by Ashley Williams with David Brayley
Y Lolfa, £14.95
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 316 June 2013

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The first memory of Ashley Williams remains vivid. Late season 2008, driving a clearance down the right wing at the Liberty Stadium but checking his follow-through so that the ball dropped perfectly for a team-mate. This was clearly not your usual lower-league defender. Five years on he is vastly more familiar but retains the capacity to surprise. Prospective purchasers may (as this one did) quail at a 376-page diary and replace it on the shelves. Swansea fans or not, they should think again or miss something pretty impressive.

It is not that there is any single blinding revelation in his account of Swansea’s 2011-12 season. Instead there is an accumulation of detail, anecdote and observation, forming a compellingly credible picture of footballing life. Credit to David Brayley, who clearly asked the right questions in assembling a book whose clarity and easy conversational flow make for great readability. But co-writers are only as good as their material. It is clear from a terrific opening passage recalling Swansea’s promotion celebrations at Wembley Stadium – with champagne off-limits until Sky say so and Nathan Dyer absent until he does the necessary for a random drug test – that Ashley has the attributes of a good reporter.

He is thoughtful, acutely observant and perceptive. There’s also a sharp self-awareness evident where, for instance, he moans about play-acting by former team-mate Jordi Gómez, then adds “but I have to own up to double standards”, having been happy to accept the fruits of Gómez’s misdemeanours when he played for Swansea.

There’s sharper, clearer tactical analysis than in 100 editions of Match of the Day and intuitive observation of team-mates, notably a brilliant exposition of Leon Britton’s role in Swansea’s rise. No Manchester City fan can be shocked by his view of Scott Sinclair as a gifted player who “probably doesn’t believe in himself enough and actually lacks a bit of confidence”.

He’s refreshingly frank about likes and dislikes, notably of referees. His thoughts on Phil Dowd as “a referee with empathy for the game and the battles that form part of a competitive match” are highlighted by a joyous description of his interaction across a match with Dowd and Kevin Davies. And while no player ever lost by praising his manager, there is little doubt of his genuine admiration for Brendan Rodgers, depicted as a meticulous organiser and superb man-manager who “developed me in so many ways, probably off the field as much as on”.

He concludes by hinting at a sequel. And 2012-13 offers plenty of material: lifting Swansea’s first major trophy, provoking perhaps the silliest post-match whinge of Alex Ferguson’s career and getting tapped up, via the media, by Liverpool and Arsenal. It should be another decent read but still better would be the really good autobiography – taking in his early rejection by West Brom and climb to success via Hednesford, Stockport and Swansea – he clearly has within him.

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The life of Stanley Matthews
by Jon Henderson
Yellow Jersey, £18.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 316 June 2013

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Stanley Matthews is one of those figures who looms so large in the consciousness of the nation there’s a tendency to think we already know all there is to know about him. The truth, which becomes apparent while reading Jon Henderson’s vivid biography, is that what most of us actually know about a player whose career spanned 29 seasons is confined to the salient facts about a couple of famous matches and a whole heap of the sort of cliches (including the one about how he always crossed the ball so that the laces didn’t hit the forward’s head) that were the 1960s equivalent of YouTube.

As you might expect, the truth, as it emerges in this well-researched and cannily written book, is more complex and interesting than the well-worn phrases about body swerve, dropping a cross on a postage stamp and the 1953 FA Cup final might have led us to expect. Matthews himself was a difficult character to read, on good terms with his team-mates yet always distant from them. Like many men of his generation and background he was not given to talking about his feelings, or to public displays of emotion. Even the obvious affection of football fans across the world could not draw him out. “He never interacted with the crowd,” Blackpool team-mate Jimmy Armfield recalls. “It just wasn’t his way.”

Matthews’s dribbling was so phenomenal that after one particularly spectacular run and goal against Belgium, the opposition players spontaneously applauded him as he ran back to the halfway line. Yet, for all the brightness he brought to the game, he was a rigid, almost Spartan figure – a non-drinker and non-smoker who sat quietly in the corner while his Stoke City team-mates were swigging beer from a hotel chamber pot, during surreptitious late-night sessions, and took cold showers before matches to help him focus. Locked in an unhappy marriage, frustrated by a succession of club and international managers who regarded him as a temperamental “show off” and by the financial constraints imposed by a job that, despite his celebrity, never paid him more than £20 a week, he clearly felt the strain. One day, sitting in a first-class railway carriage with his Stoke colleagues, he watched a luggage porter going about his work and remarked wistfully: “There’s something about normal life, isn’t there?”

As Henderson clearly demonstrates, whatever Matthews’s wishes – whether he was dazzling Hitler’s henchmen with a breathtaking display in Berlin following the shameful “Nazi salute” business, arguing bitterly over a loyalty bonus at Stoke, being reprimanded by the War Office for selling coffee on the black market in Brussels or eloping with “the true love of my life” Mila Winterova, a Czech who it emerged had once been a spy – his was a life that was destined never to be normal.

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Seb Patrick mantains that it is becoming harder to admire or support a player who has lots of skill but repeatedly damages his club’s image

It’s difficult not to imagine that Luis Suárez has a “goodwill meter” that he lets fill up to a certain point before jettisoning all of it in one go. Having arrived in England fresh from serving a ban for biting PSV’s Otman Bakkal – and with his part in Ghana’s exit from the 2010 World Cup still fresh in the memory – it took a quick adjustment to English football for people to start thinking maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

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