Search: 'Peterborough'

The AFC Wimbledon story
by Niall Couper
Cherry Red Books, £14.99
Reviewed by Andy Brassell
From WSC 313 March 2013

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Author Niall Couper wrote in the Independent that his “stomach turned over” when AFC Wimbledon were drawn against Milton Keynes in the FA Cup second round this season. Nevertheless, it made his latest work all the more germane. This Is Our Time is Couper’s second book on Wimbledon, following 2003’s The Spirit Of Wimbledon which traced the area’s footballing lineage from 1922 through to the formation of AFC Wimbledon in 2002. You don’t necessarily need to have read that to grasp the thread of events for the sequel, though the opening pages of the book give a potted history of the club’s evolution from the 19th century to the brink of the Milton Keynes move.

The nuts and bolts of the story are well known to most regular football fans, from the three-man appeal commission that ratified the Milton Keynes move in late May 2002 to the open trials on Wimbledon Common that helped to find players for the first AFC Wimbledon team. Yet the book is plugging a significant gap – not just because of the detail contained in its 608 pages. The problem with any fan-based discourse surrounding AFC Wimbledon since their formation has been obvious. How do you establish an anti-establishment view when the fans themselves are that establishment?

There’s no whitewashing of opinion here (as anti-Milton Keynes voices have often been accused of doing) or even an author’s “this is how it happened” party line. Instead, Couper hands over the right to be heard to the people, with the story told by a succession of talking heads, from players and managers to board members, trust volunteers and those who pay at the turnstiles each week.

What emerges is not one linear truth but several versions of it, an account of the growing pains inherent in a protest movement becoming a semi-professional (and later professional) football club. So we hear about the dismissal of the club’s first manager, Terry Eames, through board members who became sick of him and fans who felt as if the club sold out “one of us”. There’s also the tale of how the club’s very ethos was questioned, with businessman Darragh MacAnthony’s attempt to buy the club out in 2006 before he assumed control of Peterborough United. Recently fired boss Terry Brown even offers a window into his own downfall, admitting he thought he may have “made a mistake” in signing defender Callum McNaughton from West Ham.

The format does occasionally spill over the line from thorough into exhaustive, such as in the section on reaction to the Conference play-off final win when it feels as if half the game’s attendees are canvassed for opinion. Yet This Is Our Time is a commendable, thorough and honest piece of work. Even if history is told by the winners, there’s nothing to say they can’t be objective and that’s what Couper does so well here.

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Calls for a trial of new safe standing technology in the top two tiers are slowly starting to gather political support, Tom Hocking writes

The Safe Standing Roadshow has spent the last year showing fans and officials around the country how standing could work in the England’s top two divisions. On December 11, 2012 it arrived in Parliament. The event, held in conjunction with the Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF) and sponsored by Roger Godsiff MP, took the case for safe standing to the Attlee Suite of Portcullis House, across the road from Big Ben.

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Sex, booze and sendings off: The life of Britain’s wildest footballer
by Roy McDonough with Bernie Friend
Vision Sports, £12.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 309 November 2012

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The football hard man is still a familiar figure, even if he is receding increasingly quickly into the game’s recent past. Popular culture tends to remember those who played at the highest level, where violent tackles and unsavoury moustaches were brought to a national television audience. For every Graeme Souness or Tommy Smith there were less well-known contemporaries in the the lower leagues. One such player was Roy McDonough, who accumulated a British record 22 early baths.

Apparently assembled from a bin of spare “Soccer’s Hard Men” tropes (the mullet and tache, the drinking and womanising, the failed marriage, the distant father he’s desperate to impress) McDonough is such an unrelenting stereotype that the obligatory career photos have presumably been included to reassure readers that they are not the victims of an elaborate spoof. Driven by limitless quantities of self-belief and an almost psychotic relish for physical confrontation, McDonough played just two first-team games during unhappy spells as a centre-forward at Aston Villa, Birmingham City and Chelsea. At the age of 22 he claims to have made a conscious decision to cruise through lower-league football as a way of funding his fondness for nightclubs.

A man who once promised a horrified physio that he would cut down to “just” 70 pints a week should be heading for a spectacular fall but it is the tragic suicide of Colchester team-mate John Lyons that, briefly, throws the boozing and one-night stands into stark relief. Alcohol permeates almost every page of this book but alcoholism is mentioned only once – when McDonough categorically rejects it as a description of his own drinking.

He is more honest in recounting the football side of his career, with team-mates, opponents, referees, supporters, managers and boardroom “suits” all subjected to withering assessments. There’s also a refreshing lack of dressing room omerta. It’s doubtful that Mark Kinsella will thank him for revealing a teenage fling with his landlady, though McDonough stops short of naming the team-mate who goaded Ian Holloway on the pitch by insulting his cancer-stricken wife.

He’s generous to those he respects too, without ever allowing it to affect his behaviour during a game. He idolises Southend boss Bobby Moore and when the manager gets wind of an unsettled score with Newport County’s Tony Pulis he pleads with McDonough not to let the team down. He is duly sent off after just seven minutes following a self-confessed attempt to decapitate the future Stoke manager.

Ghostwriter Bernie Friend has a great eye for period detail (there has surely never been a more evocatively named central-defensive partnership than Peterborough’s Neil Firm and Trevor Slack) and there are hilarious insights into some of the more eccentric characters of the era: Exeter boss Jim Iley’s fondness for games of hide and seek during training, for instance. In describing McDonough’s nocturnal activities the book occasionally slips into the kind of graphic detail that wouldn’t be out of place on the top shelf of a backstreet 1980s newsagent but this is still a fascinating voyage through a career described as “a violent trawl through the rough seas of the lower divisions”.

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When struggling to secure promotion to the Football League, Wigan attempted to join the Scottish pyramid. Owen Amos explains more

Wins may be scarce, but the Premier League fixture list offers consolation for Wigan Athletic: Manchester United one week, Liverpool the next. But if things had gone to plan in 1972, it could have been quite different: more like Stranraer one week, Stenhousemuir the next.

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League meetings between the two Hampshire clubs have been relatively rare but their derby matches are as keenly contested as any local rivalry in English football. James de Mellow reports

On April 29, 1939, as Portsmouth pulled off a surprise 4-1 FA Cup final win over Wolves at Wembley, only 4,000 Southampton fans showed up for a home league game on the same day, preferring to cheer on their neighbours while listening to the radio. When the trophy was brought back to the south coast, it was displayed for a short time at Southampton Guildhall and even paraded around The Dell for Saints fans to salute Pompey’s achievements. One wonders, then, what Hampshire’s pre-war football supporters would make of Operation Delphin, which the police deemed necessary to prevent trouble before and after the south-coast derby on December 18. As a condition of purchasing a ticket, all travelling Saints fans agreed to be bussed in a “bubble” under police escort between the two cities, while eight-foot-high barriers were erected north-east of Fratton Park in order to keep a minority of idiots from both sides coming into contact with each other.

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