Author Archive

The AFC Wimbledon story
by Niall Couper
Cherry Red Books, £14.99
Reviewed by Andy Brassell
From WSC 313 March 2013

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Author Niall Couper wrote in the Independent that his “stomach turned over” when AFC Wimbledon were drawn against Milton Keynes in the FA Cup second round this season. Nevertheless, it made his latest work all the more germane. This Is Our Time is Couper’s second book on Wimbledon, following 2003’s The Spirit Of Wimbledon which traced the area’s footballing lineage from 1922 through to the formation of AFC Wimbledon in 2002. You don’t necessarily need to have read that to grasp the thread of events for the sequel, though the opening pages of the book give a potted history of the club’s evolution from the 19th century to the brink of the Milton Keynes move.

The nuts and bolts of the story are well known to most regular football fans, from the three-man appeal commission that ratified the Milton Keynes move in late May 2002 to the open trials on Wimbledon Common that helped to find players for the first AFC Wimbledon team. Yet the book is plugging a significant gap – not just because of the detail contained in its 608 pages. The problem with any fan-based discourse surrounding AFC Wimbledon since their formation has been obvious. How do you establish an anti-establishment view when the fans themselves are that establishment?

There’s no whitewashing of opinion here (as anti-Milton Keynes voices have often been accused of doing) or even an author’s “this is how it happened” party line. Instead, Couper hands over the right to be heard to the people, with the story told by a succession of talking heads, from players and managers to board members, trust volunteers and those who pay at the turnstiles each week.

What emerges is not one linear truth but several versions of it, an account of the growing pains inherent in a protest movement becoming a semi-professional (and later professional) football club. So we hear about the dismissal of the club’s first manager, Terry Eames, through board members who became sick of him and fans who felt as if the club sold out “one of us”. There’s also the tale of how the club’s very ethos was questioned, with businessman Darragh MacAnthony’s attempt to buy the club out in 2006 before he assumed control of Peterborough United. Recently fired boss Terry Brown even offers a window into his own downfall, admitting he thought he may have “made a mistake” in signing defender Callum McNaughton from West Ham.

The format does occasionally spill over the line from thorough into exhaustive, such as in the section on reaction to the Conference play-off final win when it feels as if half the game’s attendees are canvassed for opinion. Yet This Is Our Time is a commendable, thorough and honest piece of work. Even if history is told by the winners, there’s nothing to say they can’t be objective and that’s what Couper does so well here.

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by Guillem Balague
Orion, £20
Reviewed by Tim Stannard
From WSC 313 March 2013

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If Pep Guardiola thought a sabbatical year spent hiding in plain sight in New York would offer a much needed respite from football, he was being a touch naive. Over four hairline-damaging years, Guardiola was in the news for what he had won with Barcelona. Since announcing his departure from the Nou Camp in April 2012, headlines have been dominated by what Guardiola might achieve next. The news that Bayern Munich are set to be the next port of call merely quadrupled the chatter, such is the fascination with the future of the former Barça boss.

In Another Way Of Winning, Spanish football journalist Guillem Balague offers a timely indication of whether Guardiola will ever be able to repeat his La Liga success in the Bundesliga. As well as recalling a stereotypical fairytale story of a gangly Nou Camp ballboy becoming the Barcelona boss via an outstanding playing career, the biography attempts to dissect Guardiola’s psyche to discover how a managerial rookie transformed Barça into one of the best club teams in the history of football.

Through testimonials from friends, colleagues, players and Guardiola himself, Balague describes a contradictory character who has both enormous confidence in his coaching abilities and philosophies on football, as well as frequent moments of self doubt and insecurity. Guardiola struggled to cope with conflict and confrontation, a necessary evil of his job, but still had the courage to jettison dressing room heavyweights such as Ronaldinho, Samuel Eto’o, Deco and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, for the simple reason that he had no connection or “feeling” 
with the players.

For an emotional personality, handling the expectations of supporters and media demanding constant success, keeping the team’s tactics fresh, the endless provocation from José Mourinho and the illnesses suffered by Éric Abidal and Tito Vilanova took too much of a toll. Guardiola struggled to separate his personal life from the job, a feat that one of his mentors in the game, Alex Ferguson (who writes the introduction), has been able to achieve. The physical transformation of the former Barça boss between his first and last day at his job is startling.

While the question of why Guardiola left the best club in the world was an easy one to answer for Balague, the poser of whether his success can be repeated elsewhere is a tougher one to tackle. The answer is positive. Guardiola did have outstanding talents at his disposal but his development of Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets, Pedro and to some extent the transformation of Lionel Messi into a pure goalscorer are often overlooked. As are the absolute commitment and passion that Guardiola would bring to any role.

Trying to break down the inner workings of someone’s psyche is a tough ask, especially one as complex as Guardiola who himself struggles to live with his conflicting characteristics. Nonetheless, Balague’s attempt is an intriguing and enlightening read on a figure who is still only in his early 40s and whose next challenge is about to begin.

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by Duncan Hamilton
Century, £14.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 313 March 2013

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A while ago at a book festival in Duncan Hamilton’s native Nottinghamshire I was asked why the literature of cricket tended towards nostalgia. The implication of the question was that the literature of other sports – football in particular – didn’t embrace the elegiac in quite the same way. I’d guess that’s true. Or at least it was until recently. The success of Gary Imlach’s excellent My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes, released in 2005, has proved that there is an audience for books about football that don’t simply focus on the here and now but drift back into the apparently perpetually mist-wreathed world of long ago. In football terms that is the 1950s (in cricket it would be the Edwardian era).

Duncan Hamilton’s The Footballer Who Could Fly follows two fine works on cricket and taps into a similar vein to Imlach’s book. It’s not just about football but also fathers and sons. Jim Hamilton was a Scottish pitman, an adopted Geordie who was forced by colliery closures to move to Nottinghamshire. He is laconic, his relationship with his stammering only child carried out more or less entirely through conversations about football: “Without football we were strangers under the same roof,” Hamilton observes.

From the opening account of a walk along the Tyne to Frank Brennan’s sports shop, the pages of The Footballer Who Could Fly – who was, as no Newcastle fan will need telling, Wyn “The Leap” Davies – are so rich with nostalgia that if you sniff them you can smell woodbines, blended Scotch, brown ale, coal smoke and the whiff of crushed expectations.

Hamilton senior idolises Jackie Milburn, a man so shy and self-deprecating public adulation seems to cause him almost physical pain (as the author discovers when he sits next to him one day in the St James’ Park press box and tries to engage him in conversation). He has great admiration too for Milburn’s nephew Bobby Charlton and there is a fine moment when, during a spell as a barman (one of Jim Hamilton’s many unsuccessful attempts to escape from a life underground), Jim Baxter spends an afternoon of lonely drinking in the rural pub where he’s working. Baxter, the father tells his son, does not seem to dwell on what might have been, which is just as well since: “If he’d thought too much about what he might have done with that talent I’m sure he would have driven himself mad.”

Though there’s a welcome and pithy assault on the vindictive way Newcastle chairman Stan Seymour treated long-serving centre-half Frank Brennan, generally the opinions of both Hamiltons don’t wander far from the orthodox. You know that when Bobby Moore appears you are going to find out that he wasn’t very quick but he could read the game superbly (which is true enough, clearly). But familiarity is what we want from nostalgia. If you are over 45, reading The Footballer Who Could Fly is the literary equivalent of tucking into a big bowl of treacle sponge and custard. It isn’t going to change anything but on a cold winter night it may be just what you need.

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The day the promises had to stop
by Denis Cassidy
Amberly Publishing, £9.99
Reviewed by Mark Brophy
From WSC 312 February 2013

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As calls for improved governance of football clubs continue to be made, Denis Cassidy’s experiences after being appointed a non-executive director of Newcastle United in 1997 give an illustration of just what can go wrong. He remained in position for 20 months, during a period which spanned the removal of Kenny Dalglish and appointment of Ruud Gullit as well as the News of the World undercover sting which forced the owners Freddy Shepherd and Douglas Hall to leave the board for a short time.

Despite the inside track he can provide, the book itself is a mixed bag. Though it’s styled as an attempt to show how the creation of the Premier League has affected the game in England, much of the book sets the scene for the section describing events during the short period Cassidy was on the board, and concludes with a run down of his thoughts on how to ensure success. Alex Ferguson’s views on success might prick up a few more ears, 
of course.

That’s not to say that there isn’t interest in the rest of the book. Cassidy’s insider knowledge isn’t limited to the period of his tenure on the board and his excellent contacts mean the reader is often left wanting to hear more. At one point, he reports meeting Lord Taylor just after the delivery of the report which changed English football post-Hillsborough, frustratingly without any record of the conversation.

It’s that 20-month period in the boardroom where the book comes to life, however. Though current owner Mike Ashley doesn’t escape criticism, Cassidy clearly disapproves of the way the Shepherds and Halls ran Newcastle; he calls them “vandals” at the point they are trying to force their way back into control of the plc board. He suggests John Hall used the club first as a promotional vehicle for his own regional interests then later as a cash cow for his other businesses. Cassidy points out that Newcastle abandoned corporate governance best practice when they removed independent directors  from the board in favour of the majority shareholders’ nominees. The Shepherds and Halls are painted as draining the club to the point of financial chaos, to their own personal benefit.

The final implied criticism, left to an appendix on the last page, is both the largest and via its format least open to argument. Without commentary, it’s an account detailing how much was taken from the club by the Hall and Shepherd families in their time at the club between 1996 and 2007. The total comes to nearly £144 million. As Cassidy succinctly puts it earlier: “Did their performance over that period justify such rewards?”

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