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Episode 28: Orange balls and ice skating with Jimmy Armfield

In this exclusive WSC Supporters’ Club edition of the podcast, magazine editor Andy Lyons, writer Harry Pearson and host Daniel Gray discuss old football possessions, Christmas presents related to the game and matches in snow and fog, from orange balls to the Filbert Street polysphere. Dan’s dubious views on the efficiency of household glue are questioned, and the Random Topic Generator throws up the subject of One Hit Wonder players including Cup Tie McKay and Tim Buzaglo. Record Breakers takes us to Udine, Reims and Norwich.

The only way to hear this episode is to sign up for the WSC Supporters’ Club for as little as £2 per month. There are great rewards, including bonus episodes, extended editions, badges, T-shirts and photo prints.

It’s Not All Black 
& White

326 McDerby John McDermott 
& Simon Ashberry
The History Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 326 April 2014

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In many ways John McDermott’s book is the archetypal lower-league autobiography. You have contractual wrangles and several relegations shot through with moments of glory, laddish hijinks on pre-season tours of Scandinavia, a touching sense of wonder when the player crosses paths with his contemporaries from the Premier League and transcription from interview tapes with a minimum of editorial effort. Rather than leave for a new club every chapter, though, McDermott spends all of his 21-year, 750-match career with Grimsby Town.

This is what makes his story remarkable. He is, perhaps, the last of his kind – not just at Blundell Park, but anywhere. McDermott was long recognised as one of the best full-backs outside the top flight, having perfected the art – as we Town fans sometimes called it – of defending without tackling. “The best defender on any team is the one with the cleanest pair of shorts,” he is told as a young player, and “that became my forte, staying on my feet rather than sliding in rashly.” It’s Not All Black & White sounds only the faintest notes of wistfulness as the author reflects on transfer approaches from Ipswich, Bradford and Watford – all three of whom go on to reach the Premier League. An England scout arrives early on but McDermott has just been sent on a cross-country run by manager Mick Lyons and has a stinker.

As a schoolboy McDermott travels down from his native Middlesbrough for a trial and never looks back. He speaks of his club and adopted hometown with gentle rather than showy affection (once asked by a national paper why he stayed with Grimsby, he cited the area’s low house prices). Over two decades managers come and go, and with them a variety of methods. Lennie Lawrence takes Town to the bottom of the second tier but McDermott admires his futuristic approach to fitness. More typical is the illustrious Alan Buckley, who throws down the scouts’ opposition report and says: “Right, read it if you want but I’m not bothered if you don’t… it’s all about us.”

McDermott’s situation eventually prompts a sad and telling reflection on footballers’ pay. Wages reflect only what it costs to retain a player – not his ability. When an ageing star is performing superbly these are not the same. Supporters vote McDermott player of the year, but at the age of 36 approaches from elsewhere are unlikely, so the then Grimsby chairman John Fenty (who essentially retains the role to date, in all but name) cuts his weekly pay from £650 to £300. Witness a club legend scrabbling around for odd jobs at the ground to bring in an extra £50 a week, and you see the kind of house Fenty has been running.

For all the talk of McDermott’s loyalty, the most striking trait in evidence here is his dignity. He speaks of Fenty with a surprising lack of bitterness and declines to settle old scores with the senior players who bullied him as an apprentice. In 2009, after retiring, he receives the PFA Merit Award – bestowed previously upon the likes of Jimmy Armfield and Alex Ferguson – and his humility shines on. As with the playing style, so with the man: never lunging in, always staying upright. He’s Grimsby’s greatest ever and his story is compelling.

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The Wizard

316 WizardThe life of Stanley Matthews
by Jon Henderson
Yellow Jersey, £18.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 316 June 2013

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Stanley Matthews is one of those figures who looms so large in the consciousness of the nation there’s a tendency to think we already know all there is to know about him. The truth, which becomes apparent while reading Jon Henderson’s vivid biography, is that what most of us actually know about a player whose career spanned 29 seasons is confined to the salient facts about a couple of famous matches and a whole heap of the sort of cliches (including the one about how he always crossed the ball so that the laces didn’t hit the forward’s head) that were the 1960s equivalent of YouTube.

As you might expect, the truth, as it emerges in this well-researched and cannily written book, is more complex and interesting than the well-worn phrases about body swerve, dropping a cross on a postage stamp and the 1953 FA Cup final might have led us to expect. Matthews himself was a difficult character to read, on good terms with his team-mates yet always distant from them. Like many men of his generation and background he was not given to talking about his feelings, or to public displays of emotion. Even the obvious affection of football fans across the world could not draw him out. “He never interacted with the crowd,” Blackpool team-mate Jimmy Armfield recalls. “It just wasn’t his way.”

Matthews’s dribbling was so phenomenal that after one particularly spectacular run and goal against Belgium, the opposition players spontaneously applauded him as he ran back to the halfway line. Yet, for all the brightness he brought to the game, he was a rigid, almost Spartan figure – a non-drinker and non-smoker who sat quietly in the corner while his Stoke City team-mates were swigging beer from a hotel chamber pot, during surreptitious late-night sessions, and took cold showers before matches to help him focus. Locked in an unhappy marriage, frustrated by a succession of club and international managers who regarded him as a temperamental “show off” and by the financial constraints imposed by a job that, despite his celebrity, never paid him more than £20 a week, he clearly felt the strain. One day, sitting in a first-class railway carriage with his Stoke colleagues, he watched a luggage porter going about his work and remarked wistfully: “There’s something about normal life, isn’t there?”

As Henderson clearly demonstrates, whatever Matthews’s wishes – whether he was dazzling Hitler’s henchmen with a breathtaking display in Berlin following the shameful “Nazi salute” business, arguing bitterly over a loyalty bonus at Stoke, being reprimanded by the War Office for selling coffee on the black market in Brussels or eloping with “the true love of my life” Mila Winterova, a Czech who it emerged had once been a spy – his was a life that was destined never to be normal.

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The Last Fancy Dan

The Duncan McKenzie Story
by Duncan McKenzie and David Saffer
Vertical Editions, £17.99
Reviewed by Mark O'Brien
From WSC 274 December 2009 

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Duncan McKenzie openly admits that his style of play divided opinions. There were those who saw him as a luxury player, while others considered him the sort of maverick who could unlock defences in an era, the 1970s, when men like Ron Harris and Tommy Smith would emasculate forwards as soon as look at them.

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