Search: ' Soccer Saturday'

Mike Whalley takes a look at Hyde’s terrible winless run

Scott McNiven is, by his own admission, hard to live with when he isn’t winning. The manager of Hyde, the Conference Premier’s bottom club by a mile, can barely remember what victory feels like. Twenty-six league games have brought no wins and just three points. The New Year opened with an unwanted record beckoning: no team in Conference history, going back to 1979, has gone through a whole season without a league win. McNiven’s wife Adele is enduring a lot of gloomy weekends. “She’s very understanding, especially as I don’t really speak to her on Saturday evenings now,” he says. “I’m not in the best mood for conversation after a defeat.”

Read more…

A year on the road 
for Soccer Saturday
by Johnny Phillips
Bennion Kearny, £9.99
Reviewed by David Harrison
From WSC 320 October 2013

Buy this book

Johnny Phillips is a product of Sky’s Soccer Saturday conveyor belt constructed to provide Jeff Stelling with a never-ending stock of earnest reporters, ready to update the nation with breathless goalflashes. That was until Phillips briefly lost it on-air at the end of last season and went from calmly “delivering his own brand of footballing brilliance”, as Stelling’s foreword generously describes our man’s contribution, to a demented comedy figure screaming a match update in a ludicrous high-pitched falsetto. Those 20 seconds in May elevated him, we’re told, to “an internet sensation with millions of hits”.

To be fair that Watford v Leicester play-off semi-final did deliver the most extraordinary climax and Phillips performed manfully, albeit squeakily, to keep it together and provide any sort of factual assessment, what with flares going off and a fair old pitch invasion gathering pace behind him.

In many ways those Vicarage Road scenes served as a perfect bookend to the season Phillips had enjoyed as he travelled the land on behalf of Sky. The cynic might suggest that if you’re about to release a season-long diary, national exposure along those lines does no harm. But whatever criticisms one may choose to level at this undemanding tome, cynicism would not feature.

Phillips has chronologically documented 24 trips he made during the course of last season, starting in August with a delightful little story about how celebrity Spireite the Duke of Devonshire invited his local team to train within the magnificent 100-acre gardens of his Derbyshire ancestral seat, Chatsworth House. What Capability Brown would have thought is anyone’s guess but it’s a charming tale with which to set the ball rolling.

What follows is distinctly mixed but this is the archetypal bedside book, in that the reader could happily flip from one month to the next and back. There are short stories based around key characters within smaller clubs who rarely make headlines – the likes of Fleetwood, Mansfield, Forest Green and Met Police – as well as tales of football people.

The chapter on Brentford’s troubled goalkeeper Richard Lee is revealing if hardly original and the story of Port Talbot ambulance driver and former Swansea striker James Thomas is another pleasing read, while the piece on Lee Hendrie is refreshingly upbeat. The most interesting essay covers the rise and fall of Gretna, intertwined with the story of the club’s late benefactor, the extraordinary Brooks Mileson.

Phillips is a Wolves fan and indulges himself to some degree with a reflective piece on his lengthy relationship with them but the section on finding his club and recollections of 1980’s terrace life will strike a chord with many. This is no Sports Book of the Year contender. Some of the grammar is painful – “The esteem in which he [Benítez] is held by Liverpool fans is considerably high” is a particularly gruesome example – but it’s nevertheless an engaging effort with nothing to dislike about the author. The book, we’re told, was conceived on a train journey from South Wales to London. It could be read within a similar timespan – and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Buy this book

by Tony Cottee
Philip Evans Media, £14.99
Reviewed by Mark Segal
From WSC 317 July 2013

Buy this book

Back in the day when you could phone footballers out of the blue for an interview, Tony Cottee was one of the few who didn’t hang up immediately or pretend they were busy and then turn their phone off at the time you were asked to phone back. Once he even gave me his home number. This, added to the fact he was a West Ham hero of mine, made him one of football’s nice guys but this side of his personality is sadly lacking in The Inside Story.

His second autobiography, the story begins as Cottee is winding down his career. A return to West Ham and a League Cup winner’s medal at Wembley with Leicester are the high points as he slowly slips down the leagues, ending up as player-manager at Barnet where it all went horribly wrong.

Like any centre-forward you’ve ever met or played with, Cottee is keen to let you know his scoring record but there seems little feeling behind the numbers. In fact the end of his career is not the real reason for the book, it’s the thing he needs to get out of the way before the main part – his attempt, and ultimate failure, to become West Ham chairman.

It was on the drive home from the 2004 play-off final defeat to Crystal Palace in Cardiff that Cottee decided to act, and the reader is taken through his attempts to put together a consortium to oust hated chairman Terry Brown from Upton Park. At first it’s a shambles, as he turns up to meetings without any kind of business plan, but slowly it begins to come together and each meeting, phone call and proposal is faithfully documented as the book becomes bogged down.

After realising he doesn’t have the money among West Ham supporters he spreads his net further and begins talking to a group of Icelandic bankers who eventually go it alone, buy the club and almost run it into the ground. Cottee is desperate for the reader to understand the time and effort he put into trying to save “his” club, which is why the progress of his consortium is documented in such detail. But in doing this he only glosses over the other areas of his life which were clearly suffering. He admits part of the reason his marriage failed was because of the time he dedicated to his consortium.

In a chapter about his work for Sky’s Soccer Saturday, Cottee claims his live reports are the next best thing to playing and perhaps it’s this transition from player to ex-player which could have been explored more. Many former pros talk about missing the buzz of the dressing room and maybe it’s even more acute for prolific strikers who are used to the adulation which comes with scoring goals. Cottee’s tireless work in trying to oust Brown could be a way of replacing this buzz, but it’s a shame the mechanics of his takeover are more in evidence than the human story.

Buy this book

Trains are an important mode of transport for fans but Tom Hocking says that little is done to make them more convenient

“In terms of transportation,” read an official FA statement, following the controversy caused by setting the FA Cup final kick-off time at 5.15pm, “a small percentage of Cup final fans use the method of train travel.” The evening start, rather than the traditional 3pm, meant fans of both north-west-based finalists would have trouble catching the last train home. Wigan supporters had already faced similar problems for the semi-final against Millwall and been widely mocked for not selling out their entire ticket allocation. The situation was made more galling by the FA’s solution: use their official coach partner, National Express, instead.

Read more…

Footballers can be overacting show-offs, but very few make a decent play of it when given their chance on screen, says Ashley Clark

Though it is easy to see why those engaged in one performative discipline awash with cash and fan adulation may be eager to try their hand at another, history is littered with examples of footballers turning to acting with distinctly mixed results. In largely well received new thriller Switch, Eric Cantona brings his usual brooding charisma to the role of Damien Forgeat, a detective on the trail of a young woman accused of murder. With the talent, versatility and self-confidence to match his ambition, Cantona has carved out an impressive acting career, beginning with a small role in Shekhar Kapur’s period drama Elizabeth, packing in a host of serious-minded French-language fare and peaking with a sly, perfectly judged turn in Ken Loach’s drama Looking For Eric.

Read more…