Search: 'Alex Totten'

“Competitions” such as the International Champions Cup miss the point of pre-season games

8 August ~ Last week I went to a football match in which nothing was won or lost, the pace was slow and the flow stilted by 13 substitutions. I’ve seen Burnley before. I’ve watched Rangers for decades. And I’ve attended more friendlies than most fans would think advisable in one lifetime. But when the post denied Burnley the chance to go 3-0 up after just 23 minutes I realised it could become the biggest defeat I’d ever seen my team suffer and that, consequently, I cared deeply about this match.

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Modern attendances are huge but lack the spectacular feeling of the past

20 June ~ With Euro 2016 nearly halfway though and the Champions League, FA and Scottish Cup finals barely behind us, it feels like the entire planet wants to attend a football match. Huge, packed venues dominate the media. And all I do is rue the fact I’ve never been in a six-figure crowd and that no ground in Europe can currently hold one.

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The Alex Totten story
by Alex Totten with 
Jeff Holmes
Pitch Publshing, £18.99
Reviewed by Gavin Saxton
From WSC 344 October 2015

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A book whose cover proudly boasts forewords by both “Sir Alex Ferguson and Walter Smith OBE” does not inspire a huge amount of enthusiasm, but this ghost-written autobiography of journeyman Scottish manager Alex Totten is, at least intermittently, more interesting than I might have given it credit for. Ferguson and Smith may have been among the most famous and successful of the remarkable crop of managers that came out of the tenements of Scotland’s post-war years, but below them were a whole battalion of irascible, gruff-voiced men who dominated the game while I was growing up. Among this next rank, Totten was one of the more successful.

His playing career was modest – as a youngster in the early 1960s he had been on the books at Bill Shankly’s Liverpool but, having failed to make the first team there, he returned to Scotland. There he enjoyed a worthy enough career with, among others, Dundee and Dunfermline, where he played alongside Ferguson, of whom he speaks well. Indeed he speaks well of pretty much everyone, especially at this stage of his career, and projects an affability as a man who is not always easy to reconcile with memories of the perpetually furious manager we used to see arguing with referees on Sportscene. This might just reflect journalistic platitudes, or a degree of self-editing, but by and large he persuaded me that underneath the hard-nosed bluster, his likeability is genuine.

Perhaps managerial success depends in part on being able to produce this disconnect, to be able to separate the personal from the professional in that fashion. And sure enough, on being given his first management job, at Alloa at the age of 34, the first cross words appear. An unfortunate young man called Colin McIntosh becomes the first target if his ire, having been deemed not to have put in sufficient effort during a defeat by Forfar. Within a couple of pages he’s confessing to having thrown a pie at a referee in the tunnel after the match – for which he escaped punishment because, as at Old Trafford in latter years, the perpetrator remained unknown. Totten claims, rather unconvincingly, that it was meant in jest. (“I wanted him to enjoy the pie.”)

After a brief first spell at Falkirk, Totten became assistant to Jock Wallace at Rangers. As he tells it, he was being groomed to be the next manager, but then the Graeme Souness revolution happened, and Totten followed Wallace out. Unsurprisingly he believes they could have done much more had he been given Souness’s funds, but instead he went on to be better known for subsequent creditable spells at St Johnstone, Kilmarnock and Falkirk. During his time at the Saints, a touchline barney with Walter Smith resulted in ejection from the ground and a conviction for breach of the peace (Smith’s own charge was found not proven). He continues to protest his innocence.

Totten’s book reflects the man: it’s not a deep analysis of the problems of the game, nor is it a character study in self-doubt. But despite everything, I mostly warmed to him.

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How the Arsenal became l’Arsenal
by Fred Atkins
GCR Books, £18.99
Reviewed by Damian Hall
From WSC 313 March 2013

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There can’t be many football clubs that have a stronger connection to a foreign country than Arsenal do with France. Since Arsène Wenger took over, 23 French footballers have played for the Gunners – often in teams without an Englishman. Between September 10, 1996 and November 1, 2011 the club played only two competitive fixtures without a Frenchman in the team, both of which were experimental line-ups for relatively meaningless fixtures (and one included an unused French sub).

There’s a story to be told here and Fred Atkins is in a good position to tell it, having lived in France and studied at university in Strasbourg, the city where Wenger grew up and gained his oft-mentioned 
economics degree.

The book is logically divided into a chapter for each player and lengths wisely vary – you wouldn’t expect Patrick Vieira to get the same amount of coverage as Gilles Sunu. There’s a foreword by Gilles Grimandi, in which he self-deprecatingly confesses his one Arsenal goal was a mishit cross, but unfortunately there are no fresh interviews. Though tracking down all 23 men would have been a huge job, it means there’s little new here about the players’ times at Arsenal, bar occasional quotes translated from interviews with the French press.

The book’s interest comes largely from the players’ pre-Arsenal careers, such as the comical litany of bureaucratic errors by French football officials, one of which meant William Gallas couldn’t play first-team football for half a season at Marseille. No wonder his tantrums started long before his move to Arsenal. Many chapters are reminders that players’ foibles – Abou Diaby’s injuries, Mathieu Flamini’s perceived disloyalty – were there before they moved across the Channel. Some may enjoy the news that, while playing for Lorient against Bordeaux, Laurent Koscielny was once sent off for fouling future team-mate Marouane Chamakh and the obvious quips it encourages.

The Emmanuel Petit chapter stands out. His life has not been that of the average footballer: he’s struggled to deal with the death of his brother, depression, the USA 94 qualification failure (he played left-back in the defeat to Bulgaria) and periods of debauchery. Atkins also claims Petit drank and smoked throughout France 98. Perhaps more startlingly, after joining Barcelona, manager Lorenzo Serra Ferrer asked him what position he played. Petit almost joined Manchester United instead of Chelsea – and wishes he had.

However, Atkins’s tone is unashamedly parochial. There are puerile digs at Alex Ferguson, a tedious and paranoid rant about refereeing decisions and, apparently, Jacques Santini’s judgment should be questioned simply because he managed Tottenham, while crass speculation on Thierry Henry’s marriage breakdown belongs to the worst of the tabloid press.

Some bigger questions, too, go begging. Has Wenger systematically favoured French players over English players? If so, why? Should Le Prof still be recruiting heavily from Ligue 1 when the French national team are no longer pre-eminent – and when Alan Pardew seems better at it. And how has Wenger’s English seemingly got worse, “a little bit”, over the years?

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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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