Search: ' Kendal'

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

My life from left field
by Kevin Sheedy
SportMedia, £14.99
Reviewed by Mark O’Brien
From WSC 332 October 2014

Buy this book

Paul McGrath and Tony Cascarino’s autobiographies are renowned as two of the most caustic and revealing footballing books in recent times. Their former Republic of Ireland international team-mate Kevin Sheedy has written his life story now but anyone expecting soul searching in the same vein as Back From The Brink or Full Time is likely to be disappointed.

Sheedy’s story is told in a fashion that could most politely be described as “breezy”. From a youngster at Hereford to a bit-part player at Liverpool before becoming a key part in the all-conquering Everton side of the mid-1980s – then rounding off his playing career at Newcastle United and Blackpool – it’s all dealt with in the same cheery, almost 
matter-of-fact fashion.

It’s quite an old-school approach, even throwing in some “any other business” chapters near the end, where Sheedy gives his opinions on the perils of social media facing today’s young players and picks a best XI from his former Everton and Ireland team-mates. Among that throwaway page-filler then it’s a shock to come across a section which deals with his recent treatment for bowel cancer. A more modern style might have made that the touchstone for the whole book, reflecting on his career in the light of the grave news of his illness, but maintaining the light-hearted tone Sheedy concentrates instead on a nurse pulling back the sheets following his operation and declaring: “Oh my god, they’ve cut your cock off!”

He comes across as a thoroughly nice fella then, but it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. While Evertonians have probably read just about everything it’s possible to know about Rotterdam and the League wins under Howard Kendall, Sheedy was privy to the break-up of that great side and the start of the club’s decline and it would have been illuminating to know more about that process. He was in fact part of an infamous incident that is seen as emblematic of the chaos that reigned at Goodison during Kendall’s second spell in charge, when he had a fight with Martin Keown in a Chinese restaurant. He brushes it aside though, blaming his behaviour on the fact that he was unaware that the players had been buying him glasses of wine when normally he only drank it with soda. Seems plausible.

He tells his own collection of Jack Charlton anecdotes too – the Ireland manager left him out of a squad altogether for a match and then added insult to injury by trying to send him on as a sub – and the Italia 90 section is probably the best bit of the book.

The title, by the way, refers to an incident at Goodison in March 1985. Sheedy lashed a free-kick past Ipswich’s Paul Cooper and into the top-right corner. When ordered to be retaken he simply placed it in the top left. So good he did it twice. Unfortunately though, once is more than enough when it comes to reading his book.

Buy this book

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

Buy this book

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.

Buy this book

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

Buy this book

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.

Buy this book

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

Buy this book

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.

Buy this book