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My autobiography
by Rio Ferdinand
Blink Publishing, £20
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 334 December 2014

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At the time of writing, media speculation was rife that Rio Ferdinand’s brief spell at Loftus Road would soon be brought to an end, with QPR reportedly left cold by the 35-year-old’s efforts since he joined them from Manchester United last July. Should the press scuttlebutt be true, it will be a somewhat shabby end to what’s been an excellent career. For all his intermittent inanity off the pitch, Ferdinand remains, alongside Tony Adams, the best centre-half produced by English football since Bobby Moore.

It’s hard to tell whether #2Sides would have been a superior book had Ferdinand employed a different ghostwriter (the one he did hire, David Winner, has taken an unconventional approach to the form, as we shall see). The title, a nod to his fondness for spending hours on Twitter, immediately makes the heart sink – and for the most part, the contents are similarly disappointing. In fact, it’s less a memoir and more a succession of disparate polemics on Ferdinand’s most cherished (or, in the case of John Terry, least cherished) topics, presented with few concessions to the concept of basic chronology.

Ferdinand has been a sufficiently voluble presence in the media over the years for you to more or less know in advance what his take on each subject will be. Fabio Capello and Roy Hodgson are duly slammed. So is David Moyes for his miserable ten months as Manchester United manager, though in this case Ferdinand does leaven the harsh criticism with unstinting praise for Moyes as a person (as well as revealing that the alleged “Do it like Phil Jagielka would” exchange on the training ground never actually happened). The details of his now-terminal rift with Ashley Cole, ignited when Cole gave evidence in favour of Terry, are rendered in almost sorrowful terms.

But #2Sides suffers woefully from its utter absence of structure. No sooner has Ferdinand finished talking about the Terry racist abuse trial or the 2008 Champions League final or a title race, than we’re off into a digression about the restaurant he co-owns, or his favourite music (grime and corporate rock), or something equally thrilling. There’s even a chapter devoted solely to that Twitter account, entitled “5.7 Million And Counting”. It’s not up to much.

If you’re wondering why #2Sides has little discernible structure or cohesion, it’s worth mentioning that Winner has form for this approach. In Brilliant Orange, his award-winning 2001 study of Dutch football, the author gave the chapters random “squad numbers” for whimsical reasons. It worked very well on that occasion, but a number of his more recent books – Those Feet, Around The World In 90 Minutes – have been misfires, and so is this. Winner ghostwrote #2Sides immediately after finishing Dennis Bergkamp’s memoir Stillness And Speed, so there may or may not have been an element of racing to beat the clock.

By far the most substantial chapter comes early on, where Ferdinand explains his approach to the art of defending, going into fascinating detail about how he could “smell out” one kind of attacking danger and his long-time partner Nemanja Vidic could scent another. A penny for Tony Fernandes and Harry Redknapp’s thoughts if they read it.

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Inside the minds of football’s leaders
by Mike Carson
Bloomsbury in association with the League Managers Association, £16.99
Reviewed by Barney Ronay
From WSC 321 November 2013

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Often when reviewing a book it is customary to quote one of the best bits at the start to give a little flavour of what treats can be found within its pages. This isn’t an easy thing to do with The Manager. Mainly because there aren’t any best bits, or even any good bits to speak of – apart from occasional unintentionally good bits, such as the passage that starts off by quoting St Francis of Assisi and Stephen Covey “best-selling author of The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People” (me neither) before ploughing into a passage on the philosophy of Neil Warnock (yes that one).

On the other hand despite its lack of good bits, its muscular banality – the literary equivalent of a long and tedious game of squash – The Manager is also a considerable achievement in its own right. Most notably it takes one of the more mercurial and thrillingly baroque aspects of English football and turns it into something so unrelentingly laborious that this book, which is sponsored by the League Managers Association and the Premier League, should come with a warning not to operate heavy machinery or drive late at night should you accidentally find yourself reading more than a paragraph or two.

Yet this is perhaps a little unfair. In reality The Manager is barely a book at all, more a kind of how-to guide aimed not at football fans but at business-minded people: leaders, rain-makers, ladder-climbers, even football managers themselves. This lumping together of football and corporate managerdom is a process that has been in train for some time, but it is given a fresh twist here. The first secretary-mangers would often borrow the mannerisms and vocabulary of clerks or factory foremen.

In the 1950s a socially mobile breed of manager took up the coat and hat of the ambitious junior sales manager. The 1980s brought with them a breed of Thatcherite manager-made-good, the Big Ron-ish notion of the manager as self-made man and flash git. With the celebrification of the modern manager – and with football generally bleeding into every other walk of life – this is now a process that has increasingly been reversed. The corporate world looks to football, borrowing the manager’s habits, mannerisms and – as here – musings on success, the leadership of men and the rest of it.

Perhaps for this reason the book seems to describe an unfamiliar footballing world. In part this is because it presents a version of football completely robbed of any humour, becoming in the process at times quite funny – favourite chapter heading: “Seeing The Bigger Picture (Harry Redknapp)” – and in part this is because it is simply very dull.

Poring over the cracker motto banalities (“if there is a lesson to take from this it is the tendency of great leaders to take ownership of their situations. In the words of Mick McCarthy…”) it is tempting to conclude that the real problem with The Manager is managers themselves. When they talk about football English managers just aren’t very interesting. Instead they are famously dull, anti-academic and light on any coherent management theory. Particularly when, as here, what they have to say is presented unquestioningly, without context, irony, analysis or any of the things most people who like football like about football.

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Inside the mind of Harry Redknapp
by John Crace
Constable Books, £18.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 318 August 2013

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A little over a year ago, Harry Redknapp had it all. Spurs were well on course for a Champions League place, Redknapp himself had won his courtroom battle with the taxman and he was in pole position for the England job. And if he didn’t get the latter, he had a contingency plan for the summer: a lucrative and cushy slot analysing Euro 2012 for the BBC.

Other than the tax case, none of it worked out. Spurs tumbled into the Europa League for another year, Roy Hodgson took England to Ukraine and Redknapp is out of the top flight entirely, facing a season in the Championship with a dreadful QPR team. Even the Euro 2012 gig turned sour when Redknapp sheepishly stood down from the BBC panel after Daniel Levy called his bluff over a pay rise.

Harry’s Games, a generally positive (and occasionally adoring) biography, would have seemed well timed at another moment, but parts of it read a little strangely in the summer of 2013. Redknapp sharply divides opinion among the public: some lap up his man-of-the-people clubbability, while others see him as shady and having too many fingers in pies. John Crace writes here that the aim is to find an accurate midpoint between the two extremes, though it’s obvious the author cleaves more to the former than the latter.

A Guardian journalist and Spurs fan, Crace has been dealt a slightly awkward hand, with none of Redknapp’s friends or confidantes willing to speak to him on the record. So a lot – though not all – of the book is a cuttings job, albeit a thorough and solidly written one. The problem is that he lays his cards on the table early on and keeps them there, announcing that he’s “not ashamed to love” Redknapp and talking at length about the man’s charisma and common touch. The words “national treasure” are used, and not sarcastically. You wonder exactly how much you can trust a biographer who openly admits to being in lust with his subject.

Crace’s strengths are his thoroughness and prosecraft, and Harry’s Game is an easy, diverting read if nothing else. Redknapp’s first couple of decades in football were resolutely unglamorous: his time as an injury-plagued winger for West Ham is analysed through the prism of the fear he would have felt whenever another caveman full-back was lunging in to clatter him. Retiring early, he fetched up at Bournemouth, where his first match in charge ended in a 9-0 defeat.

The West Ham years, where Redknapp seemed to be signing four players a week at one stage, were chaotic. “Harry just loved a deal,” an anonymous former West Ham board member tells Crace. “It was almost as if it were a drug.” Crace notes later that while Redknapp has a tendency to “stay in the black” when trading players, it has a bad effect on the players themselves, who don’t like being passed around like pieces of meat.

With QPR down, few expect Redknapp to hang around for long. Crace finished the book just before the relegation and rounds it off by speculating on Redknapp’s chances of pulling off another Houdini act, to cement his reputation as “one of football’s greatest ever survivors”. Perhaps, but mere survival isn’t the kind of thing that a man like Redknapp settles for.

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by Julie Welch
Vision Sports, £20
Reviewed by Alan Fisher
From WSC 314 April 2013

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The Twitter hashtag #againstmodernfootball is hardly a scientific dissection of the faults of the modern game but it has become an outpouring of genuine frustration and growing disenchantment: exorbitant ticket prices, alienated and marginalised fans, an obsession with the here and now and instant success. Julie Welch’s Biography Of Tottenham Hotspur is not only a revealing insight into the club, it could well restore your faith in football.

Welch traces the development of the club’s character and personality, showing there is more to a football club’s history than a list of players, matches and trophies. Her beloved Danny Blanchflower’s statement that it’s not just about winning, it’s about glory and doing things in style, articulates a culture and identity that dates back to the club’s formation in the 1880s, when three schoolboys met under a lamp-post 100 yards from the current ground.

Harry Redknapp and André Villas-Boas come from different schools of management but both talked of the need to play good football the Spurs way. Arthur Rowe’s pioneering “push and run” won a League title in 1951. He was influenced by another innovator, Peter McWilliam, Spurs boss in the 1920s, and in turn inspired the incomparable Bill Nicholson to bring unparalleled success in the 1960s and early 1970s. The familiar mixture of flamboyance and exasperation, the sublime and erratic, would be instantly recognisable to successive generations of Spurs fans.

We deny history at our peril. Alan Sugar saved the club but he understood the balance sheet better than his heritage, hence the crushing mediocrity of the 1990s with Christian Gross, Gerry Francis and George Graham. Then again, there’s nothing new under the sun. Financial crises, businessmen wanting to profit by moving the ground, an ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: any decade at Spurs, not just 
the last one.

Welch is an author and screenwriter, the first woman football reporter in Fleet Street to have her own byline. She is a beguiling storyteller who tells the tale with a curiosity and style that sweeps the reader along. The air of artistry and magic seduced her as a schoolgirl but it’s not quite right to suggest they entice fans these days. Peer pressure, family ties or blind accident are more common factors. However once committed it keeps us there, becoming part of who we are.

The nature of Spurs’ identity as a Jewish club is the only omission, perhaps because although it’s an independent publication, unusually the club have co-operated and are shy of potential controversy. The absence of statistics and tables may dismay lovers of detail, who will point to several 
proof-reading errors.

It’s a beautiful book, wonderfully written, that is essential for Spurs fans and deserves to be widely read because it is about perspective, culture and identity, precious to fans everywhere yet under attack. Read it and I defy you to tell me that finishing fourth in the Premier League is what truly matters.

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