Search: ' Malcolm Allison'

Rob Hughes wonders why so many football-related dramas fail to strike the right tone, especially in their action scenes

Lord knows they’ve tried. Ricky Tomlinson as England manager. Sean Bean tanking around in a Sheffield United strip. Sylvester Stallone between the sticks. Even Adam Faith as pint-sized proprietor of – oh yes – Leicester Forest (from a script by Jackie Collins, no less). All of them as inept, unconvincing and downright embarrassing as each other. So just why is it that films about football never work? Certainly not through lack of an audience. It’s a sport, lest we forget, adored by millions the world over, one with its own in-built dramatic arc. A ready-made fantasy in which slumdogs really can become superstars. Never mind Mike Bassett or Jimmy Grimble. Where’s our Raging Bull, our This Sporting Life? Even a Seabiscuit would do.

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The Peter Taylor Story Volume One
by Wendy Dickinson & Stafford Hildred
Matador, £17.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 286 December 2010

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Gus van Sant makes films – Elephant, Final Days – that focus on a series of incidents viewed from complex mesh of different viewpoints. Maybe one day he'll turn his attention to the story of Brian Clough. Certainly there are already more than enough angles available on the bookshelves. Indeed, with new volumes appearing almost monthly (two more Clough biographies are slated for next year, and another one on Don Revie is on the way) it's hard to avoid a feeling that what we have here might be, to bowdlerise the words of Nigel Tufnell, "too much perspective".

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Football With A Smile
by Gary James
James Ward, £19.95
Reviewed by Ian Farrell
From WSC 283 September 2010

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Unless there are any new revelations, legal estate challenges or hauntings to report, you might reasonably ask what the point is of putting out an updated version of a posthumous biography. Though it is coming up to the 20th anniversary of Joe Mercer's death, the first thought about this reworking of Football With A Smile, originally published in 1993, is that it's really to capitalise on the moderate publicity generated by The Worst Of Friends, the recent novel about his time managing Man City alongside assistant Malcolm Allison. But, opportunistic or not, it nevertheless comes across as a heartfelt attempt to reassess Mercer's standing 17 years on, and see his legacy given the respect it deserves. Those who've read the "faction" have a chance to read the facts.

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Manchester City’s owners have divided opinion over the years, but the latest incumbents have been welcomed deliriously. David Conn wonders if the fans’ loyalty is being exploited

The takeover of Manchester City was celebrated uproariously by most of the club’s supporters, but it prompted me instead to question the very basis of fans’ loyalty to their clubs. I am talking not about today’s surreal ownership by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, but a deal that looks positively homely by comparison, the 1994 City takeover by Francis Lee.

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Malcolm Allison, Joe Mercer and Manchester City
by Colin Shindler
Mainstream, £17.99
Reviewed by Ian Farrell
From WSC 268 June 2009 

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Back in the late Nineties, Colin Shindler’s Manchester United Ruined My Life became one of football writing’s biggest break-out hits, earning its author plenty of mainstream praise, a spin-off TV documentary, and, it has to be said, a fair amount of criticism, amid suggestions that it was just a Manchester City version of Fever Pitch. Such carping about merely putting his own club’s spin on a recent success is clearly of no concern to Shindler if the strangely familiar premise of his latest work is anything to go by: a piece of nostalgic ­“faction” about a big-mouthed, larger-than-life coach battling for control… of Man City. In fact, given that its release has been timed to follow that of The Damned United’s much-hyped film version, it doesn’t look like Shindler and his publisher’s publicity department mind one little bit if you make the comparison. Now that I’ve done their bidding, I’ll say this: they’re nothing like each other.

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