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A new anthology of Victorian football writing
Edited by Paul Brown
Goal-Post, £8.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 311 January 2013

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There has been a recent growth of interest in Victorian football, possibly because, as the editor here speculates, we “have grown weary of certain aspects of modern football [and] will no doubt find much to admire in the Victorian game”. November 2012 saw a restaging of the 1872 FA Cup final at The Oval, next year sees the 150th anniversary celebrations of the FA and there is excellent and revelatory work being done on the early club histories of, for example, Arsenal – as featured in WSC 300.

From the modern fan’s perspective 19th century accounts of football appear remarkable for their lack of analysis and self-awareness: plenty of hot scrimmages and backing-up but very little on how football became so popular so quickly and what it was about football that particularly engaged players and fans over other sports. This anthology of contemporary articles goes a short way to providing some of the answers.

It is not a history lesson but a “flavour” of football writing at the time. Still, it is odd to suggest that a piece from 1869 on how to make a football shares the same flavour as an 1898 interview on Tottenham’s business plan for the 20th century (which was well executed, as it happens). There is no obvious organising principle and if you want to sense the development of the game chronologically you have to do the page-finding yourself.

Of the 21 articles a few are well known: the foundation meeting of the FA, the first Scotland v England international match. The earliest article is from 1862 and the latest from 1900 but there are only three from 1872-82, the decade which was the most formative period in establishing the popularity of football. This was the one era where that old Shanklyism “there’s nothing new in football” would have failed. Paul Brown finds a number of later pieces that resonate with modern football concerns: the celebrity footballer tempted by the good life, a referee’s view of gamesmanship, Burnley falling out of the top division into “the dark”, and vulgar and abusive fans. There’s even a forerunner of the Respect campaign, “success to football, irrespective of class or creed”, in the form of an after-dinner toast, not pre-match banner.

One fascinating extract features a reporter travelling away with the team (think of Hunter Davies’s 1972 The Glory Game set in a Victorian railway carriage) and another gives a good impression of what it was like to be in the first ever floodlit crowd (Bramall Lane, 1878, unsafe). Brown’s intention is to make a series from this often beautifully written material and I look forward to seeing more of how much, and how little, football has changed since its first days.

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How the English Premier League came to dominate the world
by Mihir Bose
Marshall Cavendish Business, £14.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 311 January 2013

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Mihir Bose is an authentic journalistic heavyweight. Before becoming the BBC’s first sports editor he made his mark as Britain’s pioneer of serious sports business journalism. He has been ringside for every major sports story of the past 30 years and ranges well beyond that, with a catalogue including subjects such as Bollywood, the financial crash of 1987-88 and Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation).

So it is hard to think of anybody better qualified to attempt a definitive account of the Premier League. Sadly the attempt rather fails – maybe he knows too much. Some detail, like the reminder that Sky were forced by smaller clubs on the giants, who generally favoured ITV, is highly relevant. Much more is head-spinningly complex and some – such as what was eaten at important lunches – simply unnecessary.

It is oddly structured, with a long diversion into essays on Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho. None is bad in itself, and Ferguson is vividly portrayed, but in covering such excessively well-trodden ground the narrative loses a momentum it never really regains.

It starts badly with a chapter on football in the 1980s that fails to address the fact that crowds rose steadily from their 1986 lowpoint, making it possible that the Premier League inherited, rather than created, the upturn, and mentions the 1990 World Cup only in passing. If he is to convince that football was irredeemably horrible then he needs better witnesses than Tim Lovejoy and Piers Morgan. Hearing that a teenage Piers was clocked by a pint of piss at Highbury in 1983 will make more readers cheer than wince.

That typifies a problem with sources. Bose is not an unconditional admirer of the league but he appears not to have read its most cogent critics – the bibliography cites GQ and a welter of biographies but nothing by the Guardian‘s David Conn.

He has little time for organised fans and is critical of Manchester United’s followers, while giving plenty of space to City advocates for the Glazers. Those voices are worth hearing but they’ll have to do better than arguing that “If the Glazers walk away from United tomorrow, United is a sustainable business. You haven’t got an uneconomic club like Chelsea”, entirely ignoring that “a sustainable business” is what the Glazers took over.

Similarly, quoting figures to show that Wigan’s turnover is proportionately closer to United’s than it used to be ignores that one club has risen three divisions while the other stayed where it was. Numbers purporting to prove that the Premier League is outpacing its rivals actually show La Liga and the Bundesliga keeping up in absolute terms and making ground proportionately.

Apparently written in haste, this book desperately needed a rigorous editor. There’s a decent read in here somewhere, probably around two-thirds the length plus the index which, unforgivably for a serious factual work, this lacks.

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A history of sport on TV
by Martin Kelner
John Wisden & Co, £18.99
Reviewed by David Harrison
From WSC 311 January 2013

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Having worked in broadcasting, I’m painfully aware that those on the inside can be guilty of attaching far too much importance to the social significance of their output. For the viewer, television remains essentially what you do when you get home and remove your shoes. But with average viewing holding steady at around four hours a day, there are so many opinions we’ve all accumulated – consciously or not. Consequently, donning our football hats, every one of us has a view on the relative merits of commentators, presenters, pundits and the like.

Martin Kelner has tapped into the great national pastimes of sport and TV with this extensively researched work. It covers the developing relationship between the two, from the early days – characterised primarily by suspicion and resentment – through to today when everything has changed, apart from the suspicion and resentment.

The opening chapters are fairly dull, accurately reflecting TV coverage of sport for most of the last century. Things don’t really get going, in real life or the book, until the FA Cup’s “Matthews Final” in 1953 when the first rights payment was made for coverage of a live sporting event. Kelner observes that this represented the first occurrence of footballers overtaking their cricketing counterparts in terms of public awareness. So many pioneering figures, on both sides of the camera, have helped drive televised sport to the intrusive position it holds today and Kelner is happy to acknowledge and credit, generally without attempting to compare – apart from the BBC incarnation of Des, his absolute favourite.

Age will determine where the reader’s affections and admirations lie, but they’re all here – from a football perspective commentators such as Captain Henry Blythe Thornhill “Teddy” Wakelam, who delivered Britain’s first live sports broadcasts in 1927, through massive figures like Raymond Glendenning, Peter Dimmock, Kenneth Wolstenholme, David Coleman, Brian Moore and beyond. Pundits, effectively a 1970 World Cup innovation, are acknowledged and discussed, as are the off-screen visionaries who made it happen – men like the heroic Dimmock, Angus Mackay, Paul Fox, Bryan Cowgill, John Bromley and many others. And then there’s Jimmy Hill, a man who could justifiably claim a place in all three groups.

The book is characterised by Kelner’s gags; many dismal, for which he consistently and wisely blames others, but some very funny. The factual stories also contribute greatly. In the weeks before the consummate Coleman took over as presenter of Grandstand, I particularly liked the account of Dimmock’s own attempts to read results from the teleprinter. Not a football man, Dimmock was confronted with “Cltc 3 Ptk Th 1” which, in the absence of any assistance through his earpiece, he delivered as “Celtic 3 Purr Thaaa 1”. Kelner wears his lack of actual match attendance as a badge of honour and the device works well. If this book appears under your Christmas tree, you may well finish it before the turkey sandwiches appear.

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