Search: 'Andrew Taylor'

Players used to keep themselves busy by swapping sports on a seasonal basis. Si Hawkins looks at why that’s no longer the case

A few months ago, as the news broke that a house fire had cruelly curtailed the long innings of England batting stalwart Trevor Bailey, a lesser-known strand of his career cropped up in conversation. “Old ‘Stonewall’ Bailey,” mused my grandad, fondly. “I used to watch him play for the Avenue.”

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Neil Andrews tracks the development of the bench and can't help but feel shortchanged by its most recent incarnation

Change is meant to be a good thing but it can go hideously wrong. Take the humble substitutes' bench. Once the bastion of the 12th man and his manager, it is now an overcrowded, characterless affair packed full of reserves in club tracksuits who look like they're serving double detention after being caught smoking behind the bike sheds.

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Twenty years of the Premier League
by Joe Lovejoy
Mainstream, £11.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge 
From WSC 304 June 2012

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Joe Lovejoy seems to have set out to write an analysis of the circumstances surrounding the Premier League’s formation and of some of its biggest issues since then, notably foreign players, foreign managers, foreign owners, bungs and grasping agents. The decision to do this chiefly through the medium of long, undigested quotations from interviews with some of the main protagonists means that much of it reads more tediously than it should.

Slotted in between the often wearisome accounts of the machinations of Rick Parry et al are chapters that cast a cursory and abbreviated eye over some of the events on the pitch. “The Big Kick-Off” chapter compiles team lists of the original 22 clubs with a brief, phoned-in intro. This is not the only section that appears to be written almost in note form, but it is one of the more engaging, if you can put faces to the names. Ditto the hasty, often obvious assortment that is “My Top Twenty Matches” (seven of which feature Manchester United being thumped or throw- ing away leads). Spurs’ 2008 comeback 4-4 draw with Arsenal ends with the mystifying statement: “The rest is Lilywhite history.”

“Managers Who Have Won the Premier League” never strays from the perfunctory, as Lovejoy divulges that Alex Ferguson has “more silverware than H Samuel”, José Mourinho is a “Portuguese charmer” and “Monsieur Wenger polarises opinion”. Rather than reading “Twenty Headline Makers”, why not try to guess which major incidents make the cut. You will not go far wrong if you stick with Manchester United, though John Terry’s shagging is a surprise number one. Eric Cantona’s kung-fu assault is unaccountably missing.

If the interviews with players and Premier League worthies that make up the other chapters are also intended to leaven the pudding, you would have thought Alan (“The Geordie Legend”) Shearer should be last on the list. Though he does let slip that “We had a smashing team at Blackburn and we won the league”. “Journeyman goalkeeper” Kevin Poole is almost equally unenlightening, as are Niall Quinn, Stan Collymore, Ryan Giggs and Teddy Sheringham.

Sky Andrew, the agent, and Gordon Taylor offer some thought-provoking comments and the concluding chapters, where the main theme returns, have their moments despite appearing curiously rushed. Most interesting are the reflections on the Financial Fair Play rules and whether UEFA will be able and willing to enforce them. Even the author’s final conclusions about whether the Premier League has met its original objectives (“I don’t think so”) are terse.

Perhaps some space could have been freed up by trimming Gérard Houllier’s rambling foreword. The book would have been improved by some coverage of the events that disrupted the “predictability” of the Premier League, which is lamented throughout, such as Norwich and Villa’s title challenges. Although the preface claims the book is “the story of the Premier League’s first 20 years”, this odd mish-mash is anything but. 

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On the 25th anniversary of the start of the national miners’ strike, Jon Spurling looks at the industry’s long-established links with professional football that have since been swept away

Twenty-five years ago football and coal mining had in common the fact that Margaret Thatcher clearly didn’t see a long-term future for either within British society. In 1985, a Socialist Worker article drew parallels between the 1984 “Battle of Orgreave”, where around 10,000 pickets squared up to as many police, with the violence at Kenilworth Road during a Luton v Millwall FA Cup tie in 1985: “The images of violence and of raging anger (although those witless football fans have no cause at all) lead us to question whether the fabric of society is close to collapse in Thatcher’s Britain.” Two years after the strike ended, at a time when the minister for sport Colin Moynihan mooted the idea of a compulsory membership scheme to curb hooliganism, a letter to the Guardian expressed a fear that “a high handed government, with sheer contempt for the working classes, is, if one looks at recent events, attempting to utterly destroy two bastions of working class Britain.” To take the comparison to its conclusion, both industries had been irrevocably altered by the late 1980s. In the wake of the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster, and Italia 90, football would become gentrified, and machines replaced workers as colliery closures continued apace. “The working class’s links with both football and mining were, directly or  indirectly, rightly or wrongly, severed by Thatcher’s government,” remarked former Labour MP Roy Hattersley in 1992.

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In May, St Andrew’s and the Madejski were cloaked in relegation doom. Now the hope of automatic promotion – with the play-off anxiety that accompanies that prospect – suffuses the meeting between the teams second and third in the Championship. Are they about to swap places? Roger Titford was there

Only an idiot or a football manager would say this was just another game, just another three points.  It stands like a giant sign post, the opening game of the second half of the Championship season, a potential turning point.  Birmingham City have occupied one of the automatic promotion spots from the off but they are beginning to splutter, trailing Wolves by six points. Reading are now only one behind the Blues. Both clubs were relegated from the Premier League last season and both are desperate to get back up before the parachute money runs out and they fall to parsimonious ignominy with a dull thud. It is second versus third in a three-horse race where only the first two get decent prizes and it is being run at an exceptional pace. We’re all off to witness and feel “momentum shift”. If I just wanted to see what happens I’d be better off at home watching it on Sky with my cough. But I’m making a rare away trip, despite Sky, because Reading will need every voice and body we can get in the stadium.

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