{youtube}nJDCUKlwcV4{/youtube}
FC St Pauli: Falling in
love with a radical football club
by Nick Davidson
Sportsbooks, £8.99
Reviewed by John Van Laer
From WSC 331 September 2014
It is often held to be one of the unwritten rules governing the life of a football fan that your allegiance, once chosen, remains unchanged. However many now feel priced out of what used to be an affordable form of popular entertainment, while any sort of supporter activism is seen by the clubs as a threat to the sanitised matchday experience. Only very few such people, however, have taken as radical a course of action as Nick Davidson, the author of the first English-language book about FC St Pauli. Once a season-ticket holder at Watford, he drifted away from Vicarage Road, attempting to rekindle the footballing flame by getting involved at his local non-League club. Sadly, the petty politics that blight local football proved equally unappealing and a lifelong interest in the game appeared to be at an end. However, chancing upon an article about St Pauli and deciding to visit the Millerntor stadium for a match in 2007 proved to be a turning point – the essence of this book is about a rediscovered love for football, coupled with the enjoyment of sharing the experience with thousands of like-minded individuals.
What could be described as just a German second division team that happen to be based in the red-light district of Hamburg in fact embodies a political viewpoint and an attitude to football’s place in society that has all but disappeared from the game in England. Over the last 30 years or so, the fan groups from St Pauli have become the most prominently left-wing supporters in German football. The politicisation of football at this working-class club started almost by chance but over time the groups such as Ultras Sankt Pauli have become an important counterpoint to the right-wing influence within some supporters’ groups at clubs such as Rostock, Dortmund and others. Of course, that is not to say that there are no other left-wing fans’ movements in the German game, but those connected with St Pauli are easily the most high-profile and active within the professional game.
Davidson tells the stories of his visits to St Pauli games across Germany in a style that betrays the increasingly partisan nature of his relationship to the club and its fans, while realising that both have their faults. These travelogues are intertwined with information about the history of the club and how the support has developed over the years. As a club St Pauli are not immune to the financial pressures of modern football, and certainly make capital from the iconic Totenkopf (skull and crossbones) emblem, but it is one of the few places where supporters still have effective influence over decisions affecting the future of their club, and are not afraid to voice their opinions. Many fans (and some players) are also actively engaged in political and social causes, both within the local St Pauli district and further afield.
It is hard not to share Davidson’s obvious enthusiasm for his team and the culture that they continue to embody, which he is actively supporting by donating all royalties from this book to the St Pauli Museum project.
Clough’s champion
by Roy McFarland and Will Price
Sportsbooks, £8.99
Reviewed by Charles Robinson
From WSC 331 September 2014
Following a home defeat to Reading and a couple of beers, the young Tranmere Rovers defender Roy McFarland goes to bed. A couple of hours later he is woken up by his mum with the news that “there’s two men downstairs to see you, Roy, and one of them is Brian Clough”. The other, of course, is Derby County assistant Peter Taylor. As McFarland enters the kitchen in his striped pyjamas, “looking like a convict”, he finds that Clough has managed to charm Mr and Mrs McFarland, and the deal is already halfway done.
Roy is unconvinced and harbours hopes of playing for his boyhood club, Liverpool, but soon he will win two Championships with his new team, as well as 28 England caps in an international career cut short by injury. This is a player not unaware of his worth, not to mention stoical and unsentimental. Coming from a solidly affluent working-class background, McFarland initially rejects trials at Wolves and Tranmere, throwing away the invitation letters and instead taking up a job as a trainee accountant at a local tobacco company. The reader is left to wonder whether the game was in the young man’s blood from the beginning, but any reflection has to wait as McFarland’s career takes off.
And it really does take off. After signing as a professional with Tranmere on his 18th birthday, within a year he is captain of second-tier Derby, albeit for one initial game. In his second season the Rams are promoted and, already, McFarland can sense the “wind of change” blowing through the club. Soon, he is a Championship winner and England regular. Throughout, McFarland’s affection for Clough and Taylor, but especially the former, is evident, even as Clough descends into alcoholism, a subject that McFarland doesn’t shy away from and relates in the strictly matter-of-fact tone that characterises the whole book.
The event at the heart of McFarland’s story is the resignation of Clough and Taylor in October 1973. His insider view gives a fresh perspective to an incident which still breaks the hearts of Derby supporters and, evidently, McFarland himself. As the news filters through, he admits that his emotions were “all over the place”, thinking it “the end”, only two days before England’s 1-1 draw with Poland that meant they failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup. However, he simply resolves to get on with the job under new manager Dave Mackay, and soon after wins another Championship and more England caps.
The final chapters detail McFarland’s rather unspectacular managerial career, the highlights being a play-off final with Derby in 1994 and promotion with Burton Albion in 2009, having taken over from a Derby-bound Nigel Clough. As well as the short paragraphs and tales of dressing room “banter” that pockmark such autobiographies, the cliches and constant footballer-speak do grate. Like many of the matches detailed here, even McFarland’s wedding is “a great success”, and wife Lin puts in “a monumental shift” while giving birth to their first child. Nonetheless, the fascinating story of McFarland’s rise largely alongside Clough and Taylor is enough to see Derby fans and Cloughie completists through to the end.
The teams that shaped our obsession
edited by Rob Macdonald and Adam Bushby
Ockley Books, £11.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 331 September 2014
My Favourite Year, the 1993 anthology co-published by WSC and edited by Nick Hornby, celebrated like never before the obscure, personal details of how supporters become smitten. Superficially Falling for Football seems little more than an equivalent for the Twitter generation, those for whom Chris Waddle and inflatable bananas represent earliest memories. The bloggers deserve a wider audience, though, and talented writers and editors such as Rob Langham (The Two Unfortunates) and Ian King (Twohundredpercent) have forced complacent broadsheets to up their game.
A great strength of this new volume is its broader scope in both the teams and the backgrounds of their fans. It is a delight to witness Ash Hashim falling for Spain in 2002 – reassured about their World Cup prospects by her Welsh grandfather, while her Arabic mother cheers for South Korea – and then share in Glen Wilson’s memories of Rossington FC, the pit village club where his dad was manager, groundsman, secretary, coach, programme editor and substitute.
It’s intriguing, too, how the two distinct approaches to English fandom articulated here seem to analogise with social class. Broadly speaking it’s the working-class fan who adopts their parents’ club, while the neophyte who selects from a field is often freed up to do so by their roots in a white-collar family where no one likes football. The latter is embodied here by Alex Douglas – a Red unconnected to Manchester, who arrived with United via Sheffield Wednesday and Paris Saint-Germain – and his unintentionally hilarious question “Whom would I support?” Readers must decide for themselves whether it’s the sense of choice and entitlement or the painfully correct pronoun declension that makes this towering middle-class quandary such a hoot.
The quality of writing is variable, too, but the more capable authors find ways to avoid cliche. Daniel Grey pitches a curveball by focusing on the famous but fictitious Barnstoneworth United of Ripping Yarns infamy. We can assume that Stefano Gulizia’s academic treatise on Juventus and the naming of colours is a sort of intellectual joke (it quotes Jacques Derrida), but it contrives to enrich the volume while being entirely unreadable.
In the hands of the weaker writers, the short, blogpost-style chapters can become formulaic, sometimes wearyingly so. But there’s an authenticity about the ungainly prose here which some will find more satisfying than the slicker stuff, and older readers will be reassured to find resilience and continuity in the symbolic power of Bovril. Falling For Football finds new angles on football’s oldest story, and the good outweighs the bad. You’ll probably know someone who’s experienced a football epiphany during this year’s World Cup. Buy them this and they’ll know they’re not alone
Rangers, Britain & Scottish independence
edited by Alan Bisset and Alasdair McKillop
Luath Press, £8.99
Reviewed by Gordon Cairns
From WSC 331 September 2014
The editors of Born Under A Union Flag have taken on an ambitious task: to quantify Rangers fans’ relationship not only with Scotland but the United Kingdom as a whole. A difficult terrain to map, as historically the club has been considered the team of a union that may be dissolving. That Rangers are in this position as a Unionist team in a country falling out of love with the UK is due to a particular set of circumstances which occurred at the turn of the last century, when a challenger was sought for a successful team of immigrants. The fanbase of this new champion just happened to be drawn from the Catholic-free zone of the Govan shipyards.
As Scotland has moved from being strongly identified with Britain, the position of Rangers has shifted too, from the establishment team to that of outsiders, while ironically it is the “rebel” club Celtic who have had one of the UK’s most right-wing home secretaries of recent memory, John Reid, on their board. The 14 authors, representing both opinions on the issue of Scottish independence and all bar one fans of the club, examine Rangers’ place in the UK with varying degrees of success, using a mixture of personal experience and historical perspective, with the latter the more persuasive to this non-Old Firm fan.
Historian Graham Walker convincingly charts the shift from Rangers as the establishment team to “becoming at odds with the country as a whole”, and casts light on how the support evolved to deal with this change, illustrated through the recasting of God Save the Queen as a subversive anthem. The song gained popularity in the 1980s as the club fell out of favour with mainstream opinion. Although the purpose is to wind up the anti-monarchy opposition, and I must admit it has this effect on me, Walker describes a rendition of the national anthem to illustrate his argument that many fellow fans are more concerned with showing their loyalty than supporting the team. Rangers’ last game in Europe was a must win against NK Maribor in 2011; as the team pushed for the decisive goal in the last few minutes, the crowd began to chorus the dirge-like anthem rather than the Ibrox roar, destroying the momentum on the pitch while creating an atmosphere of resignation and defeat, and so the team failed to progress.
While calling for a constitution to be created for the club, editor Alasdair McKillop looks to Barcelona as a model. He argues that “Celtic have a morally infused narrative that is entwined with the socio-economic progress of the community”, backing up their claims to be “more than a club”. In my opinion, as Rangers’ estrangement from Scottish society grows and their fans continue to utilise British symbolism and song, they could mirror Barcelona’s “other” club, Espanyol (ie “the Spanish”), and become the quintessentially British club, or that of the outsiders – especially if Scotland breaks from the union.
“Better Together” or “Yes” campaigning pollsters will be sorely disappointed if they read this book hoping to get an insight into how this considerable section of Scottish society might vote on September 18. However what it does do is take the temperature of Rangers fans at an important juncture of Scottish history.