by Mark Hodkinson
Pomona, £9.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 242 Apr 07
Mark Hodkinson’s funny and poignant new book is a deftly written account of coming of age in a scruffy north-of-England town, Rochdale – “built to be rained upon or swathed in mist, joyous in a sulk” – in which football plays its part, not in any particularly pivotal way but simply as part of the fabric of growing up.
Not all revolutionaries are fondly remembered. Barney Ronay examines the controversial legacy of Charles Reep, football’s first tactical statistician
Wing Commander Charles Reep has been called many things. Twenty years ago the Times dubbed him “The Human Computer of the Fabled Fifties”; an obituary described him more simply as “a football analyst”; while a slightly empurpled Brian Glanville once declared him a member of FA coaching director Charles Hughes’s “band of believers and acolytes”, the archangel of “a fanatical credo, a pseudo-religion”.
Simon Inglis mourns the loss of traditional floodlights from the horizon due to the changing trends in stadium construction
We’ve all been there. Driving to a game, negotiating the ring-roads and roundabouts of Awaysville, then growing hotter and more bothered as you realise the back streets in which you’re mired are nowhere near the ground. What’s worse is you’ve never had to look at a map before. All you’ve ever done was take more or less the right turn-off from the motorway and then drive blithely toward that distant set of floodlights on the horizon, like a moth homing in on a night light.
To the surprise of many the former giants of the European game came close to hosting Euro 2008, but Ray Dexter believes a football revival is a long way off
As 19-year-old Bela Koplarovics of Zalaegerszeg bundled the ball past Manchester United’s rather ponderous defence in the crumbling Nep Stadium in August, Hungarian football found itself in the world football spotlight for the first time in a generation. The result, greeted as some kind of sporting miracle in the bars of Budapest, allowed the people to forget the twin scandals of why over half the seats in their beloved national stadium were empty for such a big game (the entire upper tier was deemed too unsafe to be used) and why Vodafone, Manchester United’s sponsor, were allowed to buy 15,000 of the remaining 28,000 tickets for their corporate clients and users.
Jack Hayward spent lots of money preparing Wolves for the Premier League, but as Charles Ross discovers, you need more then just a fancy stadium to get there
If it was a difficult start to this season for Wolves, it was worse for Sir Jack Hayward. After selling Robbie Keane, we exited the Worthington Cup at the hands of the other Wanderers (Wycombe), and lost the second home league game to Walsall. Cue sporadic chants of “sack the board” and “where’s the money gone?” After a decade of Hayward’s involvement, the answer seems to be that the money – around £46 million of it – has gone on a fabulous new Molineux and on players not fit to grace it.