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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Inside the minds of football’s leaders
by Mike Carson
Bloomsbury in association with the League Managers Association, £16.99
Reviewed by Barney Ronay
From WSC 321 November 2013

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Often when reviewing a book it is customary to quote one of the best bits at the start to give a little flavour of what treats can be found within its pages. This isn’t an easy thing to do with The Manager. Mainly because there aren’t any best bits, or even any good bits to speak of – apart from occasional unintentionally good bits, such as the passage that starts off by quoting St Francis of Assisi and Stephen Covey “best-selling author of The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People” (me neither) before ploughing into a passage on the philosophy of Neil Warnock (yes that one).

On the other hand despite its lack of good bits, its muscular banality – the literary equivalent of a long and tedious game of squash – The Manager is also a considerable achievement in its own right. Most notably it takes one of the more mercurial and thrillingly baroque aspects of English football and turns it into something so unrelentingly laborious that this book, which is sponsored by the League Managers Association and the Premier League, should come with a warning not to operate heavy machinery or drive late at night should you accidentally find yourself reading more than a paragraph or two.

Yet this is perhaps a little unfair. In reality The Manager is barely a book at all, more a kind of how-to guide aimed not at football fans but at business-minded people: leaders, rain-makers, ladder-climbers, even football managers themselves. This lumping together of football and corporate managerdom is a process that has been in train for some time, but it is given a fresh twist here. The first secretary-mangers would often borrow the mannerisms and vocabulary of clerks or factory foremen.

In the 1950s a socially mobile breed of manager took up the coat and hat of the ambitious junior sales manager. The 1980s brought with them a breed of Thatcherite manager-made-good, the Big Ron-ish notion of the manager as self-made man and flash git. With the celebrification of the modern manager – and with football generally bleeding into every other walk of life – this is now a process that has increasingly been reversed. The corporate world looks to football, borrowing the manager’s habits, mannerisms and – as here – musings on success, the leadership of men and the rest of it.

Perhaps for this reason the book seems to describe an unfamiliar footballing world. In part this is because it presents a version of football completely robbed of any humour, becoming in the process at times quite funny – favourite chapter heading: “Seeing The Bigger Picture (Harry Redknapp)” – and in part this is because it is simply very dull.

Poring over the cracker motto banalities (“if there is a lesson to take from this it is the tendency of great leaders to take ownership of their situations. In the words of Mick McCarthy…”) it is tempting to conclude that the real problem with The Manager is managers themselves. When they talk about football English managers just aren’t very interesting. Instead they are famously dull, anti-academic and light on any coherent management theory. Particularly when, as here, what they have to say is presented unquestioningly, without context, irony, analysis or any of the things most people who like football like about football.

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Travels through England’s football provinces
by Daniel Gray
Bloomsbury, £12.99
Reviewed by Charles Robinson
From WSC 321 November 2013

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The ravaged post-industrial landscape of provincial England, with its boarded-up shops and disused factories, speaks of a working-class culture decimated by Thatcherism and modernism. Are we left with an endless hell of Nando’s, pound shops and Westfield shopping centres stretching the length and breadth of the land? Yes, in a way, answers Daniel Gray, author of Hatters, Railwaymen And Knitters, his superlative new book. But there’s hope in the oft-ignored footballing backwaters. Seeking to rediscover England and “Englishness” without attempting some sociological definition of it, Gray visits football grounds and their attendant communities in the hope of finding some commonality, some communalism, in this “alien, uncomfortable England”. He finds it – sometimes.

Gray starts his travels in the comfortable environs of home, Middlesbrough, and thus begins a search for identity, something once found easily at Ayresome Park thanks partly to two childhood friends, the threesome hunting for the autographs of players and staff they often don’t even recognise. From here we move on to Ipswich, Luton, Crewe, Burnley, Carlisle and beyond as Gray searches for the essence of English football.

Gray’s search is constantly, by turns, furthered and frustrated by contradictions and paradoxes. In Luton, the surfeit of white faces and offensive chants of the Kenilworth Road crowd reflect the “segregation and suspicion” of the town itself, despite the vibrancy and ethnic diversity of its markets and sports clubs. There’s a way forward here, Gray suggests, towards a more tolerant, inclusive and engaged community. A self-confessed reluctant patriot and leftie, Gray attempts to find the best in everything despite his occasional misgivings. It’s OK to believe in England and English football, seems to be the message. This is despite the fact that Luton is the original home of the English Defence League, formerly known as the United Peoples of Luton.

Gray, thankfully, eschews the Premier League and heads straight for the smaller towns and cities that contributed so much to the Industrial Revolution, with poverty and injustice pervading almost every chapter. The story of Luton’s Peace Day Riots of 1919, in which the town hall was burned down, is told with an historian’s eye for detail and context. The hardships of the workers in the factories and mills of Bradford and Burnley are also beautifully related, leading the assumption, or prejudice, as Gray admits, that football existed, and still exists, as a “working-class release valve”.

This prejudice is destroyed in part by a visit to Chester, home of a community-owned club in a prosperous part of England. Football can still surprise and the final chapter takes in a non-League game in Newquay, in which the barman safeguards Gray’s half-drunk pint until he reappears at half time to finish it.

While cynical and critical, the book is beautifully written; pessimistic and damning, yet joyful and full of love for the game. Gray’s journey is a personal search for the soul of English football but it’s one that we can all deeply sympathise with in this age of mass consumption and soulless plastic bowl stadiums. The reality remains of football offering, in the words of JB Priestley, a “more splendid form of life”. Daniel Gray’s wonderful book is proof of that.

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