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My life in football
by Howard Kendall
De Coubertin Books, £20
Reviewed by Simon Hart
From WSC 323 January 2014

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There is a lovely anecdote in Howard Kendall’s new autobiography about the day he signed Dave Watson for Everton from Norwich City. It was two days before the start of the 1986-87 season and Kendall’s attempt to complete the deal by five o’clock, so ensuring Watson’s availability for the opening fixture, had failed. Undeterred, he had the clock on the wall turned back an hour and got Watson to pose for a photo beneath it. “The Football League accepted it and Dave made his debut,” he writes.

Timing is a recurring theme in this recounting of Kendall’s career. He was ahead of his time as both a player and manager. He became the youngest player in an FA Cup final when, at 17 years and 345 days, he appeared for Preston against West Ham in 1964. At 20 he was wanted by Bill Shankly but joined Everton instead. He entered management with Blackburn at 33, winning promotion immediately. With Everton, he won the League, FA Cup and European Cup-Winners Cup before his 39th birthday.

So much so young, yet Kendall’s timing was out in one crucial respect: the post-Heysel ban denied Everton European Cup football and he cites this as the reason he left for Athletic Bilbao in 1987 (as a 45-year-old Alex Ferguson was still settling in at Old Trafford). Familiar stuff but what is new here is the revelation that an unnamed “Liverpool executive” had recommended him to Athletic after blocking their move for Kenny Dalglish – a “grim irony” indeed for Evertonians.

Written with James Corbett, who collaborated on Neville Southall’s autobiography, Love Affairs & Marriage: My Life in Football is very much what the second part of the title tells us. As befits an old-school gentleman, Kendall barely mentions his private life and dwells only briefly on potential controversies such as his departure from Notts County amid “ridiculous allegations” (unspecified here but drink-related). Yet there is much to enjoy nonetheless, not least the account of how he assembled his great Everton side in an era when a manager could create something special with a combination of homegrown talents, astute transfer dealings (he recalls the gambles taken on the injury-prone Peter Reid and Andy Gray), a trusting chairman – and morale-building Chinese dinners.

Kendall, with his man-management skills and love of the training pitch, differed so much from his own Everton boss Harry Catterick – from whom, he notes, he learned just one football lesson in six and a half years – yet the big question mark of his career is why after so much early success, his only subsequent trophy was an Anglo-Italian Cup with Notts County in 1995. Kendall reflects on his two less happy spells at Goodison in the 1990s, noting the lack of boardroom support and arguing that the influx of big money into the game meant it was no longer possible to build success on a budget. “Players were harder to sign,” laments the man whose first Everton buy, Southall, was recommended by a friend who ran a Llandudno pub. The end result is he was effectively finished as a manager at just 52 – a man out of time once more.

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by Terry Curran 
with John Brindley
Vertical Editions £16.99
Reviewed by Andy Hockley
From WSC 317 July 2013

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The blurb on the inside cover of this book ends with the words “Warning: Terry Curran’s story may offend the politically correct”. This, coupled with the dreaded word “Maverick” in the title, meant that I approached the book with trepidation.

Happily, I can report that in this case first impressions are wrong. Terry Curran is an engaging story-teller, who chooses to focus on a few interesting periods of his career rather than just launch into a tedious retelling of the whole. He’s perhaps best remembered for his spell at Sheffield Wednesday and especially for his role in the legendary 1979 “Boxing Day Massacre”, when a record 49,309 turned up for a Third Division match at Hillsborough to see top-of-the-league Sheffield United dispatched 4-0, in a match which Curran dominated, scoring one and setting up another. But ultimately he was a journeyman, playing at 16 different clubs in his all-too-short career. Twice he even managed what few do once, transferring between bitter rivals – from Nottingham Forest to Derby County and from Wednesday to United.

Such was his promiscuousness that he ended up playing under a virtual who’s who of late 1970s and early 1980s management. Brian Clough, Tommy Docherty, Lawrie McMenemy, Jack Charlton, Howard Kendall and a considerable number of others had what would appear to be the dubious pleasure of attempting to get the best out of the talented but lippy Curran, the self-styled “poor man’s George Best”.

In many ways this is where the book succeeds – providing a glimpse into the experiences of playing under all those managers with their vastly different playing styles and approaches to man management. The chapter on Clough is particularly rich and it’s clear that Curran had a huge amount of time for him. This didn’t stop the headstrong (sorry, maverick) Curran walking out on Forest just when they got to the First Division. Other former bosses are described significantly less positively, most notably McMenemy.

Curran is not averse to listing his mistakes, though since most of the titular regrets are related to walking out on clubs where he felt he was not getting enough playing time, it is notable that he never really addresses the question of why that might have been. You didn’t necessarily have to be a top manager to find him a frustrating player at times.  

In case you were wondering about that initial warning, it’s actually quite difficult to know what exactly we are being alerted to. I can only suppose that it relates to Curran’s womanising and “PC” is being used to mean “prudish”. But there’s nothing here that could be described as offensive, even to those of us with a sensitive disposition.

It’s hard not to warm to Curran, despite his admitted failings, and by the end of the book it’s gratifying to find him happy and fulfilled and working as a youth coach at Doncaster Rovers, musing on England’s lack of success. Rather than, say, following in the footsteps of the real George Best.

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by Neville Southall
De Coubertin Books, £18.99
Reviewed by Mark O’Brien
From WSC 309 November 2012

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The standard format for modern sports biographies is to start on the cusp of the subject’s defining moment – the race, the fight, the match of their life – and then flash back to their childhood to tell the story of their rise to the top. Neville Southall, record-breaking goalkeeper for Everton and Wales, kicks off his autobiography on a football pitch but instead of a glorious match at Goodison, Wembley or Cardiff Arms Park it’s the present day and he is being called a “fucking fat knobhead” by one of the troubled youngsters he now works with.

It quickly becomes clear that Southall has done everything slightly differently to other sportsmen. He states early on that he wants to show people that there is more to his personality than just the grumpy caricature that he became in many eyes and he succeeds up to a point.

From his beginnings in Llandudno through to the glittering heights at Everton, where he became the club’s most decorated player, then on a tour of English football’s less glamorous outposts when he ended his career as a wandering pair of gloves for hire, Southall talks constantly of a single-minded, overwhelming desire to improve as a keeper. After a while it’s hard not to wonder whether this obsession, especially with training, is born of a deep-seated lack of confidence.

Like Henry Skrimshander, the fictional baseball star in Chad Harbach’s The Art Of Fielding, Southall only ever seems at home in a sporting environment, one where social interaction is reduced to piss-taking and the rules are very simple: play, train, improve and play again.

He still seems quite guarded and loath to criticise too many of his former colleagues, apart from Everton’s disastrous management duo of Mike Walker and Dave Williams, but still he has a dry sense of humour and tells plenty of funny anecdotes, especially about the misadventures of the Welsh national team which appears to have been run like Dad’s Army.

Even when describing the rather melancholy end to his 751-game Everton career Southall manages to see the funny side. Told that Howard Kendall wants to speak to him ahead of a game at Elland Road he goes to the manager’s hotel room.

“‘You do know I love you,’ he said when I came in.  He looked awful, like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. To be honest, this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Howard Kendall stood in his dressing gown with his bollocks hanging out telling you he loves you is not a good sight.”

Another of football’s less conventional characters, Pat Nevin, is spot on when he describes Southall as the classic eccentric with a complex personality. As a result The Binman Chronicles is a more interesting read than the average footballer’s life story.

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Goodison Park was once a place ahead of its time but, as Simon Hart reports, the rebranded “Old Lady” is now a meeting place for disgruntled supporters frustrated by their club’s decline

Step into the parish hall of St Luke the Evangelist church on the corner of Goodison Road and Gwladys Street, and you enter a world that could not be any further removed from the ad-man’s fantasy of the face-painted, replica-shirted modern “footy” fan and their agony-and-ecstasy matchday experience.

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They weren't very popular but Don Revie's Leeds United side were certainly effective. James Calder takes a look back at their first League success

The long-term significance
This was Leeds United’s first League title. Developing what Geoffrey Green of the Times described as a “cult of collective anonymity”, the meticulous Don Revie shaped a resilient yet ruthless side that had won few friends since gaining promotion in 1964. But among the grit were regular flashes of brilliance. That, and their ability to absorb punishment and counter-attack to great effect, earned them general recognition as worthy champions. After their near-misses in previous seasons, championship success allowed Revie’s side to adopt a more expansive style. And though the “dirty” tag remained and only one more League title would follow, their consistency and organisation provided a blueprint that other less gifted teams tried to copy, Arsenal among them.

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