Search: ' Mark Stein'

Blue Thunder
The Jock Wallace story
by Jeff Holmes
Pitch Publishing, £17.99

Big Jock
The real Jock Wallace  
by David Leggat
Black & White, £9.99

Reviewed by Ian Plenderleith
From WSC 347 January 2016

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Jock Wallace was the manager of Rangers from 1972 to 1978, and is revered at Ibrox for leading the club to two trebles that ended a decade of dominance by Jock Stein’s Celtic. In the 1980s he returned for a second, less successful, spell at the club. He is also famous for making his players run endlessly up and down the sands of Gullane, a costal town east of Edinburgh.

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by Arild Stavrum
Freight Books, £14.99
Reviewed by Mark Sanderson
From WSC 343 September 2015

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Perhaps the biggest criticism of ex-footballers working in the media today is that they don’t provide nearly enough insight into what life as a professional footballer is really like. If former Norway and Aberdeen striker Arild Stavrum’s football crime novel is anything to go by then that’s just as well.

Having played for eight clubs in several different countries, as well as working as a manager over a five-year period, Stavrum can offer a telling insight into the various goings on when a player moves clubs. In the book’s case those details tend to involve vast amounts of corruption.

Stavrum’s writing career began while still a player in his early 20s when the local paper asked him to write a column. This, his second novel, but his first to be printed in English, is based upon the murder of the most powerful man in Norwegian football: agent Arild Golden – a man whose ruthless pragmatism compels him to use any means to justify his desired ends. Golden has no moral objection to exploiting teenage African footballers and manipulating his way to earning hugely disproportionate margins on the player sales he negotiates.

Although he spent a few seasons at Pittodrie at the turn of the century, Stavrum’s critique is very clearly aimed at his home country, although the themes of ambition, greed, corruption and jealousy are universal. The murder has already happened as the book begins. Golden’s corrupt ways are revealed in a series of flashbacks, well demonstrated in his dealings with (a clearly fictitious) Everton chairman James Stirling, who he refers to privately as “Mr Gastric Bypass”. The agent’s hand in a particular transfer is strengthened considerably by incriminating photographs he has of Stirling with several Ukrainian women who turn out to be under-age. Golden blackmails Stirling to buy a certain player, as well as paying the full fee to a private bank account in Guernsey.

The plot brings together a young TV sports reporter and a recently retired former Ajax player,  Steinar Brunsvik, who try to solve the case. The reason for Brunsvik’s retirement is the source of his motivation to uncover the killer. In the hands of a lesser writer this may have sounded as far-fetched as Brunsvik’s new career as a lawyer, but the characters are so well sketched out, and the dialogue so convincing, you put the book down trying to remember where you saw him play.

Stavrum excels in creating an environment highlighting the leading characters’ growing paranoia, but he doesn’t hang about: the book moves in rapid-fire chapters that manage to address homophobia, racially divided changing rooms, doping, the culture of celebrity, and what it is to be a single parent, in an insightful way. The book is brought to a satisfying conclusion; the only negative aspect is that it might trigger a trend for publishers to go looking for ex-footballers to become novelists. Stavrum has earned the right to be described as the latter and the book deserves a wide readership.

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My autobiography
by Stevie Chalmers with Graham McColl
Headline, £19.99
Reviewed by Mark Poole
From WSC 314 April 2013

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Stevie Chalmers scored the winning goal in the 1967 European Cup final. It’s still the most important goal in Celtic’s history: the goal that liberated club football’s greatest prize from its Spanish-Italian-Portuguese stranglehold for the first time and that inspired Bill Shankly to call Jock Stein immortal.

Chalmers scored 230 other goals for Celtic – including the last hat-trick in an Old Firm derby – but his career has come to be defined solely by his tap-in (team-mate Bertie Auld’s words) against Inter in Lisbon. His autobiography does nothing to change that. The middle two chapters, one for each half of that final, are where the book comes alive and Chalmers’s detailed perspective of the match is compelling reading for Celtic fans.

There are other intriguing aspects to his life and career: he almost died from tuberculous meningitis when he was 20, he only played five times for Scotland (in spite of his clear talent and scoring against Brazil) and he had a long career at the club he supported but an uneasy relationship with its most successful manager.
His perspective on Stein is interesting but no more so than many others and, perhaps unsurprisingly for a renowned gentleman, Chalmers seems reluctant to complain directly about being overlooked or played out of position.

A lot remains unsaid, leaving readers to infer much of the story. Like many of his contemporaries, Chalmers repeatedly insists that he would always rather do what was best for the team than for himself. However, it’s clear that some managers’ and selectors’ tactics and decisions (including Stein’s) still rankle with him over 40 years later, particularly his omission from the Scotland team that beat England at Wembley in 1967.

It’s a melancholy experience to intrude upon such a successful player’s feelings of loss. Stein was a notoriously hard man to read – his players’ feelings were rarely allowed to intrude on the business of winning matches – but his choices as a manager made it clear how much he valued Chalmers. The reader is left to wonder if Chalmers realises this and also if he would seem more content now if he’d made more of a fuss back then. This glimpse into a 1960s footballer’s mind is one of the more interesting aspects of the book.

The Winning Touch could have provided more of an insight into what it was like to experience Chalmers’s terrible illness, and to recover so remarkably from it. This presence of detail but absence of insight is symptomatic of other parts of the book, perhaps evidence of the adage that consummate professionals often produce mostly pedestrian autobiographies and typical of the emotional restraint of mid-century Scotsmen.

In his playing days Chalmers made the most of the chances that came his way, so it’s surprising that parts of his autobiography seem like a missed opportunity. Although it is worth reading, at least for the insight into the day when he and ten other men from the edge of the football world shocked the game’s aristocracy.

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The long search for truth by the Hillsborough campaigners has been vindicated but, as Rob Hughes writers, time will tell whether they now get the justice they deserve

And so the wait is over. On September 12, some 23 years on, previously unseen government and police documents, in tandem with the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s report into the tragedy, were finally released to the public. The results were damning. As the families of the victims had insisted all along, Liverpool fans were found to be blameless for what happened on that horrifying afternoon in April 1989.

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The story of English football’s forgotten tribe
by Anthony Clavane
Quercus, £17.99
Reviewed by Mike Ticher
From WSC 310 December 2012

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After Jack Ruby shot JFK’s killer Lee Harvey Oswald, he said he’d done it “to show the world Jews have guts”. Almost no one ran with that implausible claim, except the great Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce, who half-joked that “even the shot was Jewish – the way he held the gun”.

Anthony Clavane’s remarkable history of Jews in English football reminded me of Bruce, in that few Gentiles would think of Brian Glanville, David Pleat or David Dein as having had a “Jewish” influence on football, any more than of Ruby primarily as a Jewish assassin. That indifference, or even ignorance, is clearly a good thing if it means anti-Semitism has had little bearing on how such people have been judged (a big if, in Clavane’s view). But seeing them through a specifically Jewish lens is a fascinating and at times confronting experience.

Informed by a commanding grasp of English Jewry’s identity struggle since the great migrations, Clavane argues that football has been a key way for Jews to “become English” and be accepted. The rise of Lord Triesman and David Bernstein in the FA suggests the journey is all but complete.

Clavane’s book is packed with wonderful portraits and sharp insights into Manchester City, Leeds, Tottenham and Arsenal, among others. His research is outstanding, the complexity of his argument deftly handled and his snapshots unforgettable: the 1960s Orient directors Harry Zussman, Bernard Delfont and Leslie Grade handing players cash, tickets to the Royal Variety Performance and their own expensive clothes (defender Malcolm Lucas saved Grade’s reversible lemon/light blue cardigan “for important dos”); Manny Cussins slipping away to work in the local branch of his furniture chain on away trips with Leeds; Pleat’s Yiddish-speaking mother greeting him after every defeat with the words “So, where was the goalkeeper?”.

The author sees the Jews who have flourished in football typically as outsiders who brought “a new vision, a fresh slant” – from Willy Meisl’s 1956 polemical book Soccer Revolution, through Glanville’s groundbreaking journalism to Edward Freedman’s commercial revolution at Tottenham and Manchester United. In this light the Premier League looks startlingly like an all-Jewish production, with Irving Scholar and Dein in the lead and strong supporting roles from Alan Sugar, Alex Fynn and even, inadvertently, Lord Justice Taylor.

At times Clavane is so eager to welcome the growing influence of such “modernisers” that he disregards the wider consequences of their actions. Has the FA’s reputation improved since Jews broke open its cosy elite? Barely. Should we celebrate the influence of Robert Maxwell (mentioned only in passing) or regard the power of Roman Abramovich or Pini Zahavi as a triumph over anti-Semitism?

It’s hard to gauge how fierce that prejudice was, particularly off the field. Anti-Semitism, particularly the polite British variant, often goes unspoken and unwritten and is all the more insidious for that. Clavane often refers to unsourced “mutterings” and “references to a so-called kosher nostra” but direct evidence is sketchy.

He quotes the Burnley chairman Bob Lord, at a Variety Club function in 1974, saying: “We have to stand up against a move to get soccer on the cheap by the Jews who run television.” I’m not sure if that quite amounts to Clavane’s conclusion that “the game’s traditionalists insisted it would be a tragedy if the Football League sold out to a race that was disproportionately represented in the entertainment business”. Lord was a traditionalist in some ways but hardly a typical one – although it’s equally arguable he was the only one willing to say what others thought.

On the field anti-Semitic sentiments were much clearer, though often aimed at general targets (Tottenham above all) as much as the small number of Jewish players. Some of the best material in the book deals with the refusal to accept insults by the working-class boxing and football clan around the Lazarus family, including Barry Silkman and Orient’s Bobby Fisher. Silkman says of his relative Mark Lazarus, scorer for QPR in the 1967 League Cup final: “Lovely fella, didn’t go looking for trouble, but if someone called him a Jew they’d be horizontal.”

Clavane suggests interesting reasons for Tottenham’s association with Jews – including the quirks of London’s transport network and the inward-looking nature of the “natural” East End club, West Ham – although the claim that one-third of their fans in the 1930s were Jewish seems high. He is surely right that the carefree abuse of Tottenham as “yids” was fuelled by Warren Mitchell (grandson of Russian Jews) as Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part.

There is a lot to debate here but the depth and warmth of Clavane’s work is a giant contribution to a subject long overdue proper attention.

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