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General rules
Accents
Put them in on French, German, Spanish and Portuguese words where we’re certain they’re right. Leave them off all other languages except in occasional instances when it’s polite, eg with a contributor’s name. Use discretion when the whole article contains accents and they are definitely correct and consistent. Leave them off common English words like cliche and protege. But do put them on words that could otherwise be confusing eg exposé.
by Richard Purden
Hachette Scotland, £8.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 311 January 2013
Even Celtic supporters – some of us, anyway – are often irritated by the self-mythologising flannel regularly parped out by sections of the club’s fanbase. “A cause”, “a rebel club”, “different”: all these claims are routinely made, with not very much at all to back them up. At face value, Richard Purden’s collection of interviews with Celtic fans – some famous, some not – looks like an attempt to perpetuate this sort of empty puffery. There’s more to it than that, though, and Purden shows plenty of imagination in his choices of interviewee. One of the best chapters in the book is a conversation with Roberto Longobardi, a longstanding Celtic fan from Rome who is so dedicated he visited the grave of Johnny Doyle, a winger who died aged 30 in 1981, during an away trip to Kilmarnock.
Longobardi cannot stress enough how much he detests the “shameful” Paolo di Canio, who is still held in high regard by a lot of Celts. “The only thing worse than a mercenary is a fascist,” he says. “We shouldn’t celebrate Di Canio’s time at Celtic because the Nazis and the Holocaust still hang over us.” He also tells Purden that Enrico Annoni, a “very good servant”, took the time to learn about the club’s history; unlike Massimo Donati, who, when unable to answer Longobardi’s questions about Celtic, mumbled sheepishly: “I don’t live in Glasgow.”
Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr contributes a predictable but entertaining fusillade against the commercialisation of modern football, noting that “we know far too much” about the players’ wage packets and wives. He likens a pre-game ritual to a pre-gig one, not wanting to let the people down. Eddi Reader of Fairground Attraction tells how she tracked down her father’s old Rangers-supporting friends in a hardcore Bluenose pub. Composer James Macmillan’s heartfelt declaration that Catholicism is intrinsic to understanding the whole Celtic thing might raise eyebrows among those who regard the club as open to all.
Pat Nevin’s is the most distanced perspective, having started off as a Bhoys fan and ended up following Hibs. For some reason, he detests Martin O’Neill’s hugely successful 2000-05 side, deriding them as unwatchable and a “slightly more sophisticated version of [Wimbledon]”. Nevin claims incorrectly that the gifted Lubo Moravcik was frozen out: in fact, Moravcik played in two-thirds of league games under O’Neill then retired, not because he had been pushed to the margins by beefy-thighed warriors, but because he was 36 years old.
A few errors have slipped through, such as when Purden writes that Dermot “the Kaiser” Desmond is worth “145 billion euro”, a decimal point having vanished two points to the east at the crucial moment. He goes on to say that a “financial stake in Celtic isn’t just business”. Gordon Strachan, who was crucially denied the £800,000 required to sign Steven Fletcher in 2009, might disagree. Those aside, this is a diverting enough read, even if a number of the contributions stray the wrong side of maudlin, uncritical adoration.
A new anthology of Victorian football writing
Edited by Paul Brown
Goal-Post, £8.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 311 January 2013
There has been a recent growth of interest in Victorian football, possibly because, as the editor here speculates, we “have grown weary of certain aspects of modern football [and] will no doubt find much to admire in the Victorian game”. November 2012 saw a restaging of the 1872 FA Cup final at The Oval, next year sees the 150th anniversary celebrations of the FA and there is excellent and revelatory work being done on the early club histories of, for example, Arsenal – as featured in WSC 300.
From the modern fan’s perspective 19th century accounts of football appear remarkable for their lack of analysis and self-awareness: plenty of hot scrimmages and backing-up but very little on how football became so popular so quickly and what it was about football that particularly engaged players and fans over other sports. This anthology of contemporary articles goes a short way to providing some of the answers.
It is not a history lesson but a “flavour” of football writing at the time. Still, it is odd to suggest that a piece from 1869 on how to make a football shares the same flavour as an 1898 interview on Tottenham’s business plan for the 20th century (which was well executed, as it happens). There is no obvious organising principle and if you want to sense the development of the game chronologically you have to do the page-finding yourself.
Of the 21 articles a few are well known: the foundation meeting of the FA, the first Scotland v England international match. The earliest article is from 1862 and the latest from 1900 but there are only three from 1872-82, the decade which was the most formative period in establishing the popularity of football. This was the one era where that old Shanklyism “there’s nothing new in football” would have failed. Paul Brown finds a number of later pieces that resonate with modern football concerns: the celebrity footballer tempted by the good life, a referee’s view of gamesmanship, Burnley falling out of the top division into “the dark”, and vulgar and abusive fans. There’s even a forerunner of the Respect campaign, “success to football, irrespective of class or creed”, in the form of an after-dinner toast, not pre-match banner.
One fascinating extract features a reporter travelling away with the team (think of Hunter Davies’s 1972 The Glory Game set in a Victorian railway carriage) and another gives a good impression of what it was like to be in the first ever floodlit crowd (Bramall Lane, 1878, unsafe). Brown’s intention is to make a series from this often beautifully written material and I look forward to seeing more of how much, and how little, football has changed since its first days.