Search: 'Keith Alexander'

Great Britons who took the game to the world
by Keith Baker
Pitch Publishing, £12.99
Reviewed by Paul Brown
From WSC 341 July 2015

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Britain did not invent football, as Sepp Blatter would no doubt remind us, but it did knock it into shape, drawing up rules, forming clubs, organising competitions and sending the association version out into the world. British migrants, travelling with Laws of the Game pamphlets and deflated leather casers in their suitcases, became football missionaries, teaching and inspiring new converts, and sowing the seeds for what would become an international obsession.

In Fathers Of Football, Keith Baker profiles several of these pioneers of the world game, many of whom remain relatively unknown in their home country. Take James Spensley, who left Britain in 1896 to work for an insurance company in Genoa. Today, Spensley has an Italian park, street and junior football tournament named in his honour. His great contribution to football in Italy began when he persuaded the expat Genoa Cricket and Athletic Club to take up the association game (and to admit non-British members).

Spensley became the club’s goalkeeper, captain and de facto manager, leading Genoa to six Italian championships between 1898 and 1904. Their success saw the club renamed the Genoa Cricket and Football Club – a name they retain today. The influence of British pioneers can be seen in the Anglicised names of several international football clubs: Genoa rather than Genova; Milan rather than Milano; Athletic rather than Atlético.

Some of the individuals profiled here may already be familiar to football readers. Charles Miller is popularly regarded as the father of football in Brazil, and was the subject of various colour pieces during last summer’s World Cup. Alexander Hutton is similarly regarded in Argentina. Meanwhile Jimmy Hogan’s incredibly influential contribution to the development of football in Austria and Hungary (via the Netherlands, Switzerland, France and Germany) is well documented, although it remains a remarkable story.

More obscure are the Charnock brothers, Clement and Harry, who do not have so much as a Wikipedia entry between them, despite the role they played in the development of football in Russia. The brothers, from Lancashire, travelled to Moscow around 1890 to manage textile factories. Both men encouraged their employees to take up football and inspired the formation of several clubs, despite state opposition to organised activities involving workers. Harry’s OKS (Orekhovo Sports Club) were a founding member of the Moscow League, and won five consecutive championships between 1910 and 1914, playing in front of crowds of around 15,000. However, after the Revolution in 1917, OKS were placed under the control of the Cheka – a forerunner of the KGB. The club were renamed Dynamo Moscow, and the Charnocks were expunged from their history. They deserve to be better remembered.

Baker makes it clear that his “Great Britons” were not solely responsible for the spread of association football around the world, and he places the growth of the game into wider historical and social context. But his concise and informative book pays tribute to their individual achievements, and provides an illuminating record of their contributions to the world game.

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The Keith Alexander story
by Rob Bradley
Vertical Editions, £14.99
Reviewed by Ian Plenderleith
From WSC 312 February 2013

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With Lincoln City perpetually languishing around the nether regions of the Conference, it’s tempting for wistful fans to recall more positive times at the club. These lie just a handful of years back when the Imps became a football trivia question for making the League Two play-offs five seasons in a row but failing to get promoted. This now seems like a bronzened era of relative glory.

When the late Keith Alexander began his second spell as manager at Sincil Bank in 2002, the crowds were as low and the money was as scarce as they’ve been throughout the past 30 years. But at least the team, as Alexander promised, would be “there or thereabouts” come the season’s end. Trawling the non-League bargain bins for big, tough lads who would do the proverbial job, the manager moulded Lincoln into a team that would not only survive but get results.

Lincoln’s inversion of tiki-taka won them few friends beyond the county boundaries but Alexander had already learned from his first year in charge at Lincoln in 1993 that playing neat football in England’s fourth tier garners faint praise, while losing you both games and your job. Sacked after just 12 months, the Football League’s first black manager dropped down to Ilkeston Town to relearn the basics of leadership. He returned to Lincoln as a man who knew how to get the best out of limited performers.

As a player, Alexander was a journeyman non-League striker who had the knack of making friends wherever he went, before moving on to try his luck somewhere else. He was a benevolent bender of rules, being fined by Barnet for turning out for a Sunday league team in Lincoln when he should have been resting and forging his birth certificate by two years at the age of 31 in order to secure a contract with Grimsby Town, his belated breakthrough as a player at League level.

The harshest criticism you will find of Alexander in this book is that he wasn’t much good in the air and that he could be tough with his players, as you would expect with any decent manager. You will read what you likely know – that he was a hard-working, genuine, funny and caring man who rarely forgot a name or a face and who would go 
out of his way to talk to fans and journalists without ever making them feel like it was an imposition.

Like its subject, this book is difficult to criticise. It’s written by another fine human being, Rob Bradley, the former Lincoln chairman who famously remortgaged his house to help save the club. It’s no great investigative work but it is a thorough and warmly told story with a sprinkling of wonderful anecdotes, such as the time when, playing for Cliftonville, Alexander smiled and blew kisses at bellicose Glentoran fans chanting racist abuse.

That kind of reaction is one of the reasons why family, friends, fans and fellow players universally remember a great bloke who, in the words of ex-Lincoln defender Ben Futcher, “was the only manager in football who could pull you into his office, tell you you’re not playing, and you came out with a smile on your face”.

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Dear WSC
Trevor Fisher (Letters, WSC 301) is nearly right. When Alex Ferguson was accused of driving on the hard shoulder in 1999, he hired Nick “Mr Loophole” Freeman as his lawyer. They argued successfully that he should not be punished as he was
suffering from an upset stomach and needed to get to the training ground quickly to use the toilet. I have always slightly suspected he got away with it because nobody in the courtroom wanted to spend a moment longer than necessary with that gruesome, messy mental image in their head. Which is now in your head. No need to thank me.
Jim Caris, Prague

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Macclesfield Town fan Andrew Fraser tells how, despite the famous surname, one former player failed to live up to expectations

Making a name for yourself in football can be a struggle, but when that name has already been made for you things can be trickier still. Nineteen-year-old John Rooney, brother of Wayne, spent two weeks of August in the US having turned down a new contract with League Two Macclesfield Town. Aiming to win a place in the MLS Superdraft and secure a central contract, he trained with both the Seattle Sounders and Portland Trailblazers and his name prompted a flurry of excitement among the American media. For fans of Macclesfield, it looked very much like a last throw of the dice for a young player who has long carried the weight of expectation.

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James Bentley reviews a League Two season in which Notts County grabbed the attention, but an open division produced some astonishing results

It’s hard to think about the 2009-10 season in the basement without the beginning, middle and end of the story being taken up by the oldest club in the Football League. Notts County and their frivolous, occasionally murky, ways grabbed attention from every regional TV news team in every small market town that Sven and his illustriously paid company rolled into.

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