Search: 'David Pleat'

21 years with Clough and Taylor
by Maurice Edwards
DB Publishing, £16.99
Reviewed by Mark Rowe
From WSC 279 May 2010

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Peter Taylor and Brian Clough – the author, their long-time scout, puts them in that order – were an East Midlands phenomenon. The region’s publishers love this story for its guaranteed readership; few local sports reporters of that era have not published memoirs. Maurice Edwards learned scouting from Taylor, when he was starting as a manager at Burton Albion, so long ago that David Pleat was a teenager.

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In a game between fellow Championship strugglers, Simon Hart watches the away side continue their poor travelling form, while a debut for the home manager and a hard-fought win sees optimism bloom in Yorkshire 

“Normally you’d get 18 to 19,000 here for a Peterborough game but we’re expecting 24 today – a couple of wins on the bounce, a new manager, there’s a feelgood effect.”

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Csaba Abrahall analyses part of our regular football coverage that often goes unnoticed – the subtitles

Losing the Champions League final was obviously a disappointment for Sir Alex Ferguson. Even so, viewers of the teletext subtitles accompanying ITV’s broadcast may have been surprised to learn that it represented his “most painful urine defeat”. Mistakes such as this are not uncommon in the subtitling of live football, not because it is the work of illiterate fools with no football knowledge, but because real-time subtitling is fiendishly difficult.

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Dear WSC
I thoroughly enjoyed your blow-by-blow review of Euro 2008, noting with some reassurance that I’m not the only one driven to distraction by the so-called expert input of BBC and ITV pundits. However your assessment of the Holland-Italy game surprised me somewhat. The furious and defiant ignorance of the laws of the game displayed by Clive Tyldesley and David Pleat with respect to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s goal were surely worthy of comment, indeed arguably the most damning condemnation of their failure in their roles in providing insight and ­explanation. Instead, you bafflingly seem to support their case and argue, in effect, that an official ought to base an offside call on whether he believes a player is faking an injury or not. Actually he’d already made that call by not stopping the game to permit treatment to the Italian defender in question, who had in effect left the field without permission and thus had to be playing the Dutch striker onside. One shudders to imagine the Machiavellian tricks that some domestic managers would concoct were it possible to play an opponent offside by tumbling off the pitch in a writhing heap. Next you’ll be condemning cliched and inappropriate English attitudes to the German team alongside an anglicised spelling of “dummkopf”…
Matt Rowson, Watford

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With no home nation to cheer on, we could have been spared the usual jingoism. But to Taylor Parkes's fury, the BBC and especially ITV missed no opportunity to scrape a reference to good old Blighty

As the most promising international tournament for years got under way, the pundits tried to look on the bright side. “When your own teams are in it,” suggested Andy Townsend, “you don’t really watch the other teams.” Well, anyone who remembers the TV coverage of the last World Cup can vouch for that. So did this mean England’s absence from Euro 2008 would spare us that obsessive Anglocentricism which makes international football on British TV so uniquely aggravating, such an insult to the intelligence (not to mention the Scots, Irish and Welsh)? Hardly. It just meant our patriotic pundits had to try a little harder.

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