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Search: ' Andre Villas-Boas'

Stories

Commitment

348 Drogba400My autobiography
by Didier Drogba
Hodder & Stoughton, £20
Reviewed by Si Hawkins
From WSC 348 February 2016

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A couple of lines late in Didier Drogba’s autobiography really drive home that this isn’t your average burly striker life story. “On November 2009 I teamed up with Bono to help launch an initiative with Nike on the eve of World Aids Day,” Drogba recalls, before rattling through his UN work, including “mobilising people to eradicate the use of cluster bombs/munitions”. Clearly we’re in a different ballpark to, say, Micky Quinn’s Who Ate All The Pies.

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The Biography Of Tottenham Hotspur

314 Spursby Julie Welch
Vision Sports, £20
Reviewed by Alan Fisher
From WSC 314 April 2013

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The Twitter hashtag #againstmodernfootball is hardly a scientific dissection of the faults of the modern game but it has become an outpouring of genuine frustration and growing disenchantment: exorbitant ticket prices, alienated and marginalised fans, an obsession with the here and now and instant success. Julie Welch’s Biography Of Tottenham Hotspur is not only a revealing insight into the club, it could well restore your faith in football.

Welch traces the development of the club’s character and personality, showing there is more to a football club’s history than a list of players, matches and trophies. Her beloved Danny Blanchflower’s statement that it’s not just about winning, it’s about glory and doing things in style, articulates a culture and identity that dates back to the club’s formation in the 1880s, when three schoolboys met under a lamp-post 100 yards from the current ground.

Harry Redknapp and André Villas-Boas come from different schools of management but both talked of the need to play good football the Spurs way. Arthur Rowe’s pioneering “push and run” won a League title in 1951. He was influenced by another innovator, Peter McWilliam, Spurs boss in the 1920s, and in turn inspired the incomparable Bill Nicholson to bring unparalleled success in the 1960s and early 1970s. The familiar mixture of flamboyance and exasperation, the sublime and erratic, would be instantly recognisable to successive generations of Spurs fans.

We deny history at our peril. Alan Sugar saved the club but he understood the balance sheet better than his heritage, hence the crushing mediocrity of the 1990s with Christian Gross, Gerry Francis and George Graham. Then again, there’s nothing new under the sun. Financial crises, businessmen wanting to profit by moving the ground, an ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: any decade at Spurs, not just 
the last one.

Welch is an author and screenwriter, the first woman football reporter in Fleet Street to have her own byline. She is a beguiling storyteller who tells the tale with a curiosity and style that sweeps the reader along. The air of artistry and magic seduced her as a schoolgirl but it’s not quite right to suggest they entice fans these days. Peer pressure, family ties or blind accident are more common factors. However once committed it keeps us there, becoming part of who we are.

The nature of Spurs’ identity as a Jewish club is the only omission, perhaps because although it’s an independent publication, unusually the club have co-operated and are shy of potential controversy. The absence of statistics and tables may dismay lovers of detail, who will point to several 
proof-reading errors.

It’s a beautiful book, wonderfully written, that is essential for Spurs fans and deserves to be widely read because it is about perspective, culture and identity, precious to fans everywhere yet under attack. Read it and I defy you to tell me that finishing fourth in the Premier League is what truly matters.

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Mind games

wsc302The best antidote to the money ruining football is a litle retail therapy spent on your fantasy league team, argues Ashley Clark

As Wikipedia no doubt reliably informs me, fantasy football was created in 1990 by an Italian technology writer, Riccardo Albini, as a casually interactive, just-for-fun gaming experience. Albini was clearly onto something. The game has proved wildly popular, lurching through a variety of vaguely unwieldy mail and print iterations (as well as David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s 1990s TV show Fantasy Football League) to blossom into the slick, ubiquitous web-based beast it is today.

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Nothing in reserve

wsc301 Tom Shepherd argues that the concept of feeder teams is not too dissimilar to the current league structure and will have similarly negative effects

André Villas-Boas raised the possibility of introducing “feeder” teams into the English league structure recently. “The youth development system in England is not right, in my belief. The reserve leagues and youth levels are not competitive enough,” said the Chelsea manager. Villas-Boas believes that having a Chelsea feeder side in the lower leagues would help bridge the gap between reserve standards and first-team football. He also wants to improve his club’s youth development. John Terry, the last player to come through the Chelsea academy and become a first-team regular, is now in his thirties.

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Power struggles

wsc300 When team selections are made by senior players rather than managers things can only end badly, writes Mark Brophy

To an outsider, it seems mad that a club that has been in the top four of the Premier League pretty much all season should be rumoured to be in turmoil and on the verge of dismissing their manager. Yet that is exactly the situation Chelsea and Andre Villas-Boas have found themselves in at various points, usually coinciding with a marginal dip in performance level or results. These are not the chief reasons for the speculation, however. Constantly looming in the background is the over-confident shadow of player power.

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