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Search: 'Ian Holloway'

Stories

“All I ever wanted to do was score”: Jamie Cureton sets his sights on 400 goals

401 Cureton 800

The striker turns 45 at the end of August but having clocked up 26 years of service across the top nine levels of English football, he has no plans to stop any time soon

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Bath City bid for community ownership – and history

The National League South club are finding a new way to change ownership models within football
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Living On The Volcano

344 VolacanoThe secrets of surviving as a football manager
by Michael Calvin
Century Books, £16.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 344 October 2015

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Football uses managers as defining figures much as old-style history employed monarchs, to the extent of describing often pathetically short periods in office as “reigns”. Michael Calvin’s labelling of this phenomenon “Gaffer as Godhead” typifies an eye for the neat, aphoristic turn of phrase. He sees Roberto Martínez as “an undercover pragmatist” and identifies Ian Holloway as a “man of contradiction and impulse”. Such one-liners stud a book built on long interviews with its subjects, among which Holloway’s stream of consciousness stands out along with a sympathetic account of Alan Irvine’s travails and an intriguing portrait of Paul Tisdale.

Anyone wanting the long view of football management still needs to read Neil Carter’s historical study (The Football Manager, published in 2006). But as a picture of how it is now, this will be hard to beat. Those seeking the “how to” guide implied in the subtitle will find plenty of ideas, but must look hard since they are located within the wealth of insight and anecdote throughout the interviews rather than any grand overarching exposition. “Survival” implies retaining health, sanity and self-respect, rather than avoiding the all-but inevitable sack, although on either count your chances are better at Swansea, Exeter or Everton than QPR or Leeds.

This is a job which demands unshakeable self-confidence, but at the same time is designed to erode and ultimately destroy it. The toll it can take is shown at its most extreme by Martin Ling’s description of depression and electro-convulsive therapy, but there is plenty of testimony elsewhere, such as Brian McDermott’s belief that: “There are a lot of depressed people in football, but they probably do not even know it, because they are conditioned by the game.”

Calvin’s questioning evokes a sense of men who are confident and reflective, with credentials and hinterlands beyond their coaching badges. Some, such as Brendan Rodgers, are adepts in neuro-linguistic programming (no, me neither before I read this book), while Chris Hughton did a corporate management course and many have benefited from the League Managers Association’s training.

Aidy Boothroyd may still periodically punch a wall at half time, but sensitivity has replaced rage as a default setting. It is not just innate decency that explains Eddie Howe’s practice of “being a shoulder” for players, but that it “can only help you”.

They are also supportive of each other. Rodgers and Alan Pardew in particular emerge as willing to assist others, while Pardew also generates the best piece of trivia with his pride, from his past as a glazier, at having installed windows on the Natwest Tower and Sea Containers House.

Calvin is no soft touch, but the overwhelming impression he conveys is a sympathetic one – of largely decent, if driven men working in a world where, as Mick McCarthy says, “common sense is not very common”. The problem is not the managers, but the people who appoint them and the hysterical atmosphere in which they must try to function.

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Red Card Roy

309 RedCardSex, booze and sendings off: The life of Britain’s wildest footballer
by Roy McDonough with Bernie Friend
Vision Sports, £12.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 309 November 2012

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The football hard man is still a familiar figure, even if he is receding increasingly quickly into the game’s recent past. Popular culture tends to remember those who played at the highest level, where violent tackles and unsavoury moustaches were brought to a national television audience. For every Graeme Souness or Tommy Smith there were less well-known contemporaries in the the lower leagues. One such player was Roy McDonough, who accumulated a British record 22 early baths.

Apparently assembled from a bin of spare “Soccer’s Hard Men” tropes (the mullet and tache, the drinking and womanising, the failed marriage, the distant father he’s desperate to impress) McDonough is such an unrelenting stereotype that the obligatory career photos have presumably been included to reassure readers that they are not the victims of an elaborate spoof. Driven by limitless quantities of self-belief and an almost psychotic relish for physical confrontation, McDonough played just two first-team games during unhappy spells as a centre-forward at Aston Villa, Birmingham City and Chelsea. At the age of 22 he claims to have made a conscious decision to cruise through lower-league football as a way of funding his fondness for nightclubs.

A man who once promised a horrified physio that he would cut down to “just” 70 pints a week should be heading for a spectacular fall but it is the tragic suicide of Colchester team-mate John Lyons that, briefly, throws the boozing and one-night stands into stark relief. Alcohol permeates almost every page of this book but alcoholism is mentioned only once – when McDonough categorically rejects it as a description of his own drinking.

He is more honest in recounting the football side of his career, with team-mates, opponents, referees, supporters, managers and boardroom “suits” all subjected to withering assessments. There’s also a refreshing lack of dressing room omerta. It’s doubtful that Mark Kinsella will thank him for revealing a teenage fling with his landlady, though McDonough stops short of naming the team-mate who goaded Ian Holloway on the pitch by insulting his cancer-stricken wife.

He’s generous to those he respects too, without ever allowing it to affect his behaviour during a game. He idolises Southend boss Bobby Moore and when the manager gets wind of an unsettled score with Newport County’s Tony Pulis he pleads with McDonough not to let the team down. He is duly sent off after just seven minutes following a self-confessed attempt to decapitate the future Stoke manager.

Ghostwriter Bernie Friend has a great eye for period detail (there has surely never been a more evocatively named central-defensive partnership than Peterborough’s Neil Firm and Trevor Slack) and there are hilarious insights into some of the more eccentric characters of the era: Exeter boss Jim Iley’s fondness for games of hide and seek during training, for instance. In describing McDonough’s nocturnal activities the book occasionally slips into the kind of graphic detail that wouldn’t be out of place on the top shelf of a backstreet 1980s newsagent but this is still a fascinating voyage through a career described as “a violent trawl through the rough seas of the lower divisions”.

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Thinking aloud

The football world had a lot to say on the London riots. Paul Campbell believes not all of it was sensible

When the violence on the streets of north London began to spread across the country, it was inevitable that football would play a part in the discussion. Like most people, the football writer Ian Ridley watched the news and felt helpless. Unlike most people, however, Ridley thought that the game could somehow save the supposedly broken Britain.

“At times like these, you can feel helpless and peripheral in the sports pages, which always used to be known in newspapers as the toy department,” said a mournful Ridley in his Express column. “Maybe football can play its part in repair and healing, however. The thugs have won a battle. Let us hope they don’t, metaphorically, win the war… As the opium of the masses, it is far healthier than any liquid or substance. Or internet obsession.”

While Ridley bastardised the writings of Karl Marx, Henry Winter drew attention to the teachings of that other political heavyweight, Rio Ferdinand. Without sounding at all worried about the implications of his statement, Winter claimed that Ferdinand’s “voice certainly carries more resonance on inner-city streets than any politician’s”.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that those working in the football industry afford the game such importance. But it is a little concerning. Men who know a lot about kicking balls aren’t necessarily going to be great at constructing government policy, as Ian Holloway proved in the Independent. The Blackpool manager used his media platform to call for the rioters to stop smashing up shops and be more like Paul Scholes, “who went through his whole career without even a whiff of an off-the-field issue”. Holloway also pinned some blame on the media, arguing that “if the TV cameras weren’t there and we didn’t know about it I don’t think the rioting would have sparked up anywhere else”.

Holloway wasn’t the only football manager with an opinion. The Sun carried a double-page interview with a “sad, sickened and angry” Harry Redknapp, who blamed the riots on a breakdown in family values. “When I was 12 or 13, boys would meet their football manager dressed in a blazer or at least a pair of trousers. Now some of them turn up to see me wearing a pair of jeans with their arse hanging out. They just don’t care.” Stan Collymore called for help: “I want to know where the musicians, actors and rappers are at a time like this?”

With the great and the good of the football universe calling for action, it was left to a man still playing the game to offer some sense. David James, writing in the Observer, wondered how young people could relate to footballers at all: “While it is true that most of us have had a council estate upbringing, most now live away from those communities, enjoying a lifestyle that is light years from the kids we are talking about… Are people really going to listen to a millionaire footballer living in a plush mansion telling people who are struggling to make ends meet on a council estate to calm down?”

James went on to suggest that long-term engagement with a community would make more sense than taking a few seconds to type “Stop the violence” into a mobile phone. With this thought in mind it was heartening to see Peter Crouch and Benoît Assou-Ekotto involve themselves in the clean-up along Tottenham High Road. Football isn’t the opium of the masses and an involvement in the game doesn’t bring with it statesmanlike authority. But footballers, like everyone else, can help their communities most when they’re a part of them.

From WSC 296 October 2011

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