9 September ~ The season is only a month old and for many Leeds United supporters there is already a strong sense of deja vu. The threat of the sack looms large over new manager Garry Monk should Leeds lose to Yorkshire rivals Huddersfield Town tomorrow.
by Gary James
James Ward, £25
Reviewed by Ian Farrell
From WSC 312 February 2013
Meteoric success in any area, be it sport, show business or politics, is guaranteed to bring a glut of books within six months and sure enough there has been a recent explosion in the number of Manchester City titles on the market. Any new additions to the list are inevitably going to be viewed with ever-increasing cynicism, but Manchester: The City Years can’t de derided as a cash-in. Its author has been writing about the club since before Sergio Agüero was born and this is clearly a book several years in the making. From the first stirrings of organised football in Manchester through to the drama of last May, this is as detailed a history as anyone could conceivably want.
Season by season, over the course of 600 pages, City’s up and downs are brought to life through a truly staggering level of research. Add in several hundred photographs, press clippings, newspaper cartoons, programme covers and cigarette cards and it’s difficult to pinpoint anything more that could have been done to chronicle the club’s successes, failures, or even the relatively uneventful bits in between.
There is also plenty of opinion and spin to go with the facts and figures. This is a book written by a hardcore fan rather than an impartial historian and Gary James never misses an opportunity to defend the club, criticise its critics and highlight any occasions where he feels they’ve been the victim of unfair treatment or media bias. He is particularly sensitive to any negative reaction to the new order of the last five years and any fans nostalgic for the old ways might feel uncomfortable with the blanket praise he has for the current regime.
Readers of more delicate sensibilities might also blanch at the glowing portrayal of former CEO Garry Cook, the ex-Nike executive notorious for conducting interviews with all the dignified humility of Don King. Cook left his position after he accidentally sent a mocking email to Nedum Onuoha’s cancer-stricken mother, something he initially denied by claiming his account had been hacked by someone out to frame him. Here, he receives the very lightest admonishment for his actions, with the media subject to considerably greater scrutiny for the manner of its reporting of the story.
But whether you buy into the author’s worldview or not, Manchester: The City Years is a hugely impressive piece of work. Whatever your view of Manchester City, whether you’ve always liked them, always disliked them or have switched your opinion in recent times, it would be difficult to deny that they’re one of English football’s most interesting institutions and James may well have produced the definitive account of their story.
Winning club. Losing faith
by Colin Shindler
Headline, £16.99
Reviewed by Ian Farrell
From WSC 308 October 2012
Of all the nostalgic How-I-fell-in-love-with-my-club books that followed in the wake of Fever Pitch, Colin Shindler’s Manchester United Ruined My Life was perhaps the most notable and fondly remembered. Charming and amusing as it was, the reason for its popularity and success can undoubtedly be traced to its subject: Manchester City. They were the quintessential underdog back then, well liked and sympathetically regarded beyond fans of their few natural enemies. Fourteen years on, they are seen as football’s new supervillains and it is time for the sequel: the considerably rarer How-I-fell-out-of-love-with-my-club book.
The newfound disenchantment that has given Shindler his title is only an issue in the last third, with most of the book taking the form of a straight autobiography. City’s fortunes of the time may weave in and out, occasionally taking centre stage, but this is really the story of the last decade and a half of the author’s life, as he copes with the breakdown of his marriage, bereavement, ageing and the search for a new partner. What it is emphatically not – and does not claim to be – is A History of Manchester City 1998-2012. Anyone expecting that is likely to be bemused by what they get, much in the manner of someone reading The Origins of the Second World War and finding AJP Taylor going off on a lengthy digression about a dating agency he has signed up to.
How interesting you will find Manchester City Ruined My Life largely comes down to how interesting you find Colin Shindler. His concerns, when we finally get to them, about the money, the club’s desire to globalise its previously parochial image, the character of the last two owners and the crass arrogance of former CEO Garry Cook are all legitimate but hardly original. You begin to ask yourself why he felt the need to write this book. Financial considerations aside, perhaps the answer is that the football side is the selling point, there to enable the writing of a cathartic autobiography.
Though it had its downbeat moments Shindler’s first book was essentially optimistic in tone, so it is a strange experience to read such a negative follow-up. The lack of enthusiasm over recent (pre-title) successes is particularly jarring and supports his claim to have fallen out of love with the club. Had City won 6-1 at Old Trafford 40 years ago it would probably have merited a whole chapter in the first book. Here it is given the briefest of mentions, as if it had been achieved by someone else’s team. It seems that in a sense, for Shindler, it was.
Manchester City’s recently departed chief executive was offensive and distasteful, but he was also good at his job, as Tony Curran reportsDuring his time as chief executive of Manchester City, Garry Cook developed a reputation for making public faux pas. So it was not surprise when this propensity brought him down. Cook, should we need reminding, sent an email that he believed was exclusively directed to colleague Brian Marwood in which he mocked the cancer diagnosis of Dr Anthonia Onuoha, the mother and agent of City player Nedum.
Ian Farrell bids a grateful but unemotional farewell to Carlos Tevez as he looks for another moveIf you filter out any stories containing the words “romp” or “affray” and only count the football-related, few Premier League players have generated as much news over the last five years as Carlos Tévez. Not that there haven’t been sleazier revelations along the way, but it’s at work that he is truly a leading headline-maker, with the success and salvation his goals have delivered accounting for only a fraction of the coverage.