‘Christmas Time,
Mistletoe and Wine,
Three long away trips
And a parking fine’
…So sang Sir Cliff Richard in his paean to travelling fans at Christmas. For those of you planning to spend Boxing Day nursing a decent hangover and nibbling at a variety of Turkey treats, here’s a top ten of what you might hope to have received the day before.
This Christmas is very much a ‘what might have been’ list. The re-signing of Danny Baker for the BBC put paid to Baker and Kelly’s Great Football Debates Settled Once and For All, and whatever caused In Search of Duncan Ferguson to be put back a year left the football biographies looking pretty threadbare.
The second part of Sir Bobby Charlton’s trilogy of autobiographies, ‘My England Years’, and Ian Ridley’s opportune Kevin Keegan biography would do, but I doubt you’ll learn anything new. So I’d like to suggest two biographies of footballing personalities who have slipped off the radar.
Malcolm Allison will always be remembered as one of the great English football personalities, Fedoras and Fur Coats, Champagne and Dolly Birds, spending outrageous sums on players at Manchester City…no hang on, that last one is Mark Hughes surely…oh no, Malcolm got there first. David Tossel’s ‘Big Mal, the High Life and Hard Times of Malcolm Allison, Football Legend’ is a riotous yet sensitive read. You couldn’t pack much more into this, tuberculosis, professional gambling, wine, women and song…occasionally some football thrown in before the inevitable decline into alcoholism. It would be easy for this book to descend into cheap gags and play up the ‘larger’ side of Allison, but its strength is its balance and in the end it’s a very readable parable for the modern footballer.
So what could top losing a lung and getting in a bath with a page 3 model? How about kidnapping, a helicopter crash, half your team massacred and getting shot in the head? There are loads I left out too! Roy Race is the subject of Mick Collins’ ‘Roy of the Rovers’, the unauthorised biography of Britain’s longest serving footballing colossus. Race did it all, sometimes twice and always represented the noble side of the game.
Collins is a good sportswriter, his last book ‘All Round Genius’ proved he had a nose for the hidden story and rather than being a fawning cut ‘n’ paste throwaway, we get an insight into the real Race (if that makes sense). Collins isn’t afraid to turn over a few rocks either. The questionable signings of Emlyn Hughes and Bob Wilson, long after they’d retired are criticised and he goes to town when Martin Kemp and Steve 'plonker’ Norman of Spandau Ballet are recruited.
Frankly it’s a delightful read, you get lost again in Melchester Rovers and the backbone of that great team is revived, Blackie Gray, Vernon Elliott, Kenny ‘the cat’ Carter and wasn’t there a Red Indian chief in the midfield? Marvellous.
Most of us do our Football reading in bite size chunks with the newspapers and Christmas usually finds plenty of columnists’ offerings bound up and priced to sell. Ignoring the Cult of the Celebrity that has filled the sports pages recently there are some real quality reads available this year.
Brian Reade has been covering Liverpool for the Daily Mirror, amongst others since 1965. ‘43 Years with the Same Bird’ is his story and it’s his journalistic slant that takes this a notch or two higher than your usual fan’s eye view. It’s been an incident packed 43 years too, but through ecstasy and tragedy nothing, you sense, hit him harder than his son revealing he was a ‘blue’.
Giles Smith is a columnist for hire, once he’d got pretensions in the music business out of the way (Lost in Music). He’ll watch telly for anyone (Midnight in the Garden of Evel Knievel) and can often be found musing on cars for the Guardian. ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin…Keegan’ is his collected football columns for the Times and it’s almost brilliant. He’s witty, polemical and more often than not, bang on target. It’s a great read that’s ruined only by two things. There’s too much of the Premier League and he’s a Chelsea season ticket holder. Nothing wrong with that and he’s often happy to put his club down, especially the odious Kenyon. But I’m sorry Giles, rage all you want, Chelsea bought those titles and no matter how funny you are, nothing will change my mind on that. Despite that flaw, I heartily recommend this.
Heftier, both in size and price, is the ‘Guardian Book of Football Writing’. A tremendous collection of articles from their last 50 years. These days we tend to consider the Telegraph and the Times as the beacons of football writing, but it’s easy to forget that the Guardian has been home to some serious talent. Frank Keating, Brian Glanville, David Lacey and now Kevin McCarra stand up to any line up from the back pages and some of their most iconic work is well presented in this collection. By any standard, this is a cracking gift.
David Davies first came to my attention as part of a crack Look North local news team alongside the indefatigable Stuart Hall and cuddly John Mundy (partner of Roy ‘Corrie’ Barraclough and often there before the close down to remind us to switch everything off and have a safe night). They were good, they had to be, on the other side was the formidable Granada Reports outfit. Bob Greaves, Anthony H Wilson, Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigen…oh yes, titanic stuff. Davies handled the sport with a calm, boyish authority, not exactly exuding charisma but then not as creepy as Madeley.
No one saw his next career move coming, The Football Association, eventually becoming Executive Director! Davies had 13 years at Lancaster Gate and Soho Square; he was there to witness the cult of Hoddle, Keegan’s meltdown and the charm and smarm of Sven. In between he dealt with fake sheikhs, dodgy builders and a certain secretary. It’s written with the help of one of our best sportswriters, Henry Winter, so all in all FA Confidential has got to be worth a go. I just can’t help but think that at the height of the Faria Alam scandal, he must have looked at Palios and Eriksson and thought, ‘oi! what’s wrong with me?’
‘Tis the season of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award and at the time of writing the shortlist has just been announced. There’s always a football representative, even though in my humble opinion, there shouldn’t have been this year. Not that the two football titles that made it are not good books in their own right. It’s just that the others were better. Still why quibble, one of them, Rowan Simon’s Bamboo Goalposts, recounts his time in China trying to get the locals into the World’s game. It’s cheerful, charming and occasionally perceptive, but controversially not strong enough to make my top ten.
Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid did though and for any football fan that wants to step beyond the once smoke filled haze of the pub conversation; this is the book for you. Wilson’s is a football history via its tactics and is a fascinating insight into the great developers of the game and why England went from owning the game to third rate in a matter of years. On occasion the figures take over and you do feel that you are back at school but in general this is an interesting and informative read that will arm any casual reader with the wherewithal to enliven any football debate.
Although it’s not strictly a football book, Fighting Talk, the book of the radio show will satisfy anyone who prefers their reading to be done in short bursts and preferably in the ‘smallest’ room. Miscellanies have become a staple on the shelves and this has the benefit of capturing some of the flavour of the very popular Radio version. For those of you purists who want only football trivia, try Day of the Match instead, 365 football stories for the year.
So what about a ‘book of the year’, well in my mind it came down to two contenders. Narrowly missing out of the top accolade was by far the worthiest book on my list. More Than Just a Game is as much about the history of our times as it is football. Professor Chuck Korr, an American academic had been allowed access to the archives at Robben Island prison in South Africa, in a pile of dusty boxes, marked ‘sports’ he discovered a detailed history of the football leagues set up by some of South Africa’s most famous prisoners. These leagues were incredibly disciplined, they incorporated FIFA regulations and inmates even sat referee examinations.
The book examines how the prisoners used the regulation of football to survive detention and how it inadvertently allowed the struggle to continue. It’s an excellent read and there’s a dramatisation coming to a cinema near you in the near future. Maybe one day it’ll replace Escape to Victory on the holiday TV schedules.
Dave McVay trawled the lower leagues as a player, his first book ‘Steak, Chips and Diana Ross’ detailed life as a struggling player in the less than salubrious seventies. As a writer McVay has stayed true to those roots. Heart of Football reveals a world that Giles Smith would struggle to recognise let alone describe. He journeys to lost worlds, Gigg Lane, Prenton Park and the exotic Spotland. These are places of opinion and meat pies and doing a corporate means a box to stand on rather than a box in the stands.
What makes this the book of the year is its timing. We are cornered by expectations of foreign owners, sponsorship deals and the off the field antics of millionaire players. Here is the antidote, a book that while not exactly celebrating the seemingly miserable existence is eked out by lower league clubs certainly allows us to savour their sheer bloody-minded insistence in enjoying their survival.
A reminder, at a time when it’s sorely needed, that this is the people’s game, all the people.
If you only buy one football book this year, make it this one.
Roy of the Rovers by Mick Collins. 9781845133610. Aurum Press
Fighting Talk by Johnny Vaughan et al. 9780340977552. Hodder
Day of the Match by Scott Murray and Rowan Walker. 9780752226781 Boxtree
We Need to Talk About Kevin…Keegan by Giles Smith. 9780141037790. Penguin
More than Just a Game by Chuck Korr. 9780007278794. Harper Collins
Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson. 9780752889955. Orion
‘Big Mal, the High Life and Hard Times of Malcolm Allison, Football Legend’ by David Tossel. 9781845963309. Mainstream
FA Confidential by David Davies and Henry Winter. 9781847373687. Simon and Schuster
Guardian Book of Football Writing. Edited by Mike Herd. 9780852650967. Guardian books
43 years with the Same Bird by Brian Reade. 9780230709683. Macmillan
Heart of Football by David McVay. 9780955880704. Reid Publishing
