They don’t make them like him any more
by Paul Firth
Bantamspast, £12
Reviewed by Jason McKeown
From WSC 314 April 2013

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It’s long been a mystery to me how people of a certain age will lament the behaviour of modern day footballers and then, within the same breath, romanticise the bad lads of decades earlier. The story of Bobby Campbell, Bradford City’s all-time leading scorer in two spells between 1979 and 1986, features tales of drinking sessions, fighting and police run-ins that would prompt moralistic howls of derision were he playing today. Yet the book’s tagline – “They don’t make them like him any more” – invites us to consider that football is worse off today for the absence of someone whose off-field antics have become as much a part of Valley Parade folklore as his 131 Bantams goals.

Still there is an almost apologetic tone to some of the stories of punch-ups with bouncers and drinking in the dressing room before matches, with biographer Paul Firth focusing more on Campbell’s many admirable qualities. Any footballer who recovers from a broken leg at 19, plays for nine different clubs across three continents and makes the Northern Ireland 1982 World Cup squad after a season in Division Four has quite a story to tell.

The book is a combination of Firth’s narration and the views of Campbell himself, which are interwoven throughout. At times the switching back and forth into the subject’s direct quotes feels awkward but the striker’s blunt statements add a valuable layer of understanding into how his career unfolded. Campbell is brutally honest about the sectarian troubles he experienced growing up in Belfast (“I had a few friends who were assassinated, one just for courting a Catholic girl”) and why his career, which started promisingly at Aston Villa, at one stage drifted into the relative obscurity of playing part-time in Australia.

Campbell’s two spells at Bradford City, his heyday, take in two promotions, the club almost going bankrupt (he had to be sold to Derby to raise money) and the tragic Valley Parade fire of 1985. You get a sense that, although Campbell had something of a hardman reputation, he deeply cared about team-mates, supporters and the club. The book’s most memorable moments are provided by interviewees who played alongside Campbell. They praise both his playing ability and caring nature, such as when he raced off a team bus that had crashed into a car to try to save the lives of two children: “It’s typical of the person, going in and not being afraid of anything,” former team-mate Stuart McCall says.

Following the Bradford fire, a City supporter tells of Campbell’s regular hospital visits to various supporters’ bedsides, as he and many others recovered. Despite a decent final spell at Wigan, Campbell was apparently fed up with football when he retired at the age of 32. Nonetheless, his biographer does an excellent job conveying the lasting legacy of this unlikely hero.

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A History of the Goalkeeper
by Jonathan Wilson
Orion Books, £20
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 314 April 2013

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Of all the “name” football writers on the merry-go-round today, Jonathan Wilson is arguably the best value, even if a few of his many theories and pet obsessions tend towards the overly self-indulgent. He’s a busy man, too – running the quarterly Blizzard while producing columns for the Guardian and Sports Illustrated and roughly one book per year. The Outsider is his sixth tome since 2006, the kind of workrate that sees a lot of writers spread themselves too thinly. But Wilson’s prodigious energy doesn’t seem to dilute the quality of what he comes up with and this meticulous study of the goalkeeping art is characterised by the attention to detail that he brings to everything he writes.

Starting with a study of football in the 1800s, he demonstrates how the mere fact of being a goalkeeper has always carried with it the smell of the scapegoat. In Victorian times the position was occupied by small boys, “duffers” and “funk-sticks” (milksops who had failed to perform elsewhere on the pitch). As the years went on and the sport evolved at snail’s pace, deaths were commonplace for keepers – Celtic’s John Thomson, accidentally kicked in the head during a match in 1931, being an infamous example.

Wilson has put in plenty of air miles, heading for locales as far-flung as Brazil and Russia. The latter country, which once produced great keepers by the lorryload, has nursed a special obsession with the position since before the 1917 revolution (an assertion backed up with quotes from none other than novelist Vladimir Nabokov). Brazil, contrariwise, has had mostly white keepers due to some strange socio-racial issues – the odd exception such as Dida not withstanding. Although, as Wilson shows, English football has nurtured a similar instinctive distrust of black keepers.

African keepers, specifically, sit even lower down the food chain of perception. Two of the best, Cameroon’s Thomas N’Kono and Joseph-Antoine Bell, enjoyed a (mostly) friendly 20-year rivalry after learning from Yugoslavian legend Vladimir Beara. N’Kono was the natural, Bell the hard worker. N’Kono shone at the 1982 World Cup, got a move to Spain out of it and became an Espanyol hero. Bell had to wait until the disastrous USA 94 campaign to play in the finals, by which time he was 39 and too far over the hill to do himself justice.

Wilson’s fondness for idiosyncratic structuring sometimes weakens the book’s sense of direction. The Brazilian chapter abruptly veers into Scotland for several pages, then heads back to Brazil. Not that the material therein isn’t interesting or informative – the passages concerning the appalling bad luck that plagued Jim Leighton’s long career are particularly vivid – but layering the material in such an odd way seems unnecessarily perverse.

In the main The Outsider is a terrific history of its subject. It wears its knowledgeable perspective lightly and deftly works its vast research into the text without battering you over the head with it. Wilson can always be relied upon to come up with something a little bit different and a little bit special, and this has plenty of both.

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Damning evidence about the state of their ground makes tough reading for Owls fans, admits Tom Hocking

In late 1898 officials from The Wednesday FC learned that the lease on Olive Grove, their home for a decade, could not be renewed. The land was needed for a railway expansion and they had until the end of the season to find a replacement. With few locations available they settled on High Bridge, Owlerton. The plot of meadowland to the north of Sheffield was uneven, a long way from the city centre and poorly served by public transport.

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From the other end of the ground Nottingham Forest fans looked on as the disaster unfolded in front of them, recalls Ian Preece

Pretty much every account of Hillsborough seems to mention the weather. The truth is it was an incredibly beautiful morning: blue skies, fluffy white clouds, just a bit chilly in the shade – but the forecast was great. Winter was over and if there was a morning to put the proverbial spring in your stride, this was it.

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Nick McAleenan asseses how the Independent Panel’s report has raised questions about the original enquiries and questions whether criminal prosecutions will begin

There is a saying that “justice delayed is justice denied”. Since April 15, 1989, there have been numerous investigations and enquiries into what happened at Hillsborough, including a coroner’s inquest, public enquiry and various legal cases.

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