by Philip Kerr
Head of Zeus, £7.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 348 February 2016
Fiction with a sporting setting is notoriously variable in quality. Binary win-lose outcomes reduce the scope for ambiguity and authors may either be poor writers or under-informed. Philip Kerr sidesteps all of these traps with ease. His fictional club, London City, provides the context for crime rather than a narrative end in itself.
This has got to be the funniest match highlight of yesterday!! @LaticsOfficial #wafc #leonbarnett pic.twitter.com/0nktrJgyAV
— Lesley (@Eclipse12002) October 11, 2015
by Tony Cottee
Philip Evans Media, £14.99
Reviewed by Mark Segal
From WSC 317 July 2013
Back in the day when you could phone footballers out of the blue for an interview, Tony Cottee was one of the few who didn’t hang up immediately or pretend they were busy and then turn their phone off at the time you were asked to phone back. Once he even gave me his home number. This, added to the fact he was a West Ham hero of mine, made him one of football’s nice guys but this side of his personality is sadly lacking in The Inside Story.
His second autobiography, the story begins as Cottee is winding down his career. A return to West Ham and a League Cup winner’s medal at Wembley with Leicester are the high points as he slowly slips down the leagues, ending up as player-manager at Barnet where it all went horribly wrong.
Like any centre-forward you’ve ever met or played with, Cottee is keen to let you know his scoring record but there seems little feeling behind the numbers. In fact the end of his career is not the real reason for the book, it’s the thing he needs to get out of the way before the main part – his attempt, and ultimate failure, to become West Ham chairman.
It was on the drive home from the 2004 play-off final defeat to Crystal Palace in Cardiff that Cottee decided to act, and the reader is taken through his attempts to put together a consortium to oust hated chairman Terry Brown from Upton Park. At first it’s a shambles, as he turns up to meetings without any kind of business plan, but slowly it begins to come together and each meeting, phone call and proposal is faithfully documented as the book becomes bogged down.
After realising he doesn’t have the money among West Ham supporters he spreads his net further and begins talking to a group of Icelandic bankers who eventually go it alone, buy the club and almost run it into the ground. Cottee is desperate for the reader to understand the time and effort he put into trying to save “his” club, which is why the progress of his consortium is documented in such detail. But in doing this he only glosses over the other areas of his life which were clearly suffering. He admits part of the reason his marriage failed was because of the time he dedicated to his consortium.
In a chapter about his work for Sky’s Soccer Saturday, Cottee claims his live reports are the next best thing to playing and perhaps it’s this transition from player to ex-player which could have been explored more. Many former pros talk about missing the buzz of the dressing room and maybe it’s even more acute for prolific strikers who are used to the adulation which comes with scoring goals. Cottee’s tireless work in trying to oust Brown could be a way of replacing this buzz, but it’s a shame the mechanics of his takeover are more in evidence than the human story.
The Keith Alexander story
by Rob Bradley
Vertical Editions, £14.99
Reviewed by Ian Plenderleith
From WSC 312 February 2013
With Lincoln City perpetually languishing around the nether regions of the Conference, it’s tempting for wistful fans to recall more positive times at the club. These lie just a handful of years back when the Imps became a football trivia question for making the League Two play-offs five seasons in a row but failing to get promoted. This now seems like a bronzened era of relative glory.
When the late Keith Alexander began his second spell as manager at Sincil Bank in 2002, the crowds were as low and the money was as scarce as they’ve been throughout the past 30 years. But at least the team, as Alexander promised, would be “there or thereabouts” come the season’s end. Trawling the non-League bargain bins for big, tough lads who would do the proverbial job, the manager moulded Lincoln into a team that would not only survive but get results.
Lincoln’s inversion of tiki-taka won them few friends beyond the county boundaries but Alexander had already learned from his first year in charge at Lincoln in 1993 that playing neat football in England’s fourth tier garners faint praise, while losing you both games and your job. Sacked after just 12 months, the Football League’s first black manager dropped down to Ilkeston Town to relearn the basics of leadership. He returned to Lincoln as a man who knew how to get the best out of limited performers.
As a player, Alexander was a journeyman non-League striker who had the knack of making friends wherever he went, before moving on to try his luck somewhere else. He was a benevolent bender of rules, being fined by Barnet for turning out for a Sunday league team in Lincoln when he should have been resting and forging his birth certificate by two years at the age of 31 in order to secure a contract with Grimsby Town, his belated breakthrough as a player at League level.
The harshest criticism you will find of Alexander in this book is that he wasn’t much good in the air and that he could be tough with his players, as you would expect with any decent manager. You will read what you likely know – that he was a hard-working, genuine, funny and caring man who rarely forgot a name or a face and who would go out of his way to talk to fans and journalists without ever making them feel like it was an imposition.
Like its subject, this book is difficult to criticise. It’s written by another fine human being, Rob Bradley, the former Lincoln chairman who famously remortgaged his house to help save the club. It’s no great investigative work but it is a thorough and warmly told story with a sprinkling of wonderful anecdotes, such as the time when, playing for Cliftonville, Alexander smiled and blew kisses at bellicose Glentoran fans chanting racist abuse.
That kind of reaction is one of the reasons why family, friends, fans and fellow players universally remember a great bloke who, in the words of ex-Lincoln defender Ben Futcher, “was the only manager in football who could pull you into his office, tell you you’re not playing, and you came out with a smile on your face”.
Macclesfield were in financial disarray when they entered the Football League, but they still managed to win a second consecutive promotion, writes Michael Whalley Just getting to the starting line was an achievement. One week before their first season in the Football League began, Macclesfield Town received a High Court writ from the creditors of their late chairman’s business demanding more than £500,000. This is not generally how promotion seasons begin. Yet nine months later, Macc went up from Division Three at the first attempt. As cheesy as it might sound now, there were times during the 1997-98 season when it seemed as if the motto on Efe Sodje’s bandana – “Against All Odds” – could have applied to the club.