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by Steven Kay
1889 Books, £8.99
Reviewed by Paul Brown
From WSC 327 May 2014

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Rabbi Howell was the first footballer of Romany origin to play for England. A slight but skilful half-back, he was a star of the excellent Sheffield United team of the 1890s, alongside the better-remembered likes of William “Fatty” Foulke and Ernest “Nudger” Needham. “A Gipsy by birth, [Howell] perhaps owes some of his inexhaustible vitality to his lucky parentage,” wrote Needham of his team-mate. That “inexhaustible vitality” won Howell the nickname the “Evergreen”. But in 1898, despite his talents, and with United on the verge of securing their first League championship, Howell was hurriedly sold to Liverpool for reasons that remain unclear.

The “Wikipedia version” of Rabbi (or Rab) Howell’s story, sourced from club history books, suggests that he was booted out of United after being accused of deliberately throwing a game against championship rivals Sunderland by scoring two own goals. Author Steven Kay has never believed this version of events, and has been unable to find any evidence of match-fixing. He has, however, uncovered suggestions of a very different kind of scandal. Kay’s research forms the basis for a novel, The Evergreen In Red And White, a fictional account of Howell’s pivotal 1897-98 season.

This is football fiction based on fact, much like David Peace’s recent Red Or Dead, albeit with fewer and further-removed sources. Nevertheless, The Evergreen feels suitably authentic, set in an evocatively realised Victorian Sheffield during football’s thriving early years. Kay’s Howell has a quirky sense of humour, extrapolated from contemporary interviews, and a voice coloured with the use of Romany and Sheffield dialects. He rubs embrocation on swollen knees and worries about his waning football career, but it’s his personal life that proves to be his downfall.

The facts, as Kay has found them, are that when Howell moved from Sheffield to Liverpool he left behind a wife and four children – one of them a new-born baby – for another woman. In the novel, Howell meets the “other woman”, Ada, in Sheffield as the city prepares for the Diamond Jubilee visit of Queen Victoria. Torn between Ada and his pregnant wife, his football performances suffer and his season becomes derailed, culminating with the climactic match at Sunderland’s hostile Newcastle Road ground, where a tormented Howell scores those two fateful own goals. “If tha don’t keep things steady in life, it affects thi game,” Needham tells Howell, who is dropped from the team and effectively exiled from his home city.

Despite the defeat at Sunderland, Sheffield United did win the Championship. Howell was a Liverpool player by then. He subsequently played for Preston North End, where his career was ended by a broken leg in 1903. He did apparently find stability in his personal life – he married Ada, and the couple had five children. We may never know the whole truth about Howell and his hurried departure from Sheffield United, but Steven Kay’s novel is so diligently researched and affectionately written that it’s easy to believe the author’s claim in his introduction that it is “as close to the truth as is possible”.

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The first season 1888/89
by Mark Metcalf
Amberley, £14.99
Reviewed by Paul Brown
From WSC 321 November 2013

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In 1888, during the early days of professional football, clubs began to look for a way to secure a regular income beyond that generated by occasional cup ties and friendly matches. It was Aston Villa director William McGregor who proposed the solution, suggesting that “the most prominent clubs in England combine to arrange home and away fixtures each season”. As the Football League celebrates its anniversary 125 year later, Mark Metcalf’s extensively researched book examines the inaugural season of the game’s oldest league competition.

The Origins Of The Football League opens with a brief but useful primer on the state of football in 1888. It was an evolving game in which there were no penalty kicks or goal nets, and goalkeepers could handle the ball anywhere within their own half. But growing interest and attendances allowed the League’s 12 founder members to flourish. Indeed, 11 of the 12 still play League football today – the exception is Accrington (not to be confused with Accrington Stanley), who folded in 1896.

The book traces the 1888-89 season via a series of match reports, many of which are taken from contemporary newspapers. These early reports have, as Metcalf puts it, “a certain symmetry to them”, typically detailing the weather and pitch conditions, while studiously recording who won the toss before presenting a fairly perfunctory account of the play. “The visiting right made an attack that was cleared by Bethell,” reads an opening-day report for Bolton Wanderers v Derby County, “and in two minutes from the start Kenny had scored a fine goal for the Wanderers. A protest for offside was raised in vain.” That Kenny Davenport goal was, the author reveals via some detective work involving kick-off times, the first League goal.

Without wishing to spoil the book’s ending, the story of the 1888-89 season is also the story of Preston North End’s “Invincibles”, who won the League without losing a game. “The feat North End have accomplished, gaining 18 victories and four draws [is] a record for which no comparison can fairly be found,” one reporter wrote. Preston also beat Wolves 3-0 in the FA Cup final to claim the first football “double”. That was hard lines for the fearsome Preston full-back Nick Ross, who missed the triumph by moving for a single season to Everton.

Ross is profiled in the book’s comprehensive gazetteer, alongside hundreds of other players ranging from the well known, such as Johnny “All Good” Goodall, who scored 21 goals in 21 games for Preston in that first season, to the virtually unknown, such as the mysterious W Mitchell, who played one game for Blackburn Rovers, scored two goals and was never heard of again.

The comprehensive nature of The Origins Of The Football League may be both a blessing and a curse. For the casual reader, a book that contains hundreds of consecutive match reports, many of which are relatively inconsequential, might not represent much of a page-turner. But as a book to dip into – and as a reference work – it’s a valuable and timely record of the birth of one of football’s most important institutions.

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by Paul McVeigh
Bloomsbury, £14.99
Reviewed by Ashley Clark
From WSC 319 September 2013

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Since his retirement from football in 2010, diminutive former Norwich City midfielder and Northern Ireland international Paul McVeigh has worked hard to create a brand for himself. A regular pundit on TV and radio, he also treads the speaker’s circuit and has co-founded the company ThinkPro alongside sports psychologist Gavin Drake, which trails itself on its website as an “Elite Performance Development Programme”. It’s all a long way from the days when ex-pros simply bought pubs when their playing days were done.

McVeigh’s first book – the alarmingly titled (but largely uncontroversial) The Stupid Footballer Is Dead – is constructed as a 12-step guide for professional and aspiring footballers aiming to realise their potential and develop successful careers. Based largely around McVeigh’s thesis that mental strength is gradually replacing the need for physical strength in modern football, it is clearly structured and easy to follow, as each chapter concludes with a case study and a capsule summary of its key points. However, it is sometimes repetitive and better consumed in chunks rather than one sitting.

Though one’s overall enjoyment and appreciation of The Stupid Footballer will likely hinge on their level of tolerance for the near-messianic tone and buzzword-heavy language of the self-help industry (when McVeigh glowingly mentions Paul McKenna, he’s not talking about the ex-Preston North End midfielder), much of the book’s content is undeniably salient. In chapters with titles such as “Define and follow goals”, “Create a helpful self-image”, and “Think about thinking” he offers a host of practical suggestions filtered through his own wealth of professional experience. McVeigh is not shy of the occasional critique, either – he is particularly scathing of England’s 2010 World Cup squad, who he castigates for their lack of positivity, and has some choice words regarding Joey Barton’s perceived lack of professionalism.

McVeigh comes across as likeable enough but he often lapses into cliche, while an occasional lack of self-awareness in his choice of language bleeds through. When, in the final chapter (“There is life after football”), he boasts of having “delivered stand-up comedy”, it’s impossible not to think of David Brent. Another unintentional laugh-out-loud moment arrives when McVeigh describes Pisa FC as having “failed to sign him”, rather than him “failing to secure a contract”; this kind of lacuna in logic is perhaps a corollary of the bulletproof self-confidence he’s engendered in himself through practising what his book preaches. That said, McVeigh is candid about some of his earlier career mistakes (often involving a drink or two) and offers welcome slivers of personal information about his upbringing in Belfast against the backdrop of the Troubles.

Ultimately, even though its content is hardly revolutionary, it’s not too much of a leap to say that The Stupid Footballer Is Dead, with its neatly pedagogical structure, could come to be used as a key text for coaches looking to help focus the minds of young players across the country. However, it remains to be seen whether the current generation of English footballers, who McVeigh characterises as being hooked on Xbox, will pay it much attention.

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Players used to keep themselves busy by swapping sports on a seasonal basis. Si Hawkins looks at why that’s no longer the case

A few months ago, as the news broke that a house fire had cruelly curtailed the long innings of England batting stalwart Trevor Bailey, a lesser-known strand of his career cropped up in conversation. “Old ‘Stonewall’ Bailey,” mused my grandad, fondly. “I used to watch him play for the Avenue.”

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Peter Bateman recalls the 1965-66 season when Liverpool and Everton both had campaigns to remember

The long-term significance
This season confirmed the shift in football’s balance of power northwards. The Championship trophy went to Merseyside for the third time in four seasons and the FA Cup for the second season running. Liverpool also reached their first European final. Leeds Utd established themselves as a force in the game while Manchester Utd had a rare trophyless season in between Championships.

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