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Surviving football’s money business
by Brian Laws with Alan Biggs
Vertical Editions, £16.99
Reviewed by Graham Stevenson
From WSC 316 June 2013
For a manager who has spent over a decade employed by Scunthorpe United in three spells, it’s disappointing to find only 19 pages in Brian Laws’s autobiography about his time at Glanford Park. He’s led the club to a couple of promotions and a couple of relegations, so it’s not as if there is a dearth of interesting history between them, despite the balance sheet currently reading roughly “nil”.
Scunthorpe are now broke, broken and back in the basement division for the first time in several years – which is exactly where they were when Laws first arrived in 1997. For the small steel-town club he was a relatively big appointment and made an immediate impression. Rumours spread quickly of dressing-room dust-ups and car-park dusting-downs, but “Ol’ Big Hair” and his journalist co-writer don’t take many opportunities to fill in much colour between the lines here.
The Machiavellian boardroom-level manoeuvres during a bizarre three weeks in 2004, for instance, are dealt with in just over a paragraph. This involved Laws being fired by a new chairman, before the previous one stepped in to take back control of the club and reinstated him. “The whole thing got quite nasty,” Brian says. But nasty how? Were horses’ heads involved?
It’s much the same elsewhere throughout this (terribly titled) book. Laws’s time at Grimsby Town is over quite quickly and the aftermath of an injury caused by his launching a plate of chicken wings into Italian midfielder Ivano Bonetti’s face reads like only two-thirds of a story. The lessons learned seem to have been to do with Laws’s handling of the media rather than the handling of his players. Later managerial roles at Sheffield Wednesday and Burnley are similarly done-and-dusted in mere pages and key incidents at all of his clubs feel as if they are dealt with like clearances to be booted into row Z. Much more care is taken in detailing why Laws got the nickname “Ernie” during his playing days. It’s as simple as you imagine – team-mates’ reference to comedian Ernie Wise being short and wearing a wig.
Laws’s years on the pitch dominate – obviously none more so than successful ones at Nottingham Forest (during which he drank Mick Hucknall’s backstage bar dry and wet himself walking out at Wembley for a Cup final – events unrelated). A series of anecdotes about Brian Clough’s eccentricities add more to the mythos but it’s actually Laws himself who surprises with some poignant recollections of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, such as his continuing embarrassment at not realising the seriousness of events and hurling verbal abuse at the first few Liverpool fans out onto the pitch.
It’s clear Clough had something of a soft spot for Laws and it’s easy enough to figure out why. Laws comes across as reasonably principled and workmanlike – qualities he showed as a player. He also seems prone to let his feelings boil over from time to time, an attribute he clearly takes into the dressing room as a manager.
Nottingham is blessed by having two football stadiums and a Test cricket ground within a short walk of the city centre. Not for long if Forest’s board have their way. Brian Clough is spinning in his grave and Al Needham has smoke coming out of his ears as he explains what passes for logic in the east midlands
The village of Gotham in Nottinghamshire is famed not only for inspiring an early name for New York, but for being full of mad people. Legend has it that when the locals heard that King John was making a detour through the village (thereby forcing the creation of a royal highway that the villagers would have to pay for), they went on an orgy of mentalism – drowning eels in a tub and painting green apples red – in order to scare the monarch away.
Sunday 1 Spurs thrash Villa 5-1 to move into a UEFA Cup spot. “Spurs have pushed on because they’ve made a big investment,” says David O’Leary, loud enough for Doug Ellis to hear. Man Utd’s 4‑0 win at Charlton (“For the last six weeks our defending has been chronic,” sighs Alan Curbishley) puts them a point behind Arsenal. Rangers are two points behind Celtic after a 3‑1 win at Aberdeen.
Tuesday 1 Tony Adams's autobiography, Addicted, serialized in the Sun , lays into Glenn Hoddle's preparations for France 98 – "A lot of what Glenn was doing and saying did not impress me. He seemed quite nervous and was whistling a lot – not the sign of a relaxed man," and his mishandling of Paul Gascoigne's axing from the squad – "Gazza was an ill man and Glenn did not properly understand the illness of addiction." Apparently, Glenn's nickname among England players is "Chocolate" because he think he's good enough to eat. What times they must have.
Wednesday 2 Millionaire pranksters Media Partners announce a rejigging of their European league plans, with two extra clubs added to each of the two super league divisions (you remember) and an extra 32 to be involved into the knockout Pro Cup, thereby including every country in Europe, which would be lovely. Glenn and Tony hold a press conference at which Glenn denies, in characteristically sticky fashion, that he was upset by Tone's comments about him. "He is entitled to his opinions, many of which are positive. In a strange way I think it has brought us closer together." "I've got total respect for the man, not because he's sitting next to me, but because I have," adds Tony, improvising nicely. Man City are to be invited to become tenants of the new 45,000 capacity multi-sports stadium to be built in Manchester for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Lottery funding, however, seems to be dependent on City moving in.