Search: 'Jimmy Case'

Great Britons who took the game to the world
by Keith Baker
Pitch Publishing, £12.99
Reviewed by Paul Brown
From WSC 341 July 2015

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Britain did not invent football, as Sepp Blatter would no doubt remind us, but it did knock it into shape, drawing up rules, forming clubs, organising competitions and sending the association version out into the world. British migrants, travelling with Laws of the Game pamphlets and deflated leather casers in their suitcases, became football missionaries, teaching and inspiring new converts, and sowing the seeds for what would become an international obsession.

In Fathers Of Football, Keith Baker profiles several of these pioneers of the world game, many of whom remain relatively unknown in their home country. Take James Spensley, who left Britain in 1896 to work for an insurance company in Genoa. Today, Spensley has an Italian park, street and junior football tournament named in his honour. His great contribution to football in Italy began when he persuaded the expat Genoa Cricket and Athletic Club to take up the association game (and to admit non-British members).

Spensley became the club’s goalkeeper, captain and de facto manager, leading Genoa to six Italian championships between 1898 and 1904. Their success saw the club renamed the Genoa Cricket and Football Club – a name they retain today. The influence of British pioneers can be seen in the Anglicised names of several international football clubs: Genoa rather than Genova; Milan rather than Milano; Athletic rather than Atlético.

Some of the individuals profiled here may already be familiar to football readers. Charles Miller is popularly regarded as the father of football in Brazil, and was the subject of various colour pieces during last summer’s World Cup. Alexander Hutton is similarly regarded in Argentina. Meanwhile Jimmy Hogan’s incredibly influential contribution to the development of football in Austria and Hungary (via the Netherlands, Switzerland, France and Germany) is well documented, although it remains a remarkable story.

More obscure are the Charnock brothers, Clement and Harry, who do not have so much as a Wikipedia entry between them, despite the role they played in the development of football in Russia. The brothers, from Lancashire, travelled to Moscow around 1890 to manage textile factories. Both men encouraged their employees to take up football and inspired the formation of several clubs, despite state opposition to organised activities involving workers. Harry’s OKS (Orekhovo Sports Club) were a founding member of the Moscow League, and won five consecutive championships between 1910 and 1914, playing in front of crowds of around 15,000. However, after the Revolution in 1917, OKS were placed under the control of the Cheka – a forerunner of the KGB. The club were renamed Dynamo Moscow, and the Charnocks were expunged from their history. They deserve to be better remembered.

Baker makes it clear that his “Great Britons” were not solely responsible for the spread of association football around the world, and he places the growth of the game into wider historical and social context. But his concise and informative book pays tribute to their individual achievements, and provides an illuminating record of their contributions to the world game.

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The autobiography of Jimmy Case
by Jimmy Case
John Blake, £18.99
Reviewed by Seb Patrick
From WSC 337 March 2015

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If things had worked out differently, Hard Case could have been the first footballer’s autobiography to be crowdfunded. Jimmy Case and his ghostwriter Andrew Smart initially sought to get the book printed via online publisher Unbound, a site on which authors solicit advance orders for titles, last year but Case’s memoir didn’t attract enough pledges. Undaunted, they’ve instead managed to find a traditional publisher to take it on – but unfortunately, this change in approach doesn’t seem to have affected the content of the book, which feels badly in need of a stronger editor’s hand.

What becomes immediately apparent from its disjointed, conversational style is that Hard Case is essentially a transcription of Case talking about his career and sharing anecdotes. An opening chapter centred on his Wembley experiences at both Liverpool and Brighton suggests that these thoughts have been grouped together in some kind of thematic order; but from then on it’s a roughly chronological run through his playing career, which nevertheless takes in several diversions forwards or backwards whenever the mood strikes him to refer to something elsewhere.

It’s clear that making itself an accessible read is one of Hard Case’s foremost aims – it’s a welcoming book, from its fairly large print size to its apparent desire to directly replicate the experience of hearing Case reminisce in person. But this style lends itself to repetitiveness very quickly, and by the time you’ve read him guess at having played “thirty-seven games” for the reserves in a particular season only ten pages or so after having already stated that same figure as precise fact, you begin to yearn for Smart to start interfering in the narrative a bit more decisively.

Case himself is difficult not to warm to, especially when telling the Daily Mail’s Jeff Powell directly to his face that he hates him, or responding to a Kenny Sansom taunt about his lack of England caps with the reply “Sorry, I thought you said European Cups”. In his time at Liverpool he was the archetypal example of a hard-working, tough-but-honest 1970s pro and his career is littered with distinctive quirks, from being allowed to continue his apprenticeship as an electrician after signing for Liverpool (essentially becoming a semi-pro player for two years) to being a contemporary of Tommy Smith and Ian Callaghan who was somehow still playing in the Football League as late as 1995.

Yet while there’s much about Case’s career that was unique to him, there are also a good number of his stories – especially on the pitch – that are on the somewhat generic or predictable side. He even manages to squeeze in perhaps one of the most forgettable Bill Shankly stories yet recounted in an autobiography. It’s a shame that so many of these take up space that could have better been spent exploring his life outside football a bit more.

Instead, once the tale of his later years on the south coast is concluded, Case switches to a chapter in which he discusses the present-day Liverpool side’s prospects with an optimism born out of the events of the 2013-14 season. It’s an ill-advised sojourn that has the effect of severely dating Hard Case even before it’s reached shelves; and it’s symptomatic of a book that, for all its good intentions and occasionally lively source material, is sorely in need of knocking into better literary shape.

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Jon Spurling goes back to Boxing Day 1963, when 66 goals were scored in the First Division

As Christmas 1963 approached, weathermen warned a shivering nation to expect a recurrence of what had happened 12 months previously. The winter of 1962 was the worst since the big freeze of 1946, when the snow began on Boxing Day and wiped out football for virtually the next two and a half months. The occasional game was played here and there, but most were played out in the minds of the newly created Pools Panel, who met each weekend in a secret London location and guessed what each result might have been.

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Al Needham takes great delight in London’s footballing failure

Sometimes it comes early in the spring, with the unfurling of fresh leaves. Sometimes it comes as late as the very cusp of summer, while the musk of the first barbecues still hangs in the air. Every year you doubt that it will come at all, and every year, without fail, it does. It’s called Nottingham 2 London 0 Day, and it happens the day after the last London club has inevitably slunk out of the Champions League.

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Gavin Barber enjoyed seeing his son fulfil a childhood dream (for both of them)

Travelling on the Space Shuttle, appearing on Top of the Pops with my own synth band, playing for Ipswich: these were all ambitions that I had at various points during my childhood. Jimmy Savile heartlessly ignored requests to arrange the first two, and my lack of anything resembling football talent soon ruled out the latter. Which left me with one tantalisingly achievable alternative – to be the Ipswich mascot.

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