Search: 'Robbie James'

by Robbie Savage
Constable, £18.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 352 June 2016

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Apparently, you either love Robbie Savage or you hate him. He is, in his own words, “Mr Marmite”: someone who divides opinion “like Moses divided the Red Sea”. It’s an interesting choice of simile, suggesting a finely balanced reservoir of people on each side of the debate. In reality, on one hand there are the people who love him: his close friends and family, perhaps his agent, and on the other there are all the people you’ve ever met with an interest in football.

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Cardiff City and the Cup Winners Cup 1964-1993
by Mario Risoli
St David’s Press, £16.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 338 April 2015

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Collective memory tends to privilege the ancient and modern at the expense of what came in between. For Cardiff City the FA Cup win in 1927 looms with the same symbolic weight as 1966 does for England fans, while recent recall summons up unwanted red shirts, thwarted promotion campaigns and misery last season.

Mario Risoli, an expert preserver of Welsh football’s past, aims here to reclaim a time when Cardiff combined being a lower-division club at home with redoubtable warriors in Europe. It needed recovering. That these achievements were in a tournament which no longer exists, and enabled by a route Cardiff can no longer take – winning the Welsh Cup – cuts institutional continuities. And while the last venture was in 1993, the core of this history (and two thirds of its length) is contained in the years between 1964 and 1971.

Risoli draws on press archives and an outstanding collection of interviews with former players. They offer a vivid picture of European competition before it was subsumed to club business plans, as a glorious break from mundane reality and, in a less travelled age, a venture into the unknown.

Even that future footballing cosmopolite John Toshack could recall of the food in Tashkent in 1968: “It was like dog food. The only thing that we could eat were these big bread rolls. We called them discuses.” Entrepreneurial players took chocolates, ties and socks to sell in Moscow, only as Bobby Ferguson recalls: “We ended up eating most of the chocolate and giving the rest away because the people were so nice.”

Along with the tales of Cardiff stalwarts such as Peter King, who contributes a fine foreword, and Don Murray are glimpses of more widely remembered careers, bracketed by John Charles’s last great display at Sporting Lisbon in 1965 and Robbie James’s final senior goal, scored in defeat by Standard Liege in 1993. At the book’s heart is a compelling warts-and-all picture of Jimmy Scoular, Cardiff’s manager from 1964 to 1973 – so competitive he would kick players in a Friday afternoon five-a-side, given to tirades of abuse and arbitrary decisions and paranoid about all foreigners, yet still cherished by many of his players.

And the title gets it right. Beating Real Madrid 1-0 in 1971 is the most remembered achievement of this whole period. Yet the truly historic feat was the extraordinary expedition of 1968, passing through Breda, Moscow, Tashkent and Augsburg en route to a semi-final defeat by Hamburg which ranks for heartbreak alongside the missed penalty that cost Cardiff the League title in 1924. Risoli might perhaps have made more of fan memories and put his excellent game-by-game narration more into the wider context of the club’s history. There should certainly have been an index included. But with all that, he has produced both a great read and a real contribution to football’s collective memory.

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The history of Swansea City AFC
by Geraint H Jenkins
Yr Lolfa, £14.95
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 309 November 2012

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Whatever else can be said about Swansea City, it cannot be denied that we attract a decent class of club historian. The centenary biography is by Geraint Jenkins, a Professor of Welsh History. It follows in the 30-year-old footprints of the club’s previous chronicler David Farmer, a Professor of Management Studies. Proud to be a Swan has the virtues of that academic provenance. It is well and widely researched – to the point of penance, judging by some of the titles in the bibliography – factually reliable and judicious rather than hyperbolic.

Jenkins ranges more widely than Farmer, whose dogged season-by-season account rarely looked beyond the preoccupations and content of the back page of the South Wales Evening Post. The club’s history is related to the context formed by the progress of its host community and the fortunes of its economy and society. Swansea’s copper and tinplate industries and the 1941 blitz take their place alongside the Vetch Field, Robbie James and the FA Cup semi-finals of 1926 and 1964. If you are one of many fans the Swans have gained in recent years, or a supporter of another club wanting to know more about an opponent which has compelled attention, this is a decent introduction.

Jenkins obeys the injunction to leave readers wanting more but not entirely in a way that they might want. He is largely cliche-averse but may have found himself muttering the one about quarts and pint pots. Given 30 more years and a wider frame of reference than Farmer, he is forced to tell the story in little more than three-quarters of the length.

One hundred and eighty-six pages is not remotely enough to do real justice to the first 100 years of any club, never mind one whose fortunes encompass the extremes of two periods of extraordinary upward mobility, a post-war era that included an exceptionally fertile generation of talent and at least three near-death experiences.

Jenkins is too scrupulous a historian to deny that the bad years have far outweighed the good. He ensures that they and their personalities receive proper weight alongside the peaks attained in recent years as well as under John Toshack and the achievements of giants like Ivor Allchurch and Cliff Jones. Perhaps the best passage in the book describes Herbie Williams – “The unlikeliest of soccer idols. Tall, gangling and unprepossessing” – a gifted player who was preternaturally unlucky in the timing of his career.

Those constraints of space force Jenkins to maintain a brisk tempo which leaves only limited scope for reflection or the wealth of anecdote generated by a club which abounds in idiosyncrasy. The result is an account which describes rather than evokes and seems slightly monochrome given the rich colour at its disposal.

He is perhaps unlucky that another centenary project – the online club archive at Swansea University – was under construction rather than fully available while he was writing. That promises to be a rich resource for any future historian – so long, of course, as they get enough space.

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Dear WSC
Gavin Duenas asks why WSC readers want standing areas in football grounds (Letters, WSC 300). My reasons are purely selfish. Maybe then the people stand in front of me and my two young boys “because you can only support your team properly from a standing position” will go to the terraces and leave us to sit and enjoy an unobstructed view from our expensive seats.There should be a choice for all supporters between sitting and safe standing. Yet as a frequent away supporter in “all-seater” stadiums, the choice of sitting doesn’t actually exist. You are forced into unsafe standing in seating areas if you want to to see anything of the game. Woe betide you if you point out that if everybody sits, everybody sees. Oh for the joy of Huish Park and London Road, where thanks to the terraces you can still sit in comfort.
Andrew Bartlett, Kenilworth

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After their first leg play-off win, Lee Daly reflects on Ireland’s Euro 2012 qualification campaign

Despite the Republic of Ireland scoring four goals in their away victory against Estonia in the first leg of their Euro 2012 play-off, the most ambitious Irish performance of the night was from fan Conor Cunningham. He managed to sneak past security into the stadium and make it onto the pitch, disguised in an Estonian team tracksuit top. Cunningham sat in the home team dugout and celebrated with the Irish players after their victory. He became an overnight media sensation and made several appearances on radio explaining he was as surprised as anyone that he wasn’t found out until after the final whistle.

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