Sorry, your browser is out of date. The content on this site will not work properly as a result.
Upgrade your browser for a faster, better, and safer web experience.

Search: ' Kevin Blackwell'

Stories

How Not To Be A Football Millionaire

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

Buy this book

 

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.

Buy this book

National mourning

wsc299 Huw Richards pays tribute to Gary Speed after his death

Even discounting for the inevitable reaction when someone dies young and suddenly, there was something different and genuine about the tributes to Gary Speed. Along with shock and disbelief was simple bafflement. Why? Maybe the inquest, which reopens on January 30, will provide some answers. His case appears to differ from other sportsmen’s self-inflicted deaths.

Read more…

Letters, WSC 274

Dear WSC
I read with interest Paul Joyce’s article concerning the rebranding of SSV Markranstadt as RB Leipzig in WSC 273. Only this summer it was rumoured that my club Southampton would be saved from extinction by becoming co-opted into the Red Bull sporting portfolio. While the team colours, fitting snugly with the brand, would not need to change the adding of the Red Bull moniker seemed a step too far. Surely something would be lost in fusing a global brand, with all its focus-grouped values and marketing spin, to a football club; an act of historic vandalism similar to replacing stained glass windows in a church with double glazing while nailing a satellite dish to the spire. The internet debate suggested, however, that many Saints supporters were happy to trade naming rights in exchange for the club’s survival. The same supporters had several years previously reacted angrily against a corporate branding of St Mary’s Stadium as simply the “Friends Provident Stadium” with the ensuing negative publicity resulting in a U-turn with the addition of St Mary’s to the title. Corporate patronage is not as new as we would like to imagine. The P in PSV Eindhoven stands for Philips, as in the Dutch electrical giants,  with the club’s home games at the Philips Stadion. Indeed, many clubs have benefited from long-term relationships with business which may be far preferable to other ownership and financing options; a quick glance around the leagues reveals several fates far worse than “Red Bull Saints”. Football may be just a game to some but following our team is about being part of a community, feeling a connection with the friends and strangers stood next to us at the ground. It is a thread linking us to people looking out for the score on a TV screen or in a newspaper on the other side of the world. Brands by their nature seek to harness and transform these feelings to translate them into profit, in the process sullying the very spirit of our club. Barcelona’s motto is “more than a club”. Every clubs motto should be “more than a brand”.
Neil Cotton, Southampton

Read more…

Luton Town 1 Leeds Utd 1

Relegation to League One, administration, Kevin Blackwell – Luton and Leeds share quite a lot. So why not add the points, too, when the teams meet at a packed-out if still fairly charmless Kenilworth Road, asks Neil Rose

There is something exciting about having Leeds United in town. Irritating though the whole concept of clubs being “big” or “small” is, there is no denying that Leeds have an aura about them. It’s an aura that attracts by far the largest league crowd of the season to Luton, as well as more police than every other home game combined. It generates an edgy atmosphere at times, punctuated by the odd, quickly subdued fight at both ends.

Read more…

Old hat

The only way appears to be down for Luton Town as they await an FA ruling, writes Neil Rose

It says much about lower-league football that the benefit in kind supposedly offered by Luton to encourage one player to re-sign was laying his patio and landscaping his garden at a cost of £7,000. It is also perhaps the only faintly amusing aspect of the FA’s record 55 charges over Luton’s transfer and loan dealings and contract renegotiations between 2004 and 2007. A bad week then got a lot worse when the club were put into administration for the third time in eight years.

Read more…

Copyright © 1986 - 2024 When Saturday Comes LTD All Rights Reserved Website Design and Build NaS