Search: ' Bala Town'

The untold story 
of a football great
by Rob Sawyer
De Coubertin Books, £18.99
Reviewed by Simon Hart
From WSC 340 June 2015

Buy this book

It was 30 years ago in March that Harry Catterick died after suffering a heart attack at Everton’s FA Cup quarter-final against Ipswich Town. Five years earlier, Dixie Dean had also died at Goodison Park yet unlike the nationally famous striker, Catterick’s achievements – building two League title-winning teams – are today largely ignored beyond Merseyside.

Rob Sawyer has sought to redress the balance in a well-crafted biography that begins with a foreword from Colin Harvey, part of Catterick’s 1970 Championship side. “Don Revie, Bill Shankly, Bill Nicholson and Sir Matt Busby all get mentioned as being the great managers of the era while Harry doesn’t,” says Harvey of a man who won as many Leagues and FA Cups as Revie.

It is with Shankly, though, that Harvey makes the most telling comparison. For half of his 12-year reign, Catterick’s Everton drew the bigger crowds on Merseyside yet as Harvey recalls: “The press enjoyed being courted by Bill Shankly, but Harry was an introvert and snubbed them.” This is the crux of his image problem. Here was somebody who refused to allow the BBC cameras in to film Match of the Day until 1967 and had none of the charisma of his rival. Catterick was an aloof figure more akin to a modern-day director of football who – as his players would joke – put on a tracksuit only when the TV cameras or chairman John Moores appeared.

To achieve this insightful portrait, Sawyer pieced together interviews given by Catterick himself along with reminiscences of players and journalists and contemporary press cuttings. Alex Young recalls the coldness of a man not interested in courting popularity, saying: “I never got a pat on my head.” He had a devious side too, lying to the press and his own players; he told midfielder Brian Harris, for instance, that rumours of Tony Kay joining were false, only to swoop later that day for a player who had helped his Sheffield Wednesday side finish Division One runners-up in 1960-61.

Yet while his 1963 title-winners,  built with the largesse of Littlewoods tycoon Moores, were dubbed “cheque-book champions”, the vision behind his youthful 1970 team would fit most current ideas of how to play the game. It was a 4-3-3 formation with the “holy trinity” of midfielders Howard Kendall, Harvey and Alan Ball at its heart. Dave Sexton, then Chelsea manager, applauded him for succeeding with a “set of small players up front” and Catterick’s own view was: “When it comes to the creation of something in tight corners, which midfield men have to do, give me the little ones.”

His players might have endured an old-fashioned factory-style clocking-in system but his planning of Everton’s Bellefield training ground – with an indoor pitch for small-sided matches – was another demonstration of foresight. Indeed in October 1970 Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly magazine dubbed the then 50-year-old “a manager for the Seventies”.

Sadly for Catterick – and his legacy – his Everton team soon fell apart. Sawyer recalls a pivotal week in March 1971 when they lost a European Cup quarter-final to Panathinaikos and FA Cup semi-final to Liverpool. After Ball left in controversial circumstances and Catterick himself suffered a heart attack, he was sacked in 1973. Not until 1985, two months after his death, would Everton win the League title again.

Buy this book

by Patrick Barclay
Orion, £20
Reviewed by David Stubbs
From WSC 324 February 2014

Buy this book

Herbert Chapman is, with some justification, known as the great moderniser of English football – the old Highbury stadium with its art deco features was a monument to his forward thinking, in keeping with broader developments in the earlier 20th century. Chapman it was who insisted that the manager, rather than the directors, pick the team, who imagined the role of floodlights in games and numbers on shirts, who adapted quickest tactically to changes in the rules of football in the way he balanced attack and defence, who picked a black player. Of course, modernisation is a double-edged blade – he also took a dim view of union membership among players and early on proposed that Orient be used as a “feeder” club for Arsenal, a notion that doubtless appalled their fans then as much as it would today.

His status as a visionary is indisputable, however, given that he grew up in a footballing era when crossbars were still optional, when goalkeepers were allowed to handle, though not hold, the ball anywhere in their own half, and “hacking” or kicking on the shins was only just dying out as one of the manly characteristics of the less than beautiful game.

Having achieved triple League success with Huddersfield Town, Chapman turned his attention south – he dreamt of making then-trophy-less Arsenal the “Newcastle of the South”, which sounded very thrilling and far fetched in the 1920s. He repeated his triple League success at Highbury before his premature death in 1934, contracting pneumonia before penicillin was widely available – one aspect of modernity that came too late to save the grand old man.

Patrick Barclay tells Chapman’s story with capable thoroughness, noting that he was harshly handed a life ban for the illegal payments scandal that led to the disbanding of Leeds City, whom he managed between 1912 and 1918, but rather luckier to get away with the underhand “bungs” he offered to Charlie Buchan as compensation for losses on his sports shop business while at Arsenal. He also retells the saga of his getting representatives from Bolton Wanderers nicely drunk enough to drop their asking price for David Jack.

However, one gets the impression Barclay was hoping to discover more about Chapman from the archives than he is able to unearth. Chapman, you sense, was a man who played his cards close to his chest and didn’t testify more about this methods, his thinking, his philosophy, than he needed to. We have more evidence of his works than his inner workings. Despite Barclay’s efforts, he remains an elusive biographical subject. Consequently, there’s a lot of “Chapman would presumably have felt” this and “Chapman would most likely have thought” that. Barclay makes up the shortfall with diverting but at times bizarrely lengthy, tenuous digressions about Marie Lloyd, Edward Elgar and the First World War.

Still, this is probably as good an account as could be expected of the life of one of football’s cornerstone figures, the first great example of what a strong manager can do, given time, a free hand and his head.

Buy this book

Surviving football’s money business
by Brian Laws with Alan Biggs
Vertical Editions, £16.99
Reviewed by Graham Stevenson
From WSC 316 June 2013

Buy this book

For a manager who has spent over a decade employed by Scunthorpe United in three spells, it’s disappointing to find only 19 pages in Brian Laws’s autobiography about his time at Glanford Park. He’s led the club to a couple of promotions and a couple of relegations, so it’s not as if there is a dearth of interesting history between them, despite the balance sheet currently reading roughly “nil”.

Scunthorpe are now broke, broken and back in the basement division for the first time in several years – which is exactly where they were when Laws first arrived in 1997. For the small steel-town club he was a relatively big appointment and made an immediate impression. Rumours spread quickly of dressing-room dust-ups and car-park dusting-downs, but “Ol’ Big Hair” and his journalist co-writer don’t take many opportunities to fill in much colour between the lines here.

The Machiavellian boardroom-level manoeuvres during a bizarre three weeks in 2004, for instance, are dealt with in just over a paragraph. This involved Laws being fired by a new chairman, before the previous one stepped in to take back control of the club and reinstated him. “The whole thing got quite nasty,” Brian says. But nasty how? Were horses’ heads involved?

It’s much the same elsewhere throughout this (terribly titled) book. Laws’s time at Grimsby Town is over quite quickly and the aftermath of an injury caused by his launching a plate of chicken wings into Italian midfielder Ivano Bonetti’s face reads like only two-thirds of a story. The lessons learned seem to have been to do with Laws’s handling of the media rather than the handling of his players. Later managerial roles at Sheffield Wednesday and Burnley are similarly done-and-dusted in mere pages and key incidents at all of his clubs feel as if they are dealt with like clearances to be booted into row Z. Much more care is taken in detailing why Laws got the nickname “Ernie” during his playing days. It’s as simple as you imagine – team-mates’ reference to comedian Ernie Wise being short and wearing a wig.

Laws’s years on the pitch dominate – obviously none more so than successful ones at Nottingham Forest (during which he drank Mick Hucknall’s backstage bar dry and wet himself walking out at Wembley for a Cup final – events unrelated). A series of anecdotes about Brian Clough’s eccentricities add more to the mythos but it’s actually Laws himself who surprises with some poignant recollections of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, such as his continuing embarrassment at not realising the seriousness of events and hurling verbal abuse at the first few Liverpool fans out onto the pitch.

It’s clear Clough had something of a soft spot for Laws and it’s easy enough to figure out why. Laws comes across as reasonably principled and workmanlike – qualities he showed as a player. He also seems prone to let his feelings boil over from time to time, an attribute he clearly takes into the dressing room as a manager.

Buy this book

Owen Amos on Airbus UK, the Welsh club just trying to go about their business quietly

Everyone knows the joke. The result pops up on Soccer Saturday and, within seconds, someone has cracked it. So, are they dancing in the streets of Airbus UK? They are not, but they are doing all right. The club, in the Welsh Premier League, are based at the huge Airbus aeroplane factory in Broughton, north Wales. The site, which employs 6,000 people, is a mile from the English border, and the ground is tucked away in the south-east corner.

Read more…

Andrew Crawford believes that an influx of money, famous players and foreign managers could help football become China’s most popular sport

The Chinese Super League (CSL) season gets underway on March 15. Most of the country’s big clubs receive substantial funding from various wealthy business tycoons or state-owned enterprises, and several teams have recruited expensive foreign reinforcements. Shanghai Shenhua started things off last December in spectacular fashion by snapping up Chelsea’s Nicolas Anelka for £190,000 a week. Since then, Beijing Guoan have spent around £1.9 million to secure strikers Andrija Kaludjerovic and Reinaldo, while Shandong Luneng have paid a reported £830,000 for their own Brazilian forward, Gilberto Macena.

Read more…