Search: 'Pro Patria'

by Wilf McGuinness with Ivan Ponting
Know the Score, £17.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 265 March 2009 

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Roy Keane’s response to his recent managerial difficulties was to grow a patriarchal, piebald beard. At least he could shave it off after a few days. Wilf McGuinness’s hair began to fall out in clumps and turn white when he was “relieved of his duties” at Manchester United and all he could do was briefly sport a trimmed ladies’ wig until an overenthusiastic Greek goal celebration dislodged it. McGuinness could teach Keano a thing or two about stress. As he says in his introduction, football has given him some tremendous highs, but has also “shattered his world” on several occasions.

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A Clueless American Sportswriter Bumbles Through English Football
by Chuck Culpepper
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99
Reviewed by David Wangerin
From WSC 249 November 2007 

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The disaffected fan will readily identify with the first eight pages of Chuck Culpepper’s book, a catalogue of much that is wrong with American sport, which the Virginia-born expatriate claims left him afflicted with “Acute Sportswriter Malaise”, the product of “a 14-year career immersed in a vat of drivel, banality and corruption, especially drivel”. His conclusion – “sport sucks, but I’d hate to live without it” – could be a motto for the 21st century.

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While Lilian Thuram has made some notable left-wing gestures, one of his black predecessors in the France defence has made a sudden switch to the right. Andy Brassell reports

Basile Boli’s appointment as national secretary for ­co‑development with President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party has been on the cards for a while. It may seem surreal to those who remember the robust defender scoring the winner in Marseille’s 1993 Champions League final win over Milan, getting away with headbutting Stuart Pearce during Euro 92, or indeed helping his mate Chris Waddle reprise his recording career post-Diamond Lights (with the Anglo-French duet We’ve Got A ­Feeling). Yet though Boli’s career since playing retirement – which came in 1997, at the tender age of 30 – has included media work for the TV channel France 3, it has otherwise been quite atypical for an ex-pro.

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The sudden departure of the best-known vice chairman in football is likely to prove a case of ‘au revoir’ rather than goodbye. Jon Spurling looks at the long-term fault lines that have broken open and considers what a David Dein comeback on the coat-tails of Stanley Kroenke would mean for Arsenal

“It’s dead money,” claimed Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood, after sugar importer David Dein invested £290,250 in the club in 1983. The Gunners’ former vice chairman, whose stake in the club is now worth an estimated £60 million, has had an occasionally strained relationship with Hill-Wood, who is also chairman of Hambros bank: opposite forces of tradition and new-right economics have effectively been running on slowly converging lines at Arsenal for a quarter of a century.

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Cameron Carter sees that diving and simulation has become the BBC's current topic for discussion

The big topic on the BBC last month was diving and, in particular, how terrible and somehow foreign it is. During the last FA Cup quarter-final, Garth Crooks gamely attempted to turn a half-time studio debate into a political bear pit when the subject was introduced by Ray Stubbs. Some days later, on Match of the Day II, Stubbs seemed to get a little peevish when Graeme Le Saux and Lee Sharpe didn’t appear to treat his debate on Didier Drogba heatedly enough. At one point he jokingly asked Sharpe why he was smirking, in the way that someone jokingly asks you why you can’t get your own cup of tea. Stubbs is obviously of the view that there are some subjects one simply doesn’t joke about.

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