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by Paul McVeigh
Bloomsbury, £14.99
Reviewed by Ashley Clark
From WSC 319 September 2013
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.
The story of Welsh football
by Phil Stead
Y Lolfa, £14.95
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 319 September 2013
The condition of Welsh football is often serious but never dull, and the same can be said of Phil Stead’s engagingly readable chronicle. It is history as one thing after another, stronger on anecdote than analysis. The prose is more solid than stylish but with flourishes such as the characterisation of Jerry Sherman, briefly and disastrously Newport County’s owner, as having “the shifty-eyed evasiveness of a potion seller at a wild west show”.
Clubs are not neglected. We learn how Wrexham got their “Robins” nickname, that Cardiff possibly sacrificed the 1924 League title to Wales call-ups and that West Ham’s “Bubbles” anthem may have been borrowed from Swansea – but this is essentially the story of the Wales team and the Football Association of Wales (FAW).
The anecdotal style works well in the early years. It introduces debonair goalkeeper Leigh Roose, who dated music hall star Marie Lloyd and conceded a Scottish winner because he was talking to a spectator, and an earlier keeper who played against England with his forearms in plaster. There are two one-armed players, a schoolmaster accidentally shot dead by a pupil and evidence of the national surname shortage, with different players called Oswald Davies on consecutive pages. One FAW secretary is imprisoned for forgery and its second president is sacked for providing insufficient support – he was the nephew of the MP and magistrate who became founding president after licensing a pub lock-in at the first meeting.
Running themes do emerge. The FAW are perennially skint, so opt for income over team priorities in locating key qualifiers. They are beset by English club obstructionism over player release, localised factionalism – Oswestry v Wrexham prefiguring Swansea v Cardiff – and they treat Llanelli’s ambitions as unsympathetically in 1958 as in 2013.
They are baffled by foreign travel. Players routinely forget passports and it is hard to forgive the official who could have averted Vinnie Jones’s Wales debut, but let him play with limited documentation. The infamous incident when player Gil Reece was bumped from a flight packed with committee men is merely the culmination of traditions exemplified by taking only 18 players, but 25 officials including the FAW secretary’s sister, to the 1958 World Cup. And then there are the qualification near-misses, that litany of dodgy Scottish penalties and doped-up Russians for which the sad but inescapable explanation is that even good Wales teams are usually not quite good enough.
Red Dragons really should have an index but there are few factual glitches. Stead elevates Wrexham to Division Two 45 years too early, while the Trevor Ford who gave vital evidence at the manslaughter trial after a South Wales Transport player died on the pitch in 1934 was almost certainly not the rumbustious centre-forward, ten at the time, but his father.
But these are minor quibbles. Stead doubtless once dreamed of playing for Wales, but with this book serves his nation better than many who achieved that ambition.
In
Britain And Ireland
by Shaun Tyas
Paul Watkins, £19.95
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 319 September 2013
Shaun Tyas opens a new area in the examination of the minutiae of football culture. We’ve had stadiums, haircuts, kits, programmes, even Subbuteo; why not club nicknames? I would not have thought that it was an overly promising proposition but by dint of thorough desk research, extensive use of Wikipedia and taking the whole of the British Isles (including Isle of Man) as his canvas he generates over 350 pages of entries. He quotes a beautiful 19th-century aphorism – “a nickname is a biography in a word” – as a kind of justification for the study. Not only do so many clubs share the same nickname (I note to my surprise 11 cases of the Royals) but some clubs have many nicknames.
The main entertainment value lies in the archaic and the unofficial nicknames rather than the official and the well-known stories. To give an idea of the scope here are all the nicknames he found associated with Bristol City: Babes, Cider Army, City, Eighty-Twoers, Reds, Robins, Slave Traders, Turnips and Wurzels. As you might well imagine a number of these have been bestowed by fans of rival clubs and are sourced from a 2003 fans’ survey. Old football annuals and cigarette cards provide much of the source material.
Tyas has tackled his subject more from the top down – that is using official and often national sources, rather than from individual club histories and fan interviews. The inevitable and forgivable consequence is some omissions, common to the first edition of any dictionary. For instance, Reading have also been known as the R’s which has mutated into URZ and been in common usage over the past decade; the apparently unknown derivation of Spanners (a Charlton nickname for Millwall) dates to a spanner-throwing incident at Elm Park in August 1995.
Small gaps perhaps but Tyas has approached his task in a determinedly scholarly way with a full complement of appendices, indices, bibliography and cross-references that allow the reader to skip easily around the main body of the text. If that were not sufficient he offers a detailed four-step classification of nicknames into 50 categories so that in “name-based on locality/human history/language/proverbial sayings” you will find “The Bairns” (Falkirk) and three possible derivations thereof.
There are times when one could feel that this is a lightweight subject taken rather too seriously but then nobody nowadays would dismiss the 1960s folklore work of Peter and Iona Opie on children’s nursery rhymes and playground games which at the time may have appeared inconsequential. Moreover, while Tyas is methodical and, as far as I can tell, factually very sound, he writes with real joy and positivity about his chosen subject. This dictionary is an entertaining volume to dip into and there cannot be a fan who would fail to learn something of interest or amusement. I’d never heard of the Old Farm derby (Norwich v Ipswich) or this neat, modern biography in a word: Jackburn for Blackburn.
1953: Cup, Coronation and Stanley Matthews
by David Tossell
Pitch, £16.99
Reviewed by Charles Robinson
From WSC 319 September 2013
Sixty years on, no cup final has yet matched the game in 1953 in which Blackpool beat Bolton 4-3 with a late intervention from the incomparable Stanley Matthews. In The Great English Final author David Tossell relates the full story of this famous day, weaving social and economic history with the tale of the game to great effect.
Aside from the match reports which bookend the chapters, not just of the game itself but of the rounds leading up to the final, Tossell expertly discusses a range of issues which touch on the modern game. In one chapter, he addresses players’ wages and the challenges that big-name stars, such as Stan Mortensen – scorer of a hat-trick in the 1953 final – went through to secure a decent wage and to protect themselves against their inevitable and oncoming retirement. Although, in Matthews’s case, that wouldn’t happen for a few years yet.
Another topic that exercises Tossell is that of the supposed tactical naivety of British football in the post-war period. As he explains, 1953 was the year not only of the coronation of Elizabeth II but also the year of England’s famous and chastening defeat by Hungary. This disastrous result could have heralded a period of deep introspection, of the kind wished for by many England fans today. However, the author argues that English football fans were more concerned with entertainment than with sophisticated displays of tactical ingenuity after many years of war, hardship and suffering.
Despite that, Tossell also highlights the reckless attacking philosophy of the Blackpool manager Joe Smith, at the same time revealing the profound differences between the methods of managers in that post-war period to our own. The captain of the team was much more significant in those days and a delightful early chapter on Blackpool skipper Harry Johnston demonstrates this.
Of course, the book leans towards Blackpool, Matthews and his incredible achievements. The narrative is compelling, as the 38-year-old Matthews, a defeated Wembley finalist twice before, defies age to claim the medal that he promised his father on his deathbed. Interestingly, Tossell also uses contemporary analysis of the game, using Opta statistics to show that Matthews was, in fact, not the most effective player on the field. Ernie Taylor, Mortensen and Bolton’s Willie Moir, among others, were all more productive according to the modern analysis.
Nonetheless, the final is fittingly described as the Matthews Final. Tossell derides the contemporary media for skewing and distorting any soundbite from players and managers so as to fit in to some predetermined story. But the Matthews tale gripped the nation and even the Bolton players and supporters celebrated with him. Matthews was a genuine star before the media obsession with football and the cult of celebrity that blights the modern game. Tossell, rightly shortlisted many times for the British Sports Book awards, tells a riveting story of social and sporting history, weaving his narrative strands inwards towards that famous late goal scored not by Matthews, but by one Bill Perry, another forgotten hero of that famous day.