviewed by Robbie Meredith
From WSC 326 April 2014

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The advance publicity for, and newspaper serialisation of, Keith Gillespie’s autobiography concentrated heavily on his prodigious gambling habit. Given that Gillespie estimates he squandered around £7 million over the course of his career this is understandable, but How Not To Be A Football Millionaire is much more than a tale of beaten dockets. To his credit, Gillespie refuses to wallow in self-pity or to portray himself as a particularly likeable man.

Rather he comes across as intelligent, complex and contradictory – despite a lifelong, and ultimately damaging, habit of refusing to face up to conflict or responsibility, he’s refreshingly willing to put the boot in now his career is over. He’s withering about Stuart Pearce’s “Psycho” image, and there’s a telling depiction of Graeme Souness striding around Blackburn’s training ground in nothing but a towel and formal shoes, but his deepest scorn is reserved for his former manager at Sheffield United, Kevin Blackwell. There’s an elongated and blackly comic account of his time working under Blackwell, which culminates in a series of late-night abusive text messages.

Gillespie’s chronic gambling habit is nurtured at Old Trafford early in his career, where he gladly takes on the task of placing bets for Alex Ferguson, but it reaches its nadir at Newcastle. One of the most pathetic images in the book, although I doubt if he sees it that way, is of Gillespie spending endless afternoons on his sofa – phone in one hand and Racing Post in the other – placing huge telephone bets on the horses. A crisis comes when he loses £62,000 in two days, but the strengths and flaws in Kevin Keegan’s management are apparent when, rather than imploring his player to seek help, he organises a club payment to Gillespie’s bookie to clear the debt; a misguided act which, yet again, prevents the player from taking charge of his own life.

Money, clubs and marriages alike then come and go, while no night out is turned down. “Anything,” he puts it, “to relieve the boredom.” Gillespie was a very good player, but it’s tempting to wonder how much better he’d have been without being out on the lash three nights a week. He remembers only two games, for Newcastle against Barcelona and Northern Ireland’s famous win over England in 2005, where he actually sat in after a match.

A typically hasty and mistaken attempt to make a quick buck by investing in film schemes leads to bankruptcy late in his career when he can least afford it. However, this ultimately forces Gillespie to counter the failings in his own character, not least by opening the numerous final demand envelopes cluttering up his living room. It is too cliched to claim that Gillespie achieves redemption at the end of his tale. Rather he gains the uncertain gift of a better understanding of himself. In doing so, he provides a compelling glimpse into the dark void inherent in the modern age of adrenaline-fuelled football celebrity.

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Jon Spurling remembers how the FA began trialling regular games on the Sabbath in the 1970s despite protests from religious groups

Football was facing a crisis at the start of 1974. Attendances in all four divisions had been in decline for a while and floodlit matches were banned as part of the “three day week” introduced by Prime Minister Edward Heath to save on electricity consumption. Sunday football was regarded as one way to inject some life back into the flagging domestic game.

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1958-68
by Iain McCartney
Amberley Books, £25
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 320 October 2013

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Whatever the other flaws of Manchester United: Rising from the wreckage 1958-68, you can’t accuse Iain McCartney of not putting in the hard yards. Don’t be fooled by the fact that it’s 350 pages in length: that figure could easily have been considerably higher, had the typesetter been only slightly more generous with the font size and spacing.

Books on the Munich disaster aren’t hard to come by. McCartney himself already has one to his credit, a well-reviewed biography of Roger Byrne, the United captain who died in the crash with 22 other people. This one is clearly his final word on the subject. Each page is crammed full of microscopic detail, from George Best’s car windscreen being defaced with lipstick by a lovelorn female fan, to the price of touted tickets for the Cup final, to assistant manager Jimmy Murphy’s preferred at-home listening (Chopin and Grieg).

McCartney must effectively have lived in the cuttings library for months to amass this much material. In its own way, the deluge of information reaches critical mass – and it’s not helped by the lack of subheadings to break up the text, meaning that the whole thing feels like a slog at times.

We all already know the narrative: the emotional aftershock of the crash, the slow rebuilding, the many painful defeats, the shaping of talented young players into gods of the game, the regaining of the title in 1965, won again two years later, the coronation against Benfica in 1968. McCartney uses the 1963 FA Cup final, in which United beat Leicester 3-1, as the turning point. The team narrowly avoided relegation that same month, finishing 19th, with many players still not psychologically recovered from Munich, dressing-room recriminations abounding (Noel Cantwell reputedly led the player-power faction) and Jack Crompton’s coaching methods being soundly criticised. It’s a reminder of how easily everything could have turned out differently.

With so much information crammed in, the prose tends towards the dryly matter-of-fact. Perhaps unavoidably, it settles into a laundry-list of match after match and win after win (though it never resorts to the Lego-brick approach of David Peace’s scarcely readable Red Or Dead). At times, it reads as if it were written in the late 1950s themselves. Perhaps this is McCartney’s way of getting into the spirit of the thing, eschewing the pseudy floweriness of so much current football writing for a just-the-facts approach that better suits the subject matter. Or perhaps that’s just the way he writes: not having read the Byrne book, it’s difficult to tell.

Despite its occasional drabness, it’s not hard to imagine Manchester United: Rising from the wreckage 1958-68 becoming the set text on the subject matter. If nothing else, it’s a remarkable feat of research and hugely admirable as an important contribution to the historical record – even if it’s not always easy to love as a piece of writing.

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Both Cambridge clubs United and City have seen their requests for new grounds denied, writes Matthew Gooding

Earlier this year Cambridge City Council did a U-turn on plans to build a two-metre high statue of a Subbuteo referee on Parker’s Piece, a common near the city centre. An artist had been commissioned to design the work to commemorate Cambridge’s role in the formation of the laws of football; it is thought that the FA’s Laws of the Game were based on rules drawn up in the park in the 19th century by students from the city’s university.

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by Paul Brown
Goal-Post, £7.99
Reviewed by Terry Staunton
From WSC 318 August 2013

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Pre-empting the terrace chants of several future generations, the 1878 FA Cup final referee was, indeed, a Bastard. Racehorse owner and solicitor Segar Bastard was the man with the whistle, although just a few years earlier he might have been waving a handkerchief to signal foul play, before a bright spark hit on the idea that something which made a noise might more easily attract players’ attention.

It sounds like an obvious tweaking of how the game should be played, along with the 1871 ruling that introduced dedicated goalkeepers – instead of anyone on the pitch being allowed to take a “fair catch” – although it would be another 40 years before keepers’ powers were reined in to prevent them from picking the ball up anywhere in their own half. Likewise, the Victorian equivalent of goal-line technology was the 1870s introduction of solid crossbars, thus ending the confusion and controversy caused by balls striking the strip of tape tied between the tops of posts.

Paul Brown’s miscellany doesn’t attempt a straight chronology of how the game developed while Queen Victoria was on the throne, and that is to the book’s advantage. The time-hopping scattergun collection of pivotal changes to the laws governing play is liberally peppered with tremendously trivial tales of Zulu warriors playing exhibition matches in Scarborough, newspaper reports of therapeutic games played between inmates of lunatic asylums and revelations about the health-conscious 1889 Sunderland team containing seven non-smokers.

The author’s visits to press archives come up trumps time and again, recounting St Patrick’s Day riots at an 1840 match in Edinburgh (“a reinforcement of the police soon dispersed the cowardly assailants; four of the ringleaders, we are happy to say, are in custody”) or Derby Council’s decision to ban the game outright in 1846, declaring it “a vestige of a semi-barbarous age”. And who wouldn’t have wanted to witness the game played in Windsor, when both teams had their ankles tied 15 inches apart and the winners were presented with a cheese?

Among these myriad curios, Brown offers potted biographies of pioneering teams, players and personalities. Modern-day fans of Notts County may already be well versed in the club’s history but it’s intriguing for the rest of us to learn that antagonisms with their Forest neighbours stretch back to the very first derby fixture, when the latter team sneakily fielded 17 players. Rightful space is afforded to such movers and shakers as first FA secretary Ebenezer Cobb Morley, aristocratic Arthur Kinnaird (a 19th-century David Beckham, suggests Brown) and poet Nevill “Nuts” Cobbold, regarded as the forefather of dribbling.

The rules may have varied from town to town, even factory to factory, before the FA sought workable unification, while outbreaks of violence meant football habitually filled as many column inches of the crime reports as it did the sports pages, but the colourful transitions the game went through to become the beast we know today are endlessly fascinating. This book doesn’t set out to tell the story in dense, sober detail, opting instead to present itself as a hugely entertaining exercise in eavesdropping.

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