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Stories
The story of Welsh football
by Phil Stead
Y Lolfa, £14.95
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 319 September 2013
The condition of Welsh football is often serious but never dull, and the same can be said of Phil Stead’s engagingly readable chronicle. It is history as one thing after another, stronger on anecdote than analysis. The prose is more solid than stylish but with flourishes such as the characterisation of Jerry Sherman, briefly and disastrously Newport County’s owner, as having “the shifty-eyed evasiveness of a potion seller at a wild west show”.
Clubs are not neglected. We learn how Wrexham got their “Robins” nickname, that Cardiff possibly sacrificed the 1924 League title to Wales call-ups and that West Ham’s “Bubbles” anthem may have been borrowed from Swansea – but this is essentially the story of the Wales team and the Football Association of Wales (FAW).
The anecdotal style works well in the early years. It introduces debonair goalkeeper Leigh Roose, who dated music hall star Marie Lloyd and conceded a Scottish winner because he was talking to a spectator, and an earlier keeper who played against England with his forearms in plaster. There are two one-armed players, a schoolmaster accidentally shot dead by a pupil and evidence of the national surname shortage, with different players called Oswald Davies on consecutive pages. One FAW secretary is imprisoned for forgery and its second president is sacked for providing insufficient support – he was the nephew of the MP and magistrate who became founding president after licensing a pub lock-in at the first meeting.
Running themes do emerge. The FAW are perennially skint, so opt for income over team priorities in locating key qualifiers. They are beset by English club obstructionism over player release, localised factionalism – Oswestry v Wrexham prefiguring Swansea v Cardiff – and they treat Llanelli’s ambitions as unsympathetically in 1958 as in 2013.
They are baffled by foreign travel. Players routinely forget passports and it is hard to forgive the official who could have averted Vinnie Jones’s Wales debut, but let him play with limited documentation. The infamous incident when player Gil Reece was bumped from a flight packed with committee men is merely the culmination of traditions exemplified by taking only 18 players, but 25 officials including the FAW secretary’s sister, to the 1958 World Cup. And then there are the qualification near-misses, that litany of dodgy Scottish penalties and doped-up Russians for which the sad but inescapable explanation is that even good Wales teams are usually not quite good enough.
Red Dragons really should have an index but there are few factual glitches. Stead elevates Wrexham to Division Two 45 years too early, while the Trevor Ford who gave vital evidence at the manslaughter trial after a South Wales Transport player died on the pitch in 1934 was almost certainly not the rumbustious centre-forward, ten at the time, but his father.
But these are minor quibbles. Stead doubtless once dreamed of playing for Wales, but with this book serves his nation better than many who achieved that ambition.
A journey through Spanish football
by Jimmy Burns
Simon & Schuster, £18.99
Reviewed by Dermot Corrigan
From WSC 305 July 2012
The current golden era for Spain’s national team is also a boom time for publishers and authors producing books in English about the Spanish game. La Roja by Jimmy Burns is nicely timed for Euro 2012.
Burns has deeper links within Spanish society than most observers. His father Tom was a spy in Madrid during the Second World War and a Madrid metro station is named after his grandfather Gregorio Marañon. His closeness to issues outside sport soon emerges. Don Quixote shows up on page one and General Franco, ETA, recent president José Luis Zapatero and 19th century English travelwriter Richard Ford are all mentioned early on. None of them played much football, but they help argue that Spanish politics and culture shaped the country’s football team.
Whereas in Phil Ball’s Morbo you hear from taxi-drivers and local barmen, Burns draws in Federico García Lorca, Wilfred the Hairy and St Ignatius of Loyola. At times there are too many digressions into bullfighting theory and references to Quixote tilting at windmills. Another minor quibble is the recycling of anecdotes and interviews from Burns’s previous books on Barcelona, Diego Maradona and David Beckham. Ardal O’Hanlon’s thoughts on Catalan nationalism could have been left out.
But when a club president (Barcelona’s Josep Sunyol) can be shot for his political beliefs or a stadium can become the safest place for voicing political dissent (Athletic Bilbao’s San Mames), a broad approach makes sense. Many of the central influences on Spain’s footballing development, from Santiago Bernabéu to Johan Cruyff, were not shy about voicing strong political opinions. A paragraph in a football book that begins with the inauguration of Real Madrid’s new stadium and ends with a military coup is novel. The story of how Athletic players heard about the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Guernica while on a tour of France is moving.
Burns’s central point makes sense; Spain ditched its cultural and historical baggage, found its own football identity and suddenly became very, very good. For the entire 20th century, the national team was la furia Española – virile, aggressive and played by men with big cojones. When Luís Aragones changed the nickname to La Roja, some thought immediately of the losing “reds” from the civil war, but for Aragones it was just a colour like Italy’s Azzurri or Holland’s Oranje. Then Vicente del Bosque – from a republican family but a successful player and coach at Real Madrid – built his World Cup-winning team around a core of tiki-taka-loving Catalans.
The book is about this cultural shift. There are interviews with central figures, including Cruyff, Del Bosque, Jorge Valdano and Ladislav Kubala, but not much time is spent analysing tactics or youth systems. Burns’s central concern is not whether David Silva can play as a false nine, but how Spain’s football team represent the people (or peoples) found within its current borders. He succeeds in telling that story.
Macclesfield were in financial disarray when they entered the Football League, but they still managed to win a second consecutive promotion, writes Michael Whalley
Just getting to the starting line was an achievement. One week before their first season in the Football League began, Macclesfield Town received a High Court writ from the creditors of their late chairman’s business demanding more than £500,000. This is not generally how promotion seasons begin. Yet nine months later, Macc went up from Division Three at the first attempt. As cheesy as it might sound now, there were times during the 1997-98 season when it seemed as if the motto on Efe Sodje’s bandana – “Against All Odds” – could have applied to the club.
Simon Tyers reviews the BBC’s change of studio and whether it has made any difference to Match of the Day
Whisper it, for fear of TV columnists suddenly finding themselves surplus to requirements in these financially straitened times, but viewers of highlights shows don’t really care about what happens for much of each programme. As long as the action is plentiful and well edited – and the bits in between don’t inspire mass acts of seppuku – you can by and large get away with it.