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Search: 'Ken Bates'

Stories

Episode 64: Overstayed welcomes, Singing Winger tribute & guest Nottingham Forest podcast

In this exclusive WSC Supporters’ Club edition of the podcast, magazine editor Andy Lyons, writer Harry Pearson and host Daniel Gray stop considering the spherification of biscuits to discuss Overstayed Welcomes, from Coventry City to Ken Bates via the Fratton Park toilets. Record Breakers brings verses from Vienna and we continue our sprightly feature, The Final Third, in which a guest contributes a match, a player and an object to the WSC Museum of Football. Joining Dan as our visiting curator this time is Jeremy Davies of the Nottingham Forest podcast, 1865.

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.

Sutton v Leeds in 1970: Full-strength teams and Don Revie’s obsessiveness

With the two teams set to meet again in the FA Cup fourth round this weekend, we looks back at their previous match at Gander Green Lane

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Lincoln’s on-pitch turnaround must be matched by keeping new supporters

The Imps top the National League and face Ipswich tonight in an FA Cup replay, but the real challenge is sustaining their increased crowds

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The Gaffer

323 WarnockThe trials and tribulations of a football manager
by Neil Warnock
Headline £16.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 323 January 2014

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Outside Yorkshire people would call Neil Warnock’s bluntness “refreshing”, but I had enough relatives from the county to realise he is just talking normally, apart from the strange absence of any swearing. Warnock takes us well beyond the angry and abusive figure he was on the touchline to give perhaps one of the last accounts of being a manager from an English, old-school perspective, stretching across all the divisions.

He is prepared to name those he does not like, bears a few grievances (and why not after 33 years as a manager) and offers a few telling insights into the managerial mind. Some clubs have apparently switched the position of the home and away dug-outs, the better to berate the linesman running the right wing – no stone left unturned in the modern game.

Warnock has aired his views by means of a weekly column in the Independent (which I have not read and therefore cannot tell how much, if any, is rehashed). For The Gaffer he has employed the Independent‘s Glenn Moore to bring some polish to his thoughts. The pleasing result is an unusual structure, more reminiscent of fiction than biography. At times it reads like the musings of an after-dinner speaker reviewing his whole career through the prism of his current and recent jobs. The benefit to the well-informed fan is that you do not know what is going to come next, as you would with a more chronological approach.

The disadvantage, of course, is the reader might not get what they expect. I would have preferred more on his time at Bramall Lane. For me, and for the football world in general I think, this was the apotheosis of Warnock: ardent supporter turned successful manager and tragically undone in 2007 by managerial “friends” Alex Ferguson and Rafa Benítez, who picked weakened teams against Sheffield United’s relegation rivals, and the dodgy Carlos Tévez deal.

Instead the focus is very much on later years with unstinting praise for Simon Jordan, once chairman of Crystal Palace, and the club’s fans. This is followed by a detailed account of life at Loftus Road under the auspices of various uncontrollable international business moguls and in charge of difficult talents such as Joey Barton and Adel Taarabt. The job did not get any easier with the Anton Ferdinand and John Terry affair, which gets a close and dispassionate examination.

Warnock conveys a very strong sense of the manager’s role being invaded and undermined by non-football issues inconceivable when he started at Scarborough and Notts County, hence the sub-title of this book. Nevertheless he remains hooked on the thrills and changing fortunes of football management. After QPR he took on Leeds, Ken Bates and a foreign takeover and the final few pages read more like another job application than a farewell to a boisterous 33 years of hurt.

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Bite your tongue

wsc303Nick Miller reports on Ken Bates’s decision to ban critical supporters from Leeds United games

To put things delicately, Ken Bates’s tenure as chairman of Leeds United has been interesting. It was difficult to imagine a way he could top appointing his godson’s father as manager, banning journalists for having the temerity to ask whether he actually owned the club (before eventually admitting that he did) and calling Leeds fans who disagreed with his methods “morons”. However, Bates arguably outdid himself in March, after a group of fans were barred from Leeds games, simply for speaking out.

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