The Autobiography
by Dwight Yorke
Pan Books, £7.99
Reviewed by Damon Green
From WSC 280 June 2010
Tits. He's seen a few. Especially in the latter days of his career. Graeme Souness tried – he says – to break his leg during a five-a-side game. Roy Keane has the management skills of a psychopathic Mr Bean. And Peter Andre has no idea how close he came to being strangled to death.
Josh Widdicombe watches a remade film about football fighting
“London – The Eighties” the caption reads at the start of The Firm, and it is with brushstrokes this broad that Nick Love goes on to paint his latest picture of violence in days of yore. If coverage of the recent fighting at West Ham has taught us anything it’s that there are still a lot of people that find football hooliganism quite the turn on. Combine this with a yearning nostalgia for the Eighties that can surely only be shared by Norman Tebbit and T’Pau and you have The Firm.
Dear WSC
In response to Huw Griffiths’s letter in WSC 263, I would like to apologise to David Lloyd, the extremely popular fans’ liaison officer at Bristol City, for the flippant remarks I made in an article about the club in WSC 262. Sorry, Mr Lloyd. I would also like to apologise to my father, a Bristol City supporter for 60 years and, like Messrs Griffiths and Lloyd, an avid admirer of Paul Cheesley, for implying in the article that he cross-dresses in his potting shed. To put the record straight: my father has never owned a potting shed. Sorry, Father.However, I would like to take issue with Mr Griffiths’s claim that I have given up neither time nor money to support and represent the club in the last 15 years. In 2002, I bought and paid for the previous season’s away shirt and gave it to a friend of mine for his 40th birthday. Until unwrapping the gift, the recipient was like an excited schoolboy and cherishes it to such a degree that he has, to this day, neither worn the garment nor, as far as I know, taken it out of the packaging. Further, in 2007, I attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to obliterate a Bristol Rovers graffito on the lavatory wall in a public house in Berlin using nothing more than my house keys and a briefly rediscovered passion for the Boys In Red. If Mr Griffiths were aware of the willingness of Bristol City stayaways in Germany to jeopardise long-term friendships and to commit acts of criminal damage in the name of the club, he wouldn’t have made such an unfounded accusation in a poor attempt to add some much-needed gravitas to the WSC letters page.
Matt Nation, Hamburg
Trevor Brooking is unhappy about the attitudes pervading youth football and, based on his own experiences, Barney Ronay can see his point
Trevor Brooking, who has turned out to be an unexpectedly evangelical FA director of coaching, has talked a lot over the last month about the “golden age of learning” between the ages of nine and 13. The FA have identified this as the crucial window for football skill-cramming, the period that decides whether or not you’re going to be a Velcro-touched master of the chest-trap.
Football and pop music used to be largely separate. David Stubbs has mixed feelings about their rapprochement
In manlier days of grit and ore, when footballers were hewn from the same quarry stone as the two up, two down terraced houses in which they lived their entire lives, football and rock’n’roll were considered entirely separate provinces. One was a world of dubbin, screw-in studs, short back and sides and thick-knit, hooped socks. The other was a world of floppy fringes, cappuccino froth, portable Dansette players and young men on motor scooters up to no good.