by Andrea Pirlo with Alessandro Alciato
BackPage Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 329 July 2014

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Reading this autobiography of a playmaker nicknamed “Mozart” is like going to the opera: some bloke comes on and sings very loudly in Italian at you for a couple of hours, it’s all very dramatic and enjoyable, but you don’t always know quite what’s going on. In no discernible order, its voluble and intelligent subject, who “has an opinion about everything and I’m not ashamed to express it”, launches into an erratic, extended and idiosyncratic monologue. There are even (mostly much needed) footnotes to explain some of the passing references, although glossing ultras as “the self-styled, most passionate, vocal and committed supporters” was probably unnecessary.

Many of Andrea Pirlo’s lines do sound as if they could have come from, say, Don Giovanni. When his ten years with AC Milan end with the gift of a pen (how many domestic footballers are presented with something to write with when shown the door?) he declares: “Still, I raised a smile because I know how to laugh, long and loud.” (Cue ear-splitting Rabelaisian guffaws.) Various club presidents and managers memorably strut the stage. Marcello Lippi theatrically denounces the Italian dressing room: “Bunch of bastards, bunch of spies”; Antonio Conte hurls water bottles at Juve bellowing: “It’s time we stopped being crap.”

The reader is never in doubt that the text was originally in Italian, making it refreshingly different from the prosaic platitudes of the standard British footballer’s life. True, the highly charged style occasionally strays into Swiss Toni territory: “When you’re in love, it’s time you need. When the feeling’s gone, having an excuse can help.” Again, no British footballer could ever get away with statements such as Pirlo’s lament after Alex Ferguson “unleashes” the ferocious Park Ji-Sung to shadow the Italian midfielder in a Champions League tie: “He’s essentially a man without blemish, but he ruined that purity just for a moment… a fleeting shabbiness came over the legend that night.”

However, usually the purple prose fits the subject matter perfectly. Pirlo’s visceral reaction to losing the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul will delight not only Liverpool supporters. Not for him the mealy mouthed “gutted”. After this “mass suicide where we all jumped off the Bosphorus Bridge… I no longer felt like a player… But even worse, I no longer felt like a man.” Walking up to take the first penalty in the 2006 World Cup final shootout is “barely 50 metres. But it’s a truly terrible journey, right through the heart of your fear.”

Certain footballers’ preoccupations transcend nationalities. Pirlo’s favourite pursuits, we learn, at some length, are mickey-taking, PlayStation (“after the wheel, the best invention of all time”) and wine, albeit from his father’s vineyards. With a grand flourish he turns down €40 million (£32m) to join Qatar’s Al-Sadd, preferring instead one last bow for his country in the 2014 World Cup. As he says earlier: “Take someone like Antonio Cassano. He says he’s slept with 700 women in his time, but he doesn’t get picked for Italy any more. Deep down, can he really be happy?”

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by James Ruppert
Foresight Publications, £9.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 329 July 2014

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In 1970 the Ford Motor Company loaned every member of the England World Cup squad a car ahead of the forthcoming Mexico World Cup. With the exception of Jack Charlton – who requested a Ford Zodiac because he needed a bigger boot for his fishing tackle – they each received a Cortina 1600E. This is the story of how motoring journalist James Ruppert sets out to track down the 24 original “World Cup Cortinas”.

Except it isn’t. That element takes up a single chapter. The rest of the book involves something far more remarkable: someone who confesses to knowing very little about football writing quite a long book about football. Alarm bells begin to ring as early as the contents page (“it’s end-to-end stuff!”) while by the introduction the author appears to be having a full-blown crisis of confidence, admitting: “If you like football, there isn’t nearly enough detail, informed comment, or analysis about the game. If you like cars, well there is far too much football not nearly enough nitty gritty about camshafts… I’m not sure who will enjoy it really.”

The problem is that while Ruppert’s quest is a perfectly good idea for an article or photo essay there is nowhere near enough material for a book. His solution is a 200-page digression – a “social history” of football viewed through the cars that players drive. His conclusion? As footballers became better paid they could afford more expensive cars.

This might not be such an issue if the book was engagingly written but the prose is pitched awkwardly between lads’-mag insouciance and the nostalgic banality of a Saint & Greavsie annual. So while readers will be unsurprised to discover that George Best had “brooding good looks” but was “deeply flawed”, some bits simply make no sense at all. “Mark Hughes was a great leader on the pitch and he certainly needed a commanding one off it, hence the Range Rover Vogue SE.” Eh? At one point he questions the reliability of a source because they spell Nobby Stiles’s name incorrectly. In a book that introduces us to “Cristano Renaldo” that takes a certain amount of nerve.

Occasionally the author moves disastrously into the world of opinion. So we learn that “if fate had not intervened it is more than likely that Duncan Edwards would have been part of an England victory in the 1962 World Cup, led them to the title again in 1966 and made it a hat-trick in 1970”. Even this starts to sound like a trenchant insight compared to his baffling description of the “supremely talented” Jody Morris.

As if to reinforce the lightweight nature of the concept, Ruppert manages to sell it to The One Show as a five-minute TV feature. In the big finale, Franny Lee is reunited with his restored car in front of an expectant camera crew, before spoiling things by admitting that it was actually his wife who drove the Cortina because he had a Jag. It’s a fitting end to a book that is fatally underpowered from start to finish.

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by Steve Leach
Bennion Keaney Ltd, £11.99
Reviewed by Matthew Gooding
From WSC 329 July 2014

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Often erroneously likened to a fifth division of the Football League, the Football Conference could more accurately be described as a halfway house. Non-League’s top tier is home to a curious mix of teams; professional clubs who have fallen on hard times compete alongside new names making their way up the pyramid and getting a first taste of the big time.

Into this world steps Steve Leach, a Manchester City fan who, having grown disillusioned with the commercialisation and “over-paid prima donnas” of the Premier League, decides to focus his attentions on non-League instead. Conference Season is a diary of his travels around the country in the 2012-13 season, during which he takes in a match at every Conference club as he bids to “rediscover the soul of professional football”.

Throughout the book you get the impression that the author yearns for the days of his youth in the 1950s and 1960s, when top-level football matches were attended by thousands of working-class folk from their local community. Large crowds and red-hot atmosphere are certainly not in abundance in the Conference, and Leach’s wish to paint the league as a window to a glorious bygone era means he ignores the fact that it is a competition which is often as distorted by money and egotistical owners as the Premier League he wants to leave behind. As a result, Hyde’s tie-in with Manchester City, where they were paid to change their club colours to sky blue and remove the “United” part of their name, is briefly mentioned but not subjected to any critical analysis. Ditto an acrimonious boardroom split he encounters at Macclesfield, while the many battles for control of the author’s hometown club Stockport County, which sparked their rapid descent through the divisions from League One to the Conference North, are not touched on at all.

We rarely hear from fans of the teams involved. When Leach does engage them in conversation, it tends to be on matters of player selection and form, rather than looking at the joys of supporting a non-League side and the role their club plays in the community. As a result, the whole affair feels 
somewhat distant, and all we are left with are a series of clunky anecdotes and the author’s glib and often patronising observations; seasoned non-League supporters will enjoy his amazement at the fact that two sets of fans can co-exist in the same bar without resorting to violence, or that some games of football are played without crowd segregation.

Leach is a professor of Local Government, and it becomes apparent this is where his expertise lie as he describes the growth, and in some cases decline, of the towns he visits with passion and insight. It’s a shame that the football side of Conference Season rarely delivers either of these qualities.

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The secret world 
of José Mourinho
by Diego Torres (translated by Pete Jenson)
Harper Sport, £12.99
Reviewed by David Stubbs
From WSC 329 July 2014

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José Mourinho is a strange, as well as a special, one. He seems quite consciously and gleefully to play up to the stereo-type of a conniving practitioner of cunning tricks and brazen gamesmanship – a living affirmation of the lower morals of the southern European sort, with decent Englishmen being advised to be on their guard and lock up their wives and daughters should he attempt to beguile them with his oily ways. He revels in obnoxiousness, in his fist-pumping touchline displays, his churlish barbs against officials and fellow colleagues. His “specialist in failure” sneer about Arsène Wenger was particularly lacking in grace. Yet, get past his poor etiquette and you have to admire the fine honing of that particular verbal dagger – the word “specialist” had a particular genius when applied to the professorial yet long-time trophyless Arsenal manager.

Behind this mischievous smokescreen of public hullabaloo, you suspect a genius is at work; a master of tactics, albeit that systematically squeeze the joy out of football as an attacking, free-flowing spectacle, as well as a certain psychological understanding of how to handle players, despite never having been one himself at the top level.

This, you would assume, is Mourinho’s secret world and the secret to his success. There’s very little of that, however, in Diego Torres’s exposé of his time as manager at Real Madrid, the period covered exclusively by this book. The author’s contempt for Mourinho bristles on every page – a Machiavellian operator more obsessed with his self-image than the club he happens to be managing at any particular time, at odds with his key players, with too close and unhealthy a relationship with the agent Jorge Mendes, over-promoting players in his fold, alienating those represented elsewhere, unsportsmanlike, disrespectful to his fellow professionals (including a sneaky poke in the eye of an opposite number during a Barcelona game) and ultimately a person with far too high an opinion of himself and his tactical skills.

The book begins with Mourinho in floods of tears when he learns that he’s been passed over for the job of Manchester United manager in favour of David Moyes. Disastrous as that decision was for United, could it be that Ferguson cannily envisaged catastrophe of a similar sort had Mourinho and his ego landed at Old Trafford, with Mendes not far behind? Maybe he had some inkling of the behind-the-scenes goings-on related in Torres’s account.

We read that Mourinho’s tactic was to turn “the control of information into a fine art” – whether to the press, with players briefed heavily on what they were to say in interviews, or to the players themselves, exploiting their fear of being marginalised in the team. However, this only served to create dressing room divisions at Real Madrid, most importantly of all with his captain Iker Casillas. Moreover, his insistence on applying his customised “high pressure triangle” formation regardless of the players he had at his disposal, who he regarded as mere “assembly line” components, frequently backfired, as in a 5-0 thrashing against Barcelona in the 2010-11 season.

There’s an element of literary licence at work; Torres recounts entire, paragraph-long dressing room tirades from the manager verbatim, filled with hysterical insults like “traitors” and “sons of bitches”, clearly fed to him by players on the receiving end of them (there is no shortage of suspects) but which no one could possibly remember word for word. For all that, and the partiality of the author, this account rings and reads true.

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