Author Archive

The biography
by Jim Read
DB Publishing, £14.99
Reviewed by Al Needham
From WSC 307 September 2012

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By all accounts, and even by the standards of the pre-AIDS gay subculture of the early 1980s, Nottingham’s La Chic: Part Two was a hell of a club. According to an article in Notts magazine LeftLion: “On a typical night, you might find Su Pollard whooping it up to the latest American imports, while a regal Noelle Gordon wafted around, flanked by stage-door johnnies. You could even avail yourself of the services of a resident chaplain, after you’d made use of the pitch-black sex room.”

The most shocking aspect of the club, however, was that for over two years, it was patronised by one of the country’s best-known young footballers – and it never crossed anyone’s mind to tell the newspapers about it.

Justin Fashanu’s life would have been a seething melange of contradiction even if he’d had the sexual tastes of George Best. Fashanu was a black child raised in a staunchly white community, a born-again Christian (converted in a Nottingham car showroom) in a country that saw that sort of thing as a bit American and odd, and a teetotaller at a workplace where everyone from the boss down went out and got battered. So discovering that he actually preferred other men to the fiancée he’d brought up from Norwich reads like just another contradiction to add to the pile.

As this meticulously researched book spells out, Fashanu was (and is) impossible to pigeonhole. For starters, like his brother, he wasn’t afraid to put himself about, and there’s a great story of him confronting a group of National Front supporters in a pub and breaking the jaw of one of them.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a stoic sexual-equality pioneer, he wasn’t your man, displaying an arrogant sense of entitlement that put noses severely out of joint, making up affairs with Julie Goodyear and Tory MP Steven Milligan, and using his sexuality to cash in whenever possible.

Crucially, the author could have laid on accusations of institutionalised homophobia with a trowel, but – while making it clear that things are much better now than then – he also points out that the majority of Fashanu’s peers didn’t give a toss who he was shagging, as long as he was playing well. The book also gets as near to the truth of the circumstances surrounding Fashanu’s rape charge in the United States and subsequent suicide in London as readers are ever likely to get.

After you’ve read this extraordinary story – and you should – you can’t help wondering what a 20-year-old Justin Fashanu would be like today. He wouldn’t be the only non-boozer or born-again Christian in the dressing room, he’d be allowed to be as petulant as he liked, and a Twitter feed, invitations to celebrity game shows and Hello and OK sniffing round his house would sate his need for publicity.

But you can’t shake the feeling that there would still be an agent in his ear putting a monetary value on keeping his mouth shut and his trousers on, and a forest of arms brandishing iPhones greeting him outside NG1, Nottingham’s barn-sized gay club. We like to think that, as a society, we’re ready for the next openly gay footballer, but this book spells out exactly why we’ve been waiting so long since the last one.

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The story of a football legend
by Mike Smith
Grosvenor House, £11.99
Reviewed by Alan Tomlinson
From WSC 306 August 2012

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Until 2004, when Arsenal’s “Invincibles” went unbeaten through a full Premier League season, Burnley held the record for the longest undefeated run in a single season of England’s top tier. This small-town Lancashire club avoided defeat for 30 successive League games, going on to take their first championship in 1921. At the heart of this achievement was a gritty, combative Yorkshire-born midfield dynamo of Irish Catholic parentage, Tommy Boyle.

Mike Smith’s compellingly related and minutely researched biography of Boyle makes some of Burnley’s championship-winning heroes of 1960 look like pampered softies alongside this tough player, who dominated Burnley’s fortunes either side of the Great War. Boyle was a mere 5ft 7in but dominated the teams he led with a physical and psychological presence that willed his team-mates to victory. He cajoled, bullied and consistently inspired the players at Burnley, and before that at Barnsley, to the highest levels of competitive performance.

Boyle worked as a miner from the ages of 12 to 20, before signing professional terms for Barnsley. He took them to an FA Cup final against Newcastle, before a move to Burnley, who he led to Cup and League success. He was wounded in service in France, called back into action, then resumed the captaincy at Burnley, where eight of the 1914 Cup-winning team reunited for the 1920-21 triumph. For a time, Boyle had it all: the adulation of the “lasses” of the Lancashire mill-town (one of whom he married), money way beyond the reach of working men, the status of the local hero, acceptance and patronage of the local elite.

But the peak of 1921 was achieved in a climate of post-war industrial decline, and as his ageing body became less able to cope with the wear and tear of the top-flight game, his world fell apart. Fiery and brief spells as a trainer at Wrexham and then in Berlin were followed by the collapse of his marriage (after the tragic loss of an only child), unemployment and drink-fuelled aggression and violence. Boyle was committed to the local asylum under the new Mental Health Act of 1930, where he died after almost eight years of incarceration, aged 53.

This is a tragic story told well and with much revealing detail. Smith draws on an impressive range of sources in conveying this connection between the life of a community and the decline of one of its local heroes. The attribution of thoughts and reflections to Boyle is not always convincing, and some parts of the narrative are, as Smith concedes in a disclaimer, based on anecdote and the author’s imagination.

It is a long read, with match reports and lists of names that can jar the narrative flow. But Smith is to be congratulated for bringing alive a figure so typical of the fluctuating fortunes of early professional footballers, for whom the problems of adjustment after the glories of playing days so often proved insurmountable. Boyle’s story is no mere historical curiosity; reading this haunting tale, I was repeatedly reminded of Paul Gascoigne’s life after the magic was gone.

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by Simon Jordan
Yellow Jersey Press, £18.99
Reviewed by Matthew Barker
From WSC 306 August 2012

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Simon Jordan has never been the easiest of people to warm to. The public perception has generally been that of a perma-tanned flash git and there is little in this book to suggest otherwise. However, plenty enjoyed those inspired rants in his short series of Observer columns (“If I see another David Gold interview on the poor East End Jewish boy done good I’ll impale myself on one of his dildos,” etc).

Anyone hoping for more of the same in this autobiography is going to be disappointed. Yes, there is some fun to be had here, but the prose can be so clunky at times, full of bland cliches and feeble geezerisms, that it is clear Jordan benefited from a decent sub-editor when it came to his newspaper work.

The arc of Jordan’s time at Selhurst Park encompasses some crucial moments, both for Crystal Palace and English football at large. Beginning with the failure of ITV Digital and ending with his club in administration nine years later, there is a simmering anger in these pages, erupting in a perfect storm after 2004’s promotion and Iain Dowie quitting after the traumas of the following season. The fallout was bitter. To prove a charge of fraudulent misrepresentation in the ensuing court case, investigators even seized the departed coach’s laptop.

Jordan is keen throughout to portray himself as the progressive young buck, kicking against the grey-haired, grey-suited establishment of club owners. Some of the promised score-settling turns out to be pretty tame. It is no great surprise that David Sullivan comes across as a nasty little man, making a point of loudly asking Jordan in the middle of the Birmingham boardroom if he was gay. The witty riposte – “Why? Do you fancy a crack at me?” – was equally crass.

Former Charlton chairman Richard Murray challenges Jordan to a fight after an invitation to lunch is turned down, while Steve Coppell, Peter Taylor and Trevor Francis are all portrayed as cheerless mopes of varying degrees. Steve Bruce, despite the whole gardening leave episode, remains “a firm friend”.

There is, as you might expect, a fair bit of bragging too. Our man flits between his “exclusive Chelsea penthouse suite” and Puerto Banus, living in a world full of “beautiful ladies”. Even more galling is his boasting about his friendship with former Wimbledon chairman Charles Koppel, a “close ally against all football bullshit”.

For all that, reading the final chapters, Jordan’s frustration and eventual weary resignation as he bemoans the grip of agents and watches as a succession of homegrown talent leaves the club, is palpable. The passages describing his attempts to avoid insolvency have a gripping inevitability; the sums of money quoted are startling and depressing. Jordan invested and lost a lot. And you have to feel for him.

Palace appear to have done better than most clubs after the shock of administration, but the game’s landscape continues to alter and present new challenges, with the Elite Player Performance Plan and Financial Fair Play both starting to kick in. Maybe Jordan should write a column about it.

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