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Author Archive
by Steven Kay
1889 Books, £8.99
Reviewed by Paul Brown
From WSC 327 May 2014
Rabbi Howell was the first footballer of Romany origin to play for England. A slight but skilful half-back, he was a star of the excellent Sheffield United team of the 1890s, alongside the better-remembered likes of William “Fatty” Foulke and Ernest “Nudger” Needham. “A Gipsy by birth, [Howell] perhaps owes some of his inexhaustible vitality to his lucky parentage,” wrote Needham of his team-mate. That “inexhaustible vitality” won Howell the nickname the “Evergreen”. But in 1898, despite his talents, and with United on the verge of securing their first League championship, Howell was hurriedly sold to Liverpool for reasons that remain unclear.
The “Wikipedia version” of Rabbi (or Rab) Howell’s story, sourced from club history books, suggests that he was booted out of United after being accused of deliberately throwing a game against championship rivals Sunderland by scoring two own goals. Author Steven Kay has never believed this version of events, and has been unable to find any evidence of match-fixing. He has, however, uncovered suggestions of a very different kind of scandal. Kay’s research forms the basis for a novel, The Evergreen In Red And White, a fictional account of Howell’s pivotal 1897-98 season.
This is football fiction based on fact, much like David Peace’s recent Red Or Dead, albeit with fewer and further-removed sources. Nevertheless, The Evergreen feels suitably authentic, set in an evocatively realised Victorian Sheffield during football’s thriving early years. Kay’s Howell has a quirky sense of humour, extrapolated from contemporary interviews, and a voice coloured with the use of Romany and Sheffield dialects. He rubs embrocation on swollen knees and worries about his waning football career, but it’s his personal life that proves to be his downfall.
The facts, as Kay has found them, are that when Howell moved from Sheffield to Liverpool he left behind a wife and four children – one of them a new-born baby – for another woman. In the novel, Howell meets the “other woman”, Ada, in Sheffield as the city prepares for the Diamond Jubilee visit of Queen Victoria. Torn between Ada and his pregnant wife, his football performances suffer and his season becomes derailed, culminating with the climactic match at Sunderland’s hostile Newcastle Road ground, where a tormented Howell scores those two fateful own goals. “If tha don’t keep things steady in life, it affects thi game,” Needham tells Howell, who is dropped from the team and effectively exiled from his home city.
Despite the defeat at Sunderland, Sheffield United did win the Championship. Howell was a Liverpool player by then. He subsequently played for Preston North End, where his career was ended by a broken leg in 1903. He did apparently find stability in his personal life – he married Ada, and the couple had five children. We may never know the whole truth about Howell and his hurried departure from Sheffield United, but Steven Kay’s novel is so diligently researched and affectionately written that it’s easy to believe the author’s claim in his introduction that it is “as close to the truth as is possible”.
The autobiography of Kevin Kilbane
by Kevin Kilbane
Aurum, £18.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 327 May 2014
Sixteen and a half years on, it seems surreal to recall that when Kevin Kilbane initially broke into the Ireland squad, he was touted as a bright, shining young hope who could give Damien Duff a serious run for his money on the wing. Things didn’t pan out that way, of course. But only one of them appeared in 66 competitive internationals in a row, and it wasn’t Duffer.
That extraordinary stat (in the history of international football, only Billy Wright managed a longer streak) sums up Kilbane’s entire career. Never more than ordinary on a technical level – I once saw him lose possession against Israel at Lansdowne Road by doing an inexplicable 360-degree pirouette while the ball trundled slowly towards him – he built himself a decent and rewarding career through sheer hard work and force of will.
Football memoirs don’t always reflect the subject’s own persona (read Gordon Strachan’s for proof, or rather don’t) but this one does. Killa is a stolid, honest and meticulous read. Generous-spirited, too, in more ways than one: all the proceeds go to a Down’s Syndrome charity. Kilbane is the sort of player who can still remember what he had for breakfast on the morning of a game in Reykjavik in 1997, and who said what to whom after a match against Macedonia aeons ago. Either that or he kept a detailed diary.
His otherwise happy 1980s Preston childhood was darkened by an alcoholic father who “pissed away all his wages”, and whose eventual departure from the family home “made no difference to my life”. Kilbane himself briefly became something of a drunkard in 1994, a pattern which came to an abrupt end when he was caught stealing a car stereo and a police sergeant gave him “the longest bollocking of my life”.
The tone is generally positive and sunny (I lost count of the number of times players or teams were referred to as “great lads”), but there are sporadic glints of anger. Cesc Fàbregas’s reputation for arrogance is added to here as Kilbane relays his obnoxious comments during an Arsenal v Huddersfield cup tie (“This team are shit!”). Later in the book, a Coventry fan screams at Kilbane that he deserves to have a handicapped daughter (Elsie has Down’s Syndrome). Kilbane tells him to fuck off, but is then pressurised by the club into making a public apology. Kilbane offers the fan the chance to hear the apology face to face, secretly hoping in vain that he turns up because “an apology was the last thing I was going to offer him”.
A few more interesting nuggets pop up – David Moyes supposedly finds it near-impossible to relax even on squad getaway breaks; hard man Thomas Gravesen privately cringed at the idea of being tackled hard; and Kilbane claims that Ireland’s players came up with the tactical gameplan for the fateful World Cup play-off in Paris behind Giovanni Trapattoni’s back. In the main, however, Killa mirrors its subject almost exactly, taking few chances and diligently plugging away. It passes a few hours agreeably enough, but that’s all.