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From tildes to umlauts: Premier League players embrace shirt punctuation to show roots

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Be it an accent, umlaut or favoured nickname, many footballers have special requests as to how their name is printed

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Birmingham well placed for better season despite frustration at lack of signings

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Harry Redknapp has been exasperated by slow transfer activity which has hindered Blues’ start, but there should be no repeat of last year’s relegation struggle

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Sol Campbell: The authorised biography

327 Campbellby Simon Astaire
Spellbinding Media, £18.99
Reviewed by Adam Powley
From WSC 327 May 2014

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Major football biographies have taken a bit of a battering of late, with many publishers offering huge advances on books which failed to sell. Now, doubting commissioning editors are all looking for an “angle”. Sol Campbell’s biography, written by Simon Astaire, fits the bill. The headline grabber is inevitably only a small part of the story, but Campbell’s assertion that he was denied the England captaincy due to the colour of his skin has been a 
publicist’s dream.

It is also a serious accusation and one that has received widespread condemnation. One criticism is that it negates the more serious issues about lingering racism in football. It is also challengeable factually as well as being fodder for those who see Campbell as a whinger. As far as this book goes, it’s another example of Campbell’s lifelong grudge about being neglected.

At its heart, for all the extensive memoir of a hugely successful career, the book is primarily about Campbell’s resentments, and in particular the fractured relationship with his late father. Yet for someone so prone to self analysis, he shows a glaring lack of self awareness. He moans about the England manager Steve McClaren failing to call him but leaves his future wife in the lurch by not answering her calls for three months. And he agonises about his father’s distance while all but ignoring his own record as a parent who has had little or no contact with one 
of his children.

This will chime with the many Tottenham fans who still dislike Campbell for his move to Arsenal. There is some welcome context on the build-up to that event, and the pure logic of the move is evident. But his preening conviction – the other extreme of Campbell’s complex character – simply doesn’t countenance that it might not have been the most 
honourable of decisions.

Emerging from a difficult upbringing, Campbell shouldn’t be admonished for his ambition, but doesn’t appear to appreciate the consequences of his actions. He is now playing down the England captaincy accusation, like letting off a firework then complaining about the bang. In a Newsnight interview with non-football fan Jeremy Paxman, the message was hopelessly muddled – a result of Campbell trying to position himself as the intelligent footballer with something profound to say, but lacking articulacy.

Campbell fares better expressing himself via his biographer. He has interesting perspective on his experience at Lilleshall, while the chapter on life at Arsenal under Arsène Wenger and David Dein is enlightening. But the navel gazing overwhelms. The hitherto publicity-shy Campbell is laid bare as needy, introverted, a maddening mix of single-minded focus and debilitating reserve.

For all that, Astaire does a good job of keeping the narrative on track, while extracting genuine insight into playing at the elite level. The passages on the England v Argentina World Cup games convey the sheer intensity these contests generated. The antics of the Munto snake-oil salesmen who hijacked Notts County – and made a fool out of Campbell – make for a bleakly comic contrast.

This, however, is a biography only in name. It would have been productive, for example, to hear from the mother of Campbell’s first child, or what his 11 siblings have to say, yet, over nearly 300 pages, only three of them are even mentioned by name. “Why don’t people understand I’m just different to most professional footballers?” Sol pleads. He just wants to be loved, it seems – but he is hard work to warm to.

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Does Your Rabbi Know 
You’re Here?

310 rabbiThe story of English football’s forgotten tribe
by Anthony Clavane
Quercus, £17.99
Reviewed by Mike Ticher
From WSC 310 December 2012

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After Jack Ruby shot JFK’s killer Lee Harvey Oswald, he said he’d done it “to show the world Jews have guts”. Almost no one ran with that implausible claim, except the great Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce, who half-joked that “even the shot was Jewish – the way he held the gun”.

Anthony Clavane’s remarkable history of Jews in English football reminded me of Bruce, in that few Gentiles would think of Brian Glanville, David Pleat or David Dein as having had a “Jewish” influence on football, any more than of Ruby primarily as a Jewish assassin. That indifference, or even ignorance, is clearly a good thing if it means anti-Semitism has had little bearing on how such people have been judged (a big if, in Clavane’s view). But seeing them through a specifically Jewish lens is a fascinating and at times confronting experience.

Informed by a commanding grasp of English Jewry’s identity struggle since the great migrations, Clavane argues that football has been a key way for Jews to “become English” and be accepted. The rise of Lord Triesman and David Bernstein in the FA suggests the journey is all but complete.

Clavane’s book is packed with wonderful portraits and sharp insights into Manchester City, Leeds, Tottenham and Arsenal, among others. His research is outstanding, the complexity of his argument deftly handled and his snapshots unforgettable: the 1960s Orient directors Harry Zussman, Bernard Delfont and Leslie Grade handing players cash, tickets to the Royal Variety Performance and their own expensive clothes (defender Malcolm Lucas saved Grade’s reversible lemon/light blue cardigan “for important dos”); Manny Cussins slipping away to work in the local branch of his furniture chain on away trips with Leeds; Pleat’s Yiddish-speaking mother greeting him after every defeat with the words “So, where was the goalkeeper?”.

The author sees the Jews who have flourished in football typically as outsiders who brought “a new vision, a fresh slant” – from Willy Meisl’s 1956 polemical book Soccer Revolution, through Glanville’s groundbreaking journalism to Edward Freedman’s commercial revolution at Tottenham and Manchester United. In this light the Premier League looks startlingly like an all-Jewish production, with Irving Scholar and Dein in the lead and strong supporting roles from Alan Sugar, Alex Fynn and even, inadvertently, Lord Justice Taylor.

At times Clavane is so eager to welcome the growing influence of such “modernisers” that he disregards the wider consequences of their actions. Has the FA’s reputation improved since Jews broke open its cosy elite? Barely. Should we celebrate the influence of Robert Maxwell (mentioned only in passing) or regard the power of Roman Abramovich or Pini Zahavi as a triumph over anti-Semitism?

It’s hard to gauge how fierce that prejudice was, particularly off the field. Anti-Semitism, particularly the polite British variant, often goes unspoken and unwritten and is all the more insidious for that. Clavane often refers to unsourced “mutterings” and “references to a so-called kosher nostra” but direct evidence is sketchy.

He quotes the Burnley chairman Bob Lord, at a Variety Club function in 1974, saying: “We have to stand up against a move to get soccer on the cheap by the Jews who run television.” I’m not sure if that quite amounts to Clavane’s conclusion that “the game’s traditionalists insisted it would be a tragedy if the Football League sold out to a race that was disproportionately represented in the entertainment business”. Lord was a traditionalist in some ways but hardly a typical one – although it’s equally arguable he was the only one willing to say what others thought.

On the field anti-Semitic sentiments were much clearer, though often aimed at general targets (Tottenham above all) as much as the small number of Jewish players. Some of the best material in the book deals with the refusal to accept insults by the working-class boxing and football clan around the Lazarus family, including Barry Silkman and Orient’s Bobby Fisher. Silkman says of his relative Mark Lazarus, scorer for QPR in the 1967 League Cup final: “Lovely fella, didn’t go looking for trouble, but if someone called him a Jew they’d be horizontal.”

Clavane suggests interesting reasons for Tottenham’s association with Jews – including the quirks of London’s transport network and the inward-looking nature of the “natural” East End club, West Ham – although the claim that one-third of their fans in the 1930s were Jewish seems high. He is surely right that the carefree abuse of Tottenham as “yids” was fuelled by Warren Mitchell (grandson of Russian Jews) as Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part.

There is a lot to debate here but the depth and warmth of Clavane’s work is a giant contribution to a subject long overdue proper attention.

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