by Duncan Hamilton
Century, £14.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 313 March 2013

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A while ago at a book festival in Duncan Hamilton’s native Nottinghamshire I was asked why the literature of cricket tended towards nostalgia. The implication of the question was that the literature of other sports – football in particular – didn’t embrace the elegiac in quite the same way. I’d guess that’s true. Or at least it was until recently. The success of Gary Imlach’s excellent My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes, released in 2005, has proved that there is an audience for books about football that don’t simply focus on the here and now but drift back into the apparently perpetually mist-wreathed world of long ago. In football terms that is the 1950s (in cricket it would be the Edwardian era).

Duncan Hamilton’s The Footballer Who Could Fly follows two fine works on cricket and taps into a similar vein to Imlach’s book. It’s not just about football but also fathers and sons. Jim Hamilton was a Scottish pitman, an adopted Geordie who was forced by colliery closures to move to Nottinghamshire. He is laconic, his relationship with his stammering only child carried out more or less entirely through conversations about football: “Without football we were strangers under the same roof,” Hamilton observes.

From the opening account of a walk along the Tyne to Frank Brennan’s sports shop, the pages of The Footballer Who Could Fly – who was, as no Newcastle fan will need telling, Wyn “The Leap” Davies – are so rich with nostalgia that if you sniff them you can smell woodbines, blended Scotch, brown ale, coal smoke and the whiff of crushed expectations.

Hamilton senior idolises Jackie Milburn, a man so shy and self-deprecating public adulation seems to cause him almost physical pain (as the author discovers when he sits next to him one day in the St James’ Park press box and tries to engage him in conversation). He has great admiration too for Milburn’s nephew Bobby Charlton and there is a fine moment when, during a spell as a barman (one of Jim Hamilton’s many unsuccessful attempts to escape from a life underground), Jim Baxter spends an afternoon of lonely drinking in the rural pub where he’s working. Baxter, the father tells his son, does not seem to dwell on what might have been, which is just as well since: “If he’d thought too much about what he might have done with that talent I’m sure he would have driven himself mad.”

Though there’s a welcome and pithy assault on the vindictive way Newcastle chairman Stan Seymour treated long-serving centre-half Frank Brennan, generally the opinions of both Hamiltons don’t wander far from the orthodox. You know that when Bobby Moore appears you are going to find out that he wasn’t very quick but he could read the game superbly (which is true enough, clearly). But familiarity is what we want from nostalgia. If you are over 45, reading The Footballer Who Could Fly is the literary equivalent of tucking into a big bowl of treacle sponge and custard. It isn’t going to change anything but on a cold winter night it may be just what you need.

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The day the promises had to stop
by Denis Cassidy
Amberly Publishing, £9.99
Reviewed by Mark Brophy
From WSC 312 February 2013

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As calls for improved governance of football clubs continue to be made, Denis Cassidy’s experiences after being appointed a non-executive director of Newcastle United in 1997 give an illustration of just what can go wrong. He remained in position for 20 months, during a period which spanned the removal of Kenny Dalglish and appointment of Ruud Gullit as well as the News of the World undercover sting which forced the owners Freddy Shepherd and Douglas Hall to leave the board for a short time.

Despite the inside track he can provide, the book itself is a mixed bag. Though it’s styled as an attempt to show how the creation of the Premier League has affected the game in England, much of the book sets the scene for the section describing events during the short period Cassidy was on the board, and concludes with a run down of his thoughts on how to ensure success. Alex Ferguson’s views on success might prick up a few more ears, 
of course.

That’s not to say that there isn’t interest in the rest of the book. Cassidy’s insider knowledge isn’t limited to the period of his tenure on the board and his excellent contacts mean the reader is often left wanting to hear more. At one point, he reports meeting Lord Taylor just after the delivery of the report which changed English football post-Hillsborough, frustratingly without any record of the conversation.

It’s that 20-month period in the boardroom where the book comes to life, however. Though current owner Mike Ashley doesn’t escape criticism, Cassidy clearly disapproves of the way the Shepherds and Halls ran Newcastle; he calls them “vandals” at the point they are trying to force their way back into control of the plc board. He suggests John Hall used the club first as a promotional vehicle for his own regional interests then later as a cash cow for his other businesses. Cassidy points out that Newcastle abandoned corporate governance best practice when they removed independent directors  from the board in favour of the majority shareholders’ nominees. The Shepherds and Halls are painted as draining the club to the point of financial chaos, to their own personal benefit.

The final implied criticism, left to an appendix on the last page, is both the largest and via its format least open to argument. Without commentary, it’s an account detailing how much was taken from the club by the Hall and Shepherd families in their time at the club between 1996 and 2007. The total comes to nearly £144 million. As Cassidy succinctly puts it earlier: “Did their performance over that period justify such rewards?”

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The Keith Alexander story
by Rob Bradley
Vertical Editions, £14.99
Reviewed by Ian Plenderleith
From WSC 312 February 2013

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With Lincoln City perpetually languishing around the nether regions of the Conference, it’s tempting for wistful fans to recall more positive times at the club. These lie just a handful of years back when the Imps became a football trivia question for making the League Two play-offs five seasons in a row but failing to get promoted. This now seems like a bronzened era of relative glory.

When the late Keith Alexander began his second spell as manager at Sincil Bank in 2002, the crowds were as low and the money was as scarce as they’ve been throughout the past 30 years. But at least the team, as Alexander promised, would be “there or thereabouts” come the season’s end. Trawling the non-League bargain bins for big, tough lads who would do the proverbial job, the manager moulded Lincoln into a team that would not only survive but get results.

Lincoln’s inversion of tiki-taka won them few friends beyond the county boundaries but Alexander had already learned from his first year in charge at Lincoln in 1993 that playing neat football in England’s fourth tier garners faint praise, while losing you both games and your job. Sacked after just 12 months, the Football League’s first black manager dropped down to Ilkeston Town to relearn the basics of leadership. He returned to Lincoln as a man who knew how to get the best out of limited performers.

As a player, Alexander was a journeyman non-League striker who had the knack of making friends wherever he went, before moving on to try his luck somewhere else. He was a benevolent bender of rules, being fined by Barnet for turning out for a Sunday league team in Lincoln when he should have been resting and forging his birth certificate by two years at the age of 31 in order to secure a contract with Grimsby Town, his belated breakthrough as a player at League level.

The harshest criticism you will find of Alexander in this book is that he wasn’t much good in the air and that he could be tough with his players, as you would expect with any decent manager. You will read what you likely know – that he was a hard-working, genuine, funny and caring man who rarely forgot a name or a face and who would go 
out of his way to talk to fans and journalists without ever making them feel like it was an imposition.

Like its subject, this book is difficult to criticise. It’s written by another fine human being, Rob Bradley, the former Lincoln chairman who famously remortgaged his house to help save the club. It’s no great investigative work but it is a thorough and warmly told story with a sprinkling of wonderful anecdotes, such as the time when, playing for Cliftonville, Alexander smiled and blew kisses at bellicose Glentoran fans chanting racist abuse.

That kind of reaction is one of the reasons why family, friends, fans and fellow players universally remember a great bloke who, in the words of ex-Lincoln defender Ben Futcher, “was the only manager in football who could pull you into his office, tell you you’re not playing, and you came out with a smile on your face”.

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by Gary James
James Ward, £25
Reviewed by Ian Farrell
From WSC 312 February 2013

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Meteoric success in any area, be it sport, show business or politics, is guaranteed to bring a glut of books within six months and sure enough there has been a recent explosion in the number of Manchester City titles on the market. Any new additions to the list are inevitably going to be viewed with ever-increasing cynicism, but Manchester: The City Years can’t de derided as a cash-in. Its author has been writing about the club since before Sergio Agüero was born and this is clearly a book several years in the making. From the first stirrings of organised football in Manchester through to the drama of last May, this is as detailed a history as anyone could conceivably want.

Season by season, over the course of 600 pages, City’s up and downs are brought to life through a truly staggering level of research. Add in several hundred photographs, press clippings, newspaper cartoons, programme covers and cigarette cards and it’s difficult to pinpoint anything more that could have been done to chronicle the club’s successes, failures, or even the relatively uneventful 
bits in between.

There is also plenty of opinion and spin to go with the facts and figures. This is a book written by a hardcore fan rather than an impartial historian and Gary James never misses an opportunity to defend the club, criticise its critics and highlight any occasions where he feels they’ve been the victim of unfair treatment or media bias. He is particularly sensitive to any negative reaction to the new order of the last five years and any fans nostalgic for the old ways might feel uncomfortable with the blanket praise he has for the current regime.

Readers of more delicate sensibilities might also blanch at the glowing portrayal of former CEO Garry Cook, the ex-Nike executive notorious for conducting interviews with all the dignified humility of Don King. Cook left his position after he accidentally sent a mocking email to Nedum Onuoha’s cancer-stricken mother, something he initially denied by claiming his account had been hacked by someone out to frame him. Here, he receives the very lightest admonishment for his actions, with the media subject to considerably greater scrutiny for the manner of its reporting of the story.  

But whether you buy into the author’s worldview or not, Manchester: The City Years is a hugely impressive piece of work. Whatever your view of Manchester City, whether you’ve always liked them, always disliked them or have switched your opinion in recent times, it would be difficult to deny that they’re one of English football’s most interesting institutions and James may well have produced the definitive account of their story.

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