Leeds United manager Marcelo Bielsa makes himself comfortable on his bucket on the sidelines. Alamy
The Argentinian may have left Elland Road in February but his lasting impact left supporters scrambling to collect any memento they could of his time there
by Steve Leach
Bennion Keaney Ltd, £11.99
Reviewed by Matthew Gooding
From WSC 329 July 2014
Often erroneously likened to a fifth division of the Football League, the Football Conference could more accurately be described as a halfway house. Non-League’s top tier is home to a curious mix of teams; professional clubs who have fallen on hard times compete alongside new names making their way up the pyramid and getting a first taste of the big time.
Into this world steps Steve Leach, a Manchester City fan who, having grown disillusioned with the commercialisation and “over-paid prima donnas” of the Premier League, decides to focus his attentions on non-League instead. Conference Season is a diary of his travels around the country in the 2012-13 season, during which he takes in a match at every Conference club as he bids to “rediscover the soul of professional football”.
Throughout the book you get the impression that the author yearns for the days of his youth in the 1950s and 1960s, when top-level football matches were attended by thousands of working-class folk from their local community. Large crowds and red-hot atmosphere are certainly not in abundance in the Conference, and Leach’s wish to paint the league as a window to a glorious bygone era means he ignores the fact that it is a competition which is often as distorted by money and egotistical owners as the Premier League he wants to leave behind. As a result, Hyde’s tie-in with Manchester City, where they were paid to change their club colours to sky blue and remove the “United” part of their name, is briefly mentioned but not subjected to any critical analysis. Ditto an acrimonious boardroom split he encounters at Macclesfield, while the many battles for control of the author’s hometown club Stockport County, which sparked their rapid descent through the divisions from League One to the Conference North, are not touched on at all.
We rarely hear from fans of the teams involved. When Leach does engage them in conversation, it tends to be on matters of player selection and form, rather than looking at the joys of supporting a non-League side and the role their club plays in the community. As a result, the whole affair feels somewhat distant, and all we are left with are a series of clunky anecdotes and the author’s glib and often patronising observations; seasoned non-League supporters will enjoy his amazement at the fact that two sets of fans can co-exist in the same bar without resorting to violence, or that some games of football are played without crowd segregation.
Leach is a professor of Local Government, and it becomes apparent this is where his expertise lie as he describes the growth, and in some cases decline, of the towns he visits with passion and insight. It’s a shame that the football side of Conference Season rarely delivers either of these qualities.
The story of football’s greatest cult team
by Rob Smyth, Lars Eriksen and Mike Gibbons
Bloomsbury, £12.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 328 June 2014
If you wanted entertaining football from a European national side in the mid-1980s, the pickings on offer were slim. Spain were a shower of hackers, Germany ruthless but uninspired, Italy suffering a post-1982 hangover, Holland in the doldrums – and England were England. There were only three shows in town: France, the USSR and Denmark.
Michel Hidalgo’s marvellous France team chiselled their names down in history by winning the 1984 European Championship, and the USSR lit up Mexico 86 in tremendous style. The Danes were left with nothing after a pair of traumatic defeats by Spain in Lyon and Querétaro. The memory of the sizzling football remains, though, and this reappraisal of them is long overdue. Despite its tendency to write subsequent Denmark teams out of history, Danish Dynamite, which grew out of a 2009 article on the Guardian‘s website, is largely terrific.
With the exceptions of Frank Arnesen and Jan Molby, all the players are interviewed, as is manager Sepp Piontek, now aged 74 and still full of combative vigour. A ruthless hatchet-man as a player in the Bundesliga, Piontek brought a dash of cold-water efficiency to Danish football’s free-spirit mentality and coaxed results out of them that would have seemed utterly implausible just five or six years previously. The team was full of offbeat, off-kilter characters: Soren Lerby, so ferociously competitive that Morten Olsen dubbed him Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Preben Elkjaer, the party animal who never drank beer; Ole Qvist, the goalkeeper who played out of his skin at Euro 84 and then went straight back to his job as a motorcycle police officer in Copenhagen; Ivan Nielsen, the easygoing centre-back who is now a plumber and conducted his interview while sitting on an upturned bucket in his garage.
And the football was never less than blinding. As is mentioned here, Denmark played as if it was always the 85th minute and they were a goal down. Watch one of their games on DVD today – the 5-0 thrashing of Yugoslavia at Euro 84, for example, or the extraordinarily action-packed 4-2 victory over the USSR in Copenhagen a year later – and the footage looks like an animated cartoon on fast-forward, with players flooding into the midfield from all areas of the pitch, joining up with the attack in their droves, and scoring goals from the craziest of angles. The party was too good to last.
Just ten days after dismembering Uruguay at the 1986 World Cup, the Danes exited the competition in shattering, and somehow tragic, fashion when a solid but unexceptional Spain happily picked them off on the counter-attack and beat them 5-1, scarcely credibly. And that’s more or less where the story ends – Euro 88, where Piontek’s ageing team lost all three matches, is barely mentioned, and the subsequent glory of Euro 92 is covered in just a couple of pages. This comes across as laziness and a bad call, but in all other respects Danish Dynamite is a wonderful read and an exhilarating nostalgia trip.
Mike Whalley takes a look at Hyde’s terrible winless runScott McNiven is, by his own admission, hard to live with when he isn’t winning. The manager of Hyde, the Conference Premier’s bottom club by a mile, can barely remember what victory feels like. Twenty-six league games have brought no wins and just three points. The New Year opened with an unwanted record beckoning: no team in Conference history, going back to 1979, has gone through a whole season without a league win. McNiven’s wife Adele is enduring a lot of gloomy weekends. “She’s very understanding, especially as I don’t really speak to her on Saturday evenings now,” he says. “I’m not in the best mood for conversation after a defeat.”
Dear WSC
Gavin Duenas asks why WSC readers want standing areas in football grounds (Letters, WSC 300). My reasons are purely selfish. Maybe then the people stand in front of me and my two young boys “because you can only support your team properly from a standing position” will go to the terraces and leave us to sit and enjoy an unobstructed view from our expensive seats.There should be a choice for all supporters between sitting and safe standing. Yet as a frequent away supporter in “all-seater” stadiums, the choice of sitting doesn’t actually exist. You are forced into unsafe standing in seating areas if you want to to see anything of the game. Woe betide you if you point out that if everybody sits, everybody sees. Oh for the joy of Huish Park and London Road, where thanks to the terraces you can still sit in comfort.
Andrew Bartlett, Kenilworth