Book reviews

While English clubs shrug off the annual doom-laden analysis from financial commentators, Scotland's elite have been assessed as even flakier. Ken Gall reports on some alarming figures

Recent evidence would suggest that the required reading for Scottish Premier League chairmen during the close season would be a well-thumbed Guide to Who’s Cheap and Available Around the Second Div­isions of Europe. However, following the publication in April of the remarkable sets of accounts by all SPL clubs, they would be well advised to pick up instead a copy of JK Galbraith’s The Great Crash, in which the eminent Harvard economist describes how speculation, profligacy and unsustainable financial practices led to the Wall Street crash of 1929.

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Ipswich, everyone's favourites to go down at the start of the season, look like ending it with the fair play title, manager of the year, golden boot and a place in Europe. Csaba Abrahall and Gavin Barber asked chairman David Sheepshanks where it had all gone right

Despite the success of this season, clubs like Ipswich cannot guarantee a perennial Premiership place. How difficult is it to plan for the future bearing in mind the financial gap between the Premiership and the Football League?
It’s not difficult to plan for the future but it’s more difficult to implement it. Five or six years ago, we sat down and I said: “Can we get back into the Premiership next seas­on?” Everyone’s heads went down. “Can we get back into the Premiership the year after?” You know, “Who’s he?” “What about five years?” And they be­gan to say yes, they thought we could. I said “Why?” and the first thing was youth, because by then the development of players from the youth team could have come to fruition and all the other component parts to it. Out of that was born a long-term plan. It wasn’t just the youth, it was the com­mercial management, the community, the press relations, the way in which we looked after our customers, our sense of ambition – being able to be more up front about what our aims and objectives were, not to live with this old-fashioned idea that there’s no crisis at Ip­s­wich unless the wine runs out in the boardroom, which I felt wore really thin with the supporters – and I’m a supporter. The reason I came on the board in 1987 is because I wrote to [then chairman] Patrick Cobbold. I was a sea­son ticket holder and said that I thought the PR of the board and the way in which the club was being run was terrible. I felt the whole situation was just drifting. This was after 17 great years of First Div­ision football and European glory. I’ve always felt we’ve got to wear our ambition a bit more on our sleeves. It doesn’t mean we have to let go of the traditional values and high standards and friendliness as a football club, but we’ve got to really mean business. So that resulted in a plan being born, the five-year plan that everyone knows about. It wasn’t difficult to make the plan, it was much more difficult to implement it, because every year we were having to shoot ourselves in the foot by selling players. We had to make un­popular decisions. Although I’m a fan, I’m also responsible to the sup­porters, the shareholders and everybody else, as are my fellow directors, to look after the health of the club and to try and make the decisions that are in the best interests, short and long-term. So much of football is about short-term glory which leads so often to boom and bust. We’re not about that. That’s not down to me, this is a phenomenal team effort by everybody who’s worked for this football club. I certainly haven’t worked for the last six years to see this disappear in a puff of smoke. We’ve worked to get into this position so we can go on to make it even bigger and even better.

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Is George Graham's departure a victory for Tottenham tradition? No, says Paul Kelso, he paid the pricce for not winning football matches

Since George Graham was turfed out to make way for the Second Coming at White Hart Lane there has been so much talk of The Spurs Way that the uninitiated would be excused for thinking Haringey Council were renaming the Tottenham High Road. Of course many clubs have a distinct self-image, an un­written statement of principle based in equal parts on tradition and nostalgia – West Ham’s academy, Ever­ton’s school of science or Wimbledon’s school of hard knocks – but at Spurs the blend is particularly potent.

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David Rocastle died of cancer on March 30, aged 33. Sean Hanson looks back on the life and career, both all too brief, of the Arsenal and Engalnd star

It was on the fields of Beckenham Place Park in south-east London, playing schools and park foot­ball, that the young David Rocastle began to shine, and any­one watching knew he was going to be some­thing special. A few years later, he was signing school­boy forms at Arsenal, a contemporary of Tony Adams, Martin Keown, Michael Thomas and Gus Caesar.

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What more is there to say about Stan Collymore? David Wangerin takes up the challenge and comes to the conclusion that he simply ended up in the wrong job

Should have, would have, could have. Dalian At­kinson springs to mind. All the tools you could want: strong, quick, good in the air, a nose for goal and al­ways capable of the extraordinary. Should have been an England regular, could have guided Aston Villa to a championship or two, would have been one of the top strikers the club has ever seen. Drag out the video of his wonder-goal at Selhurst Park in 1992, the one where he runs through the entire Wimbledon team and plants the ball in the net with such graceful nonchalance. Even the strains of Clive Tyldesley’s post facto commentary can’t re­move the lustre of such genius.

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