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Conference Season

329 Conferenceby Steve Leach
Bennion Keaney Ltd, £11.99
Reviewed by Matthew Gooding
From WSC 329 July 2014

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Often erroneously likened to a fifth division of the Football League, the Football Conference could more accurately be described as a halfway house. Non-League’s top tier is home to a curious mix of teams; professional clubs who have fallen on hard times compete alongside new names making their way up the pyramid and getting a first taste of the big time.

Into this world steps Steve Leach, a Manchester City fan who, having grown disillusioned with the commercialisation and “over-paid prima donnas” of the Premier League, decides to focus his attentions on non-League instead. Conference Season is a diary of his travels around the country in the 2012-13 season, during which he takes in a match at every Conference club as he bids to “rediscover the soul of professional football”.

Throughout the book you get the impression that the author yearns for the days of his youth in the 1950s and 1960s, when top-level football matches were attended by thousands of working-class folk from their local community. Large crowds and red-hot atmosphere are certainly not in abundance in the Conference, and Leach’s wish to paint the league as a window to a glorious bygone era means he ignores the fact that it is a competition which is often as distorted by money and egotistical owners as the Premier League he wants to leave behind. As a result, Hyde’s tie-in with Manchester City, where they were paid to change their club colours to sky blue and remove the “United” part of their name, is briefly mentioned but not subjected to any critical analysis. Ditto an acrimonious boardroom split he encounters at Macclesfield, while the many battles for control of the author’s hometown club Stockport County, which sparked their rapid descent through the divisions from League One to the Conference North, are not touched on at all.

We rarely hear from fans of the teams involved. When Leach does engage them in conversation, it tends to be on matters of player selection and form, rather than looking at the joys of supporting a non-League side and the role their club plays in the community. As a result, the whole affair feels 
somewhat distant, and all we are left with are a series of clunky anecdotes and the author’s glib and often patronising observations; seasoned non-League supporters will enjoy his amazement at the fact that two sets of fans can co-exist in the same bar without resorting to violence, or that some games of football are played without crowd segregation.

Leach is a professor of Local Government, and it becomes apparent this is where his expertise lie as he describes the growth, and in some cases decline, of the towns he visits with passion and insight. It’s a shame that the football side of Conference Season rarely delivers either of these qualities.

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GoodFella

321 BellamyMy autobiography
by Craig Bellamy
Sport Media, £18.99
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 320 October 2013

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As his old boss Mark Hughes points out in the foreword to GoodFella, Craig Bellamy has a lot of strengths but diplomacy isn’t one of them. It’s an approach that’s landed him in all shades of bother throughout a nomadic career, from the “nutter with a putter” spat with John Arne Riise to brawling with bouncers outside nightclubs. It’s all laid bare here, though the real selling point of this highly engrossing memoir (written with the Daily Mirror‘s Oliver Holt as guide) is Bellamy’s frank and often painful honesty. Especially when it comes to himself.

It’s unflattering stuff. Here is a man utterly consumed by football, driven by insecurity and a will to succeed that frequently veers into self-admonishment. Such intensity, he says, turned him into “the human snarl”. Dogged by repeated knee injuries, he’s sulky and uncommunicative, especially with his wife and kids. He admits to infidelities. And during his final days at Newcastle he becomes obnoxious and arrogant.

The watershed moment comes in November 2011, with the suicide of his idol and close friend Gary Speed. Cue a rigorous stock-take of his life and destructive personality, followed by therapy with British Olympic psychiatrist Steve Peters. Bellamy finally allows himself to let go of his rage. By then it’s too late to save his marriage but what emerges is a more forgiving, open and ultimately contented character.

Not that Bellamy was ever a footballing pariah – there are plenty of former team-mates who vouch for him both as a human being and professional – but GoodFella doesn’t hold back when it comes to those he disliked. Graham Poll comes across as a self-serving “celebrity ref”, starstruck by David Beckham and Patrick Vieira. And while Bellamy cites Bobby Robson as the best manager he ever worked with, his successor Graeme Souness is the iron fist who came in looking for a fight.

Both Rafa Benítez and Roberto Mancini are portrayed as joyless control freaks, the former an “unsmiling headmaster” with no room for spontaneity or sentiment, an attention-seeking dictator. City’s Brazilian folly Robinho is appallingly lazy, both in training and on the pitch, and a spoilt man-child when Bellamy confronts him about it.

Perhaps the most damning verdict is reserved for one-time Newcastle strike partner Alan Shearer, who is seen as a self-absorbed egotist with a yellow streak. Bellamy gleefully recounts the England man’s reluctance to leave the pitch after a game against Manchester United, knowing that Roy Keane (who’d been sent off for a Shearer-related fracas) was waiting in the tunnel. And after hearing he’d supposedly dissed him to others after moving on to Celtic, Bellamy texts Shearer directly after Newcastle’s lame FA Cup semi-final defeat in 2005: “Fucking typical of you. Looking at everyone else yet again. You need to look at yourself instead.” Shearer threatens to knock him out next time he’s in Newcastle.

All of this serves as a thoroughly refreshing antidote to the usual blandness that makes for football biographies. But GoodFella is far more substantial than just a series of delicious anecdotes. It feels like a rich confession from one of the game’s most misconstrued personalities.

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Champions League Dreams

312 Benitezby Rafa Benítez
Headline, £20
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 312 February 2013

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While it’s still too early to judge Brendan Rodgers, the consensus on Liverpool’s post-war managers is pretty much in. Shankly and Paisley? Daft question. Dalglish? Still a legend, despite last season. Evans and Houllier? Both missed their chance and overstayed their time. Hodgson? Oh come on.

But no Liverpool chief has polarised opinion like Rafa Benítez. To some he remains the tactical giant who outmanoeuvred far superior teams on the way to Champions League nirvana in 2005 and whose plans for reasserting Liverpool’s dominance at home were only undone by the financial misdeeds of a pair of mad American owners. To others he’s the bloke who got lucky, made more disastrous transfer dealings than good ones, took us down into the Europa League and promptly buggered off to Milan with a £6 million pay-off.

Champions League Dreams is unlikely to make either camp scamper over to the other side. Aided by Telegraph writer Rory Smith, Benítez’s prose is often as clinical and perfunctory as his press conferences while he journeys through his six European campaigns at the club. It’s a smart narrative move. Ignoring his underwhelming achievements in the Premier League – only coming close in 2008-09 and that after an embarrassing post-Christmas collapse and the Robbie Keane fiasco – this book amounts to a Greatest Hits of Rafa’s time at Liverpool.

One thing it does shore up is his obsession for detail. Benítez happily reveals the extent of his DVD resource library, one that lined the walls at Melwood, filled the basement at home and even stuffed up the attic of his parents’ house in Madrid. Those DVDs and accompanying notes were filled with games, players and coaching sessions, all neatly categorised, numbered and instantly accessible through a database, what he describes as “not just a record of all the games I had managed and training sessions I had overseen in my career, but an extensive library of football around the world”. It was a system he applied to educate players about the opposition and how to improve.

Some of his written detail is enlightening, not least when explaining how Liverpool managed to outsmart Barcelona in 2007, pinching the win at the Nou Camp then, with a first 45 minutes of “possibly the best half of football, tactically, I saw in my time at Liverpool”, closing out the tie. Occasionally some of the incidental detail is precious. Steven Gerrard, for instance, catching a lift home from a passing milk float when unable to flag a taxi after celebrating the semi-final win against Chelsea that season.

The baffling sale of Xabi Alonso is dealt with, though hardly satisfactorily, with Benítez claiming he was backed into a corner by financial necessity and UEFA’s newly imposed overseas player ratios. While both hold a degree of truth, at no point does he concede that it was a colossal mistake or show any awareness of the huge demotivating effect Alonso’s departure had on the likes of Gerrard, Javier Mascherano 
and Fernando Torres.

If it’s tactical insight you’re after, this book might suit you fine. But those hoping to unlock the secrets and impulses of this complex individual will be little the wiser.

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Agents, Rovers 
and Cricket 
Loving Owners

310 Roversby Michael Blackburn
Grosvenor House, £7.99
Reviewed by Tom Greene
From WSC 310 December 2012

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I was 100 pages into reading Agents, Rovers and Cricket Loving Owners when Steve Kean resigned from Blackburn Rovers. The author, Michael Blackburn, pours so much of his heart and soul into describing the pain both Kean and Venky’s have caused the club’s support that my first thought on hearing the news was for him. His book is a history of Venky’s takeover from the perspective of an exasperated fan living through it.

The story is certainly there to be told – Rovers have gone from one of the best run clubs in the League, operating successfully on very little external funding in one of the poorest parts of the UK, to an utter shambles. The catalogue of mismanagement, PR embarrassments and total lack of direction described in the book continues to this day. At the time of writing, despite Kean’s resignation almost a month ago, there is still no new manager in place. When Venky’s took over Kean was Sam Allardyce’s first-team coach. Currently in charge is Kean’s assistant, Eric Black: anyone is in with a chance of the manager’s job at Ewood Park.

The book is a chronological story from the day the Venky’s took over in November 2010 to eventual relegation last May. The structure is both a strength and weakness. On the positive side, no detail of the fans’ experience has gone undocumented and almost every game of Kean’s reign is described in painstaking detail. However, his poor team selection, delusional post-match analysis and never-ending optimism about his own and the team’s position is not enough to engage the reader throughout.

My favourite sections of the book are where we get pure unadulterated Kean. Although the author is scornful of Kean’s playing and managerial experience, this was not what made him a disastrous manager. His Comical Ali-style post-match debriefs are catalogued with some verve, although I was disappointed that a personal favourite – where Kean blamed a David Dunn shot hitting the post on a lack of dew on the grass – was not included in the author’s top ten. However, because we do not hear from Venky’s or their ex-manager directly (no doubt not for want of trying by the author) we are left with the same longing for the true story as Rovers fans will have felt living through it.

This book will not shed any new light on the Venky’s debacle for anybody who has followed the era closely. However, you could not get a more comprehensive account of what it has felt like to be a Rovers fan over the last two years. For those fans of Premier League teams not content with mid- to lower-table obscurity, read this book and it will show you that things could be worse. A lot worse.

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Notes on a scandal

wsc302 Cameron Carter analyses the different reactions to football’s many controversies

Just as there must statistically be teatime programmes on the BBC that do not feature Alex Jones or John Barrowman, so we must assume that there are gay footballers out there somewhere in the universe. In Britain’s Gay Footballers (BBC3, January 30), Amal Fashanu, niece of Justin, daughter of John, quested for a gay man among the 4,000 professional players registered in the UK.

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