The Autobiography

Norman Whiteside
Headline, £18.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 249 November 2007 

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It’s June 1991, and Norman Whiteside won’t get out of bed. His fearless attitude on the pitch inspired a Manchester United fanzine, The Shankhill Skinhead, but he spends his “bed-in” crying, unable to come to terms with the reality that he is finished as a footballer at 26. So begins Determined, his autobiography, and he spares readers none of the harrowing details as he traces how a series of medical decisions, made in good faith and often the standard treatment then available, had, as he puts it, “done for him” by the time he was 18. By that tender age he is unable to rotate his hips, giving him his trademark robotic-style run, has lost his pace, and has a knee in which bone grinds against bone. Chips will henceforth regularly flake off into the joint, causing excruciating pain, swelling it up to the size of a swede, necessitating further surgery. Injuries used to be discussed in macho style in football autobiographies, an inevitable consequence of a man’s game, the honourable scars of battle. The recent trend of revealing the pain, both physical and mental, of professional football is refreshing and welcome, if often difficult to read without wincing.

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The Biography
by Joel Miller
John Blake, £17.99
Reviewed by Paul Doyle
From WSC 247 September 2007 

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Good things about this book include: the high standard of spelling; functionally correct grammar; and the fact that if you dropped it from a great height on to the head of the person who recommended it to you, it would do serious damage. Beyond that, the highest praise you could give it is that it reads like an extended Wikipedia entry, a broadly efficient collation of information already in the public domain. If you think that makes it worth almost 18 of your English pounds, then you presumably pay for WSC with wheelbarrows of gold. Well done.

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My Story
Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99
Reviewed by Tim Springett
From WSC 250 December 2007

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Did he think of that title himself or pay someone else to come up with it? Whichever, it’s apt, of course – the subject is so tall that he doesn’t even fit in the frame for the book’s front-cover photo. Peter Crouch is a player who – as he reminds us frequently – has had to work harder than many to prove himself. I wondered whether he would show similar dedication to his autobiography, which he has had published at the tender age of 26. Well, actually, he hasn’t done too badly.

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Ferguson and Shankly
by Oliver Holt
Pan, £8.99
Reviewed by David Stubbs
From WSC 250 December 2007

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Sir Alex Ferguson and Bill Shankly have some things in common, opines Oliver Holt, not least in their sharing of the sentiments expressed in the title to this double biography. For Ferguson, the need to prevail – to compensate, perhaps, for the setbacks and disappointments of his early working life – was deep-dyed. He was even known, when a game of cards with his players wasn’t going well, to chuck the entire pack across the coach in fearsome, capillary-bursting pique. As for Shanks, he outlined the attitudes that made him practically a hermit to football in an uncharacteristically revealing letter to a journalist in 1955. “I used to think that it would be better to die than to lose,” he wrote. “To enable me to reach the top, I went to all extremes, no woman, no smoking, early to bed – this went for years, but it was worthwhile.”

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The Autobiography of Ian Holloway
Green Umbrella, £16.99
Reviewed by Matt Nation
From WSC 250 December 2007

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Although Ian Holloway himself admits to being “not a particularly nice kid”, it doesn’t appear to have stopped his eye for a wrong ’un extending into adult life. After Ollie is dropped as a low-paid teenager at Bristol Rovers, Mike Channon attempts to console him by first by offering him £1,000 and then snatching it away at the last second. Three lines later, however, Channon is described as a “fantastic bloke”. Both Bobby Gould’s and Dave Bassett’s man-management skills are (once again) shown to be about as sensitive as a nipple wrench in the bogs, yet Ollie “likes” and “respects” his former gaffers. Only with Wally Downes does Ollie eschew praise with faint damnation in favour of a full-on, and fully deserved, kicking after the former Wimbledon man cracked wise about the new boy’s wife’s chemotherapy.

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