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King and country
by Alex Gordon
Arena, £17.99
Reviewed by Archie MacGregor
From WSC 323 January 2014
It’s easy to understand why Denis Law was, and still is, idolised by so many Scotland fans. As this chronicle of his international career reminds us, he just loved pulling on the navy blue jersey. There’s a palpable sense that he was just as excited and proud about his last cap – in Scotland’s opening 1974 World Cup group match against Zaire – as he was when he made his debut against Wales in 1958.
He could play a bit too, which helped of course. Law remains, alongside Kenny Dalglish, his country’s record goalscorer with 30 to his name. Twice he scored four goals in a game and he put a few in the back of the net against England. No doubting the iconic status of “the Lawman” then, but the trouble is this book just about goes right off the scale with the adulation. Superlatives are served up by the trowel – there’s just about a different one for every goal that Law scored in his entire senior career and he got 325 of them. So it’s not only the constant references to games from the Home Internationals and Scotland appearing in World Cup finals that evoke a bygone age. In an era where the warts-and-all biography laden with tales of compulsive behaviour disorders and dysfunctional relationships within dressing rooms is now the accepted norm you are left craving more gritty insight.
While the idiosyncratic Aberdonian seems nothing other than a down-to-earth type there are still a few aspects of his international career that would surely have justified some considered scrutiny. It’s widely accepted that spanning the 1960s the Scotland team, blessed with talents such as Law, Jim Baxter, Jimmy Johnstone and others, underperformed by quite a margin in World Cup and European Championship qualifiers, failing to reach the finals of either between 1958 and 1974. Just how much did the obsession with giving the English a right doing, personified by Law, distort and distract the national side’s focus?
Even when Law was part of the squad that was taken to the 1974 finals there was a fair bit of hullabaloo about his inclusion which is only lightly dwelt upon here. It’s pointed out that then manager Willie Ormond robustly defended the decision – however the fact that he was immediately dropped after the Zaire opener is surely a pointer that this was an issue worthy of more thoughtful examination. The trials and frustrations that Law faced with his lengthy injury woes and loss of form from 1967 onwards is another facet barely touched on.
Still, if as a kid like me you went around parading the trademark clenched cuff salute every time you scored a goal in the playground, there is probably more than enough here for you to enjoy wallowing in the nostalgia. It’s just a shame we don’t learn as much about Law the enigma as Law the legend.
The trials and tribulations of a football manager
by Neil Warnock
Headline £16.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 323 January 2014
Outside Yorkshire people would call Neil Warnock’s bluntness “refreshing”, but I had enough relatives from the county to realise he is just talking normally, apart from the strange absence of any swearing. Warnock takes us well beyond the angry and abusive figure he was on the touchline to give perhaps one of the last accounts of being a manager from an English, old-school perspective, stretching across all the divisions.
He is prepared to name those he does not like, bears a few grievances (and why not after 33 years as a manager) and offers a few telling insights into the managerial mind. Some clubs have apparently switched the position of the home and away dug-outs, the better to berate the linesman running the right wing – no stone left unturned in the modern game.
Warnock has aired his views by means of a weekly column in the Independent (which I have not read and therefore cannot tell how much, if any, is rehashed). For The Gaffer he has employed the Independent‘s Glenn Moore to bring some polish to his thoughts. The pleasing result is an unusual structure, more reminiscent of fiction than biography. At times it reads like the musings of an after-dinner speaker reviewing his whole career through the prism of his current and recent jobs. The benefit to the well-informed fan is that you do not know what is going to come next, as you would with a more chronological approach.
The disadvantage, of course, is the reader might not get what they expect. I would have preferred more on his time at Bramall Lane. For me, and for the football world in general I think, this was the apotheosis of Warnock: ardent supporter turned successful manager and tragically undone in 2007 by managerial “friends” Alex Ferguson and Rafa Benítez, who picked weakened teams against Sheffield United’s relegation rivals, and the dodgy Carlos Tévez deal.
Instead the focus is very much on later years with unstinting praise for Simon Jordan, once chairman of Crystal Palace, and the club’s fans. This is followed by a detailed account of life at Loftus Road under the auspices of various uncontrollable international business moguls and in charge of difficult talents such as Joey Barton and Adel Taarabt. The job did not get any easier with the Anton Ferdinand and John Terry affair, which gets a close and dispassionate examination.
Warnock conveys a very strong sense of the manager’s role being invaded and undermined by non-football issues inconceivable when he started at Scarborough and Notts County, hence the sub-title of this book. Nevertheless he remains hooked on the thrills and changing fortunes of football management. After QPR he took on Leeds, Ken Bates and a foreign takeover and the final few pages read more like another job application than a farewell to a boisterous 33 years of hurt.
My life in football
by Howard Kendall
De Coubertin Books, £20
Reviewed by Simon Hart
From WSC 323 January 2014
There is a lovely anecdote in Howard Kendall’s new autobiography about the day he signed Dave Watson for Everton from Norwich City. It was two days before the start of the 1986-87 season and Kendall’s attempt to complete the deal by five o’clock, so ensuring Watson’s availability for the opening fixture, had failed. Undeterred, he had the clock on the wall turned back an hour and got Watson to pose for a photo beneath it. “The Football League accepted it and Dave made his debut,” he writes.
Timing is a recurring theme in this recounting of Kendall’s career. He was ahead of his time as both a player and manager. He became the youngest player in an FA Cup final when, at 17 years and 345 days, he appeared for Preston against West Ham in 1964. At 20 he was wanted by Bill Shankly but joined Everton instead. He entered management with Blackburn at 33, winning promotion immediately. With Everton, he won the League, FA Cup and European Cup-Winners Cup before his 39th birthday.
So much so young, yet Kendall’s timing was out in one crucial respect: the post-Heysel ban denied Everton European Cup football and he cites this as the reason he left for Athletic Bilbao in 1987 (as a 45-year-old Alex Ferguson was still settling in at Old Trafford). Familiar stuff but what is new here is the revelation that an unnamed “Liverpool executive” had recommended him to Athletic after blocking their move for Kenny Dalglish – a “grim irony” indeed for Evertonians.
Written with James Corbett, who collaborated on Neville Southall’s autobiography, Love Affairs & Marriage: My Life in Football is very much what the second part of the title tells us. As befits an old-school gentleman, Kendall barely mentions his private life and dwells only briefly on potential controversies such as his departure from Notts County amid “ridiculous allegations” (unspecified here but drink-related). Yet there is much to enjoy nonetheless, not least the account of how he assembled his great Everton side in an era when a manager could create something special with a combination of homegrown talents, astute transfer dealings (he recalls the gambles taken on the injury-prone Peter Reid and Andy Gray), a trusting chairman – and morale-building Chinese dinners.
Kendall, with his man-management skills and love of the training pitch, differed so much from his own Everton boss Harry Catterick – from whom, he notes, he learned just one football lesson in six and a half years – yet the big question mark of his career is why after so much early success, his only subsequent trophy was an Anglo-Italian Cup with Notts County in 1995. Kendall reflects on his two less happy spells at Goodison in the 1990s, noting the lack of boardroom support and arguing that the influx of big money into the game meant it was no longer possible to build success on a budget. “Players were harder to sign,” laments the man whose first Everton buy, Southall, was recommended by a friend who ran a Llandudno pub. The end result is he was effectively finished as a manager at just 52 – a man out of time once more.