More Than Mind Games Book Of The Year 2007

It’s not the most prestigious award of its kind, and can’t match William Hill’s largesse, but our winner is not in, and is better than, the William Hill Long List.

The William Hill Sports Book of the Year Long List is dominated by sport at the top end - professional, monied, unexperienced by normal people save at third hand. Not so Jim White’s You’ll Win Nothing With Kids: Fathers, Sons and Football.

You’ll Win Nothing With Kids was serialized on Radio 4, so you’ll already know that it’s a first person account of Jim’s time running a boys’ football club. The focus is on one season, interspersed with flashbacks to the days, so long ago and so recent, when the team was new and the boys were 8 years old and innocent. Jim White is a top sports correspondent with all the top football access that that implies, and there are revealing contrasts between Premiership clubs and his club. Premiership clubs don’t have to deal with other parents, or dogshit on the pitch, but as the season wears on, one comes to feel that in all other respects…

This is a sports psychology site, at least some of the time, so it behoves me to confess that sport psychologists come out very badly. Jim’s job takes him to Sweden to interview Sven Goran Ericksson’s psychologist, Willi Railo. Railo takes him to the top of a ski jump:

We stood at the top of the jump, our knees bent against the height, the pair of us clutching the safety rail with both hands. Looking down its vertiginous run, my stomach made a bold bid to escape through the soles of my feet.

‘Dear God,’ I said. ‘What the hell would the sports psychologist say to somebody who was about to jump off here?’

‘I would tell them this,’ said Railo, peering gingerly down the launch pad. ‘If you had half a brain you would just turn around and go straight back down in the lift.’

He then roared with laughter, grabbed me by the wrist again and pulled me back inside before the urge to leap became irresistable.

‘Good,’ he said shutting the door. ‘We had to get that over with to see if you were serious.’

It doesn’t inspire confidence, does it, and it confirms my suspicion that sport psychology is at a primitive stage - a stage as primitive as attitudes dead set against it - and that, for now, almost anything can be put across as a good idea so long as it’s framed appropriately.

More encouraging is the advice White picks up from Brian McClair and Eric Harrison at Manchester United. It’s a working, living example of what I’ve said here before - that football owns some of the very best sports psychologists around; it’s just that they don’t call themselves that. McClair says, just let kids play - that’s how they learn, for themselves - but keep as much pressure off them as you can. It’s not about being uncompetitive; it’s about being fair, about not crushing a boy when he gets something wrong, about keeping the fun and joy alive as long as possible. Eric Harrison stresses vision - when you are about to take the ball, take a quick left-and-right crossing-the-road style glance at the state of play around you. Jim White saw Paul Scholes doing this, as have I since, and it’s just the kind of tip I’d have grabbed and used when I was 12.

Football is one of those arenas that bring out the best and worst in people - it’s a place for extremes, for feeling alive in amongst the peaks and troughs. I was struck in particular by Jim’s account of a crunch semi-final between his middle class boys and a side of tough estate kids:

Looking back on it, as I do quite often over the next few days, what strikes me most about the afternoon is the attitude of the opposition. Barney (Jim’s son)tells me on the way home how he had played rugby at an expensive boarding school the week before and the home team had constantly given it mouth, thinking they were hard and street and then tried to pick a fight after losing… (..) and yet here were lads from the roughest part of town, who were genuinely hard, but according to Barney, never once did they mouth off or try to intimidate. I felt ashamed that I had been so dismissive of them in my pre-match chat. These kids were hugely impressive in defeat, shaking hands, congratulating our lads. There was no petulance, no sulking. The ginge was particularly gracious after the game, wishing me good luck in the final.
‘Win it for us, eh mate,’ he said.
They behaved, these guys, like gentlemen. I don’t know if there is a life lesson here, but this game just continues to confound every known stereotype.

I really want that to be true - that bit about stereotypes.

There are some cheerier stereotypes to play with, though. Jim takes his team to play in a tournament in Belgium, and they come up against German and Dutch opposition. One of Jim’s fellow Brits enthuses about a rough tackle from an English lad:

‘That’s it, lads. They don’t like it up them. Get in there. Get stuck in.’

Karl, standing beside me, sighs.

‘For God’s sake,’ he says, ‘That is so typically English. That is what English football is all about - get stuck in, get stuck in, get stuck in. No wonder you never win anything.’

He has a point. But then soon everyone is conforming to footballing stereotype. The Dutch teams pass in neat, quick, at times mesmerising triangles. But they can’t seem to convert that into goals and it is not long into the day before they are arguing amongst themselves, shrugging in exasperation, shouting at their coach, moaning about tactics, making a fuss when they are substituted. Our English lads are all sleeves-rolled-up determination, grit in the tackle, lung-busting in their efforts, but with a tactical overview that does not consist of much more than chuck it in the mixer and see what happens. As for the Germans, well, they do have the most efficient warm-up routine I have ever seen.

What I can’t convey with quotations is the way Jim’s team worms its way quickly into your heart - their season begins to matter to the reader, too: their individual fates, so different from each other’s. They end up in a cup final - and a relegation battle - both every bit as nailbiting as anything the Premiership delivers, perhaps more so. There are times in every professional season when even the most one-eyed fan wouldn’t mind if his team’s players, the staff, journalists, everyone, just ****ed off and left the field open for a less nauseating set of characters. But you never want that, or anything like it, to come upon Jim’s team. There’s an echo there of that idea we all have of a kind of footballing golden age, one that’s never existed or could exist, in which we support our local team, which is made up of local players, who are the salt of the earth.

I won’t tell you if they win the Cup - after the Final, Jim comes away saying “I feel like I have won everything” or if they stay up - after the final whistle of the final game, Jim realizes for the first time that his son is now taller than he is. But I can promise you that, when you come to those last two chapters, you’ll care, and you’ll be feeling that little bit less cynical about football and that little bit better about the point of football, the point of sport, and about the future of both.

Review: Brian Glanville, “England Managers: The Toughest Job in Football”

There have been quite a few histories of the England team in recent years - before this one, we had James Corbett’s England Expects, and every tournament that the side qualifies for generates more of the same. Most of them are frustrating cut-and-paste jobs, that leave you knowing what the results were and what kind of performance was generated, without their possessing any particular depth. It’s a merciless, cynical genre, and a populist one, making sure never to venture too far away from common opinion in that usual childish, cowardly, late-macho manner common to modern British football.

Brian Glanville has been around as a journalist long enough to ensure that if his book is cut-and-paste, they are at least his own cuttings. And if his book is a long exercise in cynicism and low expectations, they are at least his own, genuinely held opinions. In among them are the real reason for the book - Glanville’s own, illuminating snapshots of memoir. These are frequently marvellous - why is there anything else in the book? A history of England seen entirely through Glanville’s eyes would, on this evidence, be a sporting classic, and this is therefore a missed opportunity. Take this, about England’s pioneering referee and football administrator, Sir Stanley Rous:

..Rous’s support for Winterbottom as England manager was not wholly consistent. In May 1955, when I was living and working in Rome, Jesse Carver, the Liverpudlian who was then managing Roma, one of his many Italian sides, told me that he had an appointment with Rous at the Hotel Quirinale in Via Nazionale and that I might care to come along; it could do me some good.

Rous awaited us, silver haired, formidably tall. ‘Did you have a good journey, Sir Stanley?’ I dutifully asked him.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said, impatiently. ‘Who are you?’

Little interested when I told him, he then proceeded, in my obscure presence, to offer Winterbottom’s managerial job to Carver. ‘It’s about time we brought Walter back into the office,’ he said.

Glanville has fifty years of such tales to tell. I can only wish there were more. Like this:

Ramsey..had no doubts about (Roger Hunt). Before the first leg of the Intercontinental Cup final of 1967 at Hampden Park, between Celtic and Racing Club of Buenos Aires, I found myself having tea, amiably, with Ramsey, in the North British Hotel. We went outside, hoping to catch a taxi to take us to the game. No such luck. Eventually, a somewhat battered blue jalopy full of young Scottish fans drove past and drew up beside us.

‘Och, it’s Sir Alf, get in, get in,’ which we did. The badinage soon began. ‘That England team that won the World Cup! So many poor players!’
‘Well,’ said Sir Alf, as by then he was. ‘For example, who?’
‘That Roger Hunt; he’s a poor player.’
‘Roger Hunt,’ said Ramsey, ’scores twenty-five goals a season, every season. Yes, Roger Hunt’s a poor player!’

It wasn’t always a battered car seat for Glanville. Often, it was a ringside one:

The following morning I emerged from sleeping on a colleague’s chalet floor to be greeted by an alarming sight: Gordon Banks, pale and plainly distressed, staggering across the hotel’s lawn on the arm of the England doctor, Neil Phillips. Food poisoning had affected him and, disastrously for England, put him out of the game. How had it happened, and only to him? Many years later, when I spoke to him about it, Banks insisted that he had eaten and drunk the evening before exactly the same as any other player.

Though it may be merely a wild surmise, it could be worth recording that when the Daily Telegraph reporter Bob Oxby subsequently broke his journey home in Washington to visit his cousin, the well-known Senator Stewart Symington, the senator laughingly told him, ‘That was the CIA! You don’t think we were going to let England beat Brazil, do you? - Brazil at that time being in a state of political turmoil. The mystery may never be solved, but, beyond all doubt, Banks’s illness was fatal for England.

Yet anecdotes of that kind nestle inconspicuously in yards of Monday-morning match reportage. The reportage has reference value, of course, and it is backed up with an excellent appendix - the best of its kind I’ve seen - containing full details of every post-War England match. So if you don’t own an England history, and want all of the figures at your disposal, this is the one to go for.

Glanville concentrates on short-term causes - he is a veteran journalist, not a historian, and tactics, selection, luck and the “impossibility” of the job are his principal explanatory tools. His characterization of the successive managers is as brief and constrictive as that might suggest: Ramsey good, Ericksson bad; Winterbottom couldn’t talk to players (but Glanville does correct one common error in pointing out that Walter had indeed had full-time top-level playing experience for Manchester United); Robson frightened and unadventurous; Greenwood good but too old; Hoddle an occasionally effective enigma. Taylor and McClaren are roped together. Glanville does possess two interesting opinions - he doesn’t rate Clough as a potential England boss, and he feels that Venables came to the job too late:

While at Chelsea, as a teenager, he (Venables) astonished his future co-writer, Gordon Williams, deputed to teach the club’s youngsters English language classes. Asked to write a short story, Terry alone complied, and came back with a tale reminiscent of the famous American writer, Damon Runyon. When Williams evoked the comparison, Venables replied that he had never heard of Runyon.

And as for Clough:

The patriot cry for Brian Clough and Peter Taylor goes up every time England lose a match, but what guarantee is there that the methods which have worked so well at club level would be effective in the international field? Peter Taylor’s book on Clough made it perfectly clear what many of us had known all along, that they are an authoritarian couple, ruling essentially by fear. Between the wars, in the days of the illustrious and commanding Arsenal manager, Herbert Chapman, the fear was of unemployment. Today, though we have unemployment again, the fear is of losing the huge rewards which clubs like Forest can provide. No such hold could be established over international players. Treat them peremptorily, and they would certainly rebel.

(A misapprehended view of Taylor’s book and quite unlike the way either Chapman or Clough actually operated when they were successful - but there it is).

Glanville has written a useful book and one with a few glorious stories - too few - thrown in. But although he tells you what happened, he doesn’t tell you why. Why, for instance, did England turn from being the stupendously innovative footballing nation of 1860-1905 to the incurious career-catchers-up that they’ve been ever since? Why is our international team so unrepresentative of an intelligent, inventive, original and eccentric country? Why, after all but sixty years of (mostly) falling short has there never been any sustained effort to regain a lead over the world? Or even any idea of one?

There are real answers to all of these questions in the history, culture, psychology and personality of the game. But they’re not in Glanville’s book. Or, as yet, in any other.

From Around The Grounds

From our correspondent, George Orwell:

Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many were thinking privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.

Even the newspapers have been unable to conceal the fact that at least two of the four matches played led to much bad feeling. At the Arsenal match, I am told by someone who was there, a British and a Russian player came to blows and the crowd booed the referee. The Glasgow match, someone else informs me, was simply a free-for-all from the start. And then there was the controversy, typical of our nationalist age, about the composition of the Arsenal team. Was it really an all-England team, as claimed by the Russians, or merely a league team, as claimed by the British? And did the Dynamos end their tour abruptly to avoid playing an all-England team? As usual, everyone answers these questions according to his political predilections. Not quite everyone, however. I noted with interest, as an instance of the vicious passions that football provokes, that the sporting correspondent of the russophile News Chronicle took the anti-Russian line and maintained that Arsenal was not an all-England team. No doubt the controversy will continue to echo for years in the footnotes of history books. Meanwhile the result of the Dynamos’ tour, in so far as it has had any result, will have been to create fresh animosity on both sides.

Highlights from the Dynamos’ tour can be downloaded free of charge from here. Commentary from Arsenal’s match with Dynamos was included in one of the recent BBC Radio programmes made to celebrate the 80th anniversary of football commentary - it consists mostly of the commentator admitting that the fog is preventing him from seeing what’s going on.

Reading List

I’ve put together the beginnings of a More Than Mind Games reading list here.

At the moment, it’s little more than a bald list of titles under a variety of headings, but I’ll try to annotate it more fully over time. If I had to boil it down to absolute essentials, I’d plump for

• Madness Explained by Richard P. BENTALL (Where we are in terms of understanding mental illness and in treating it)
• The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio DAMASIO (Emotion, consciousness and the brain)
• Seeing Red by Nicholas HUMPHREY (an example of a modern theory of consciousness)
• Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness by Daniel DENNETT (The philosophical challenge in understanding and studying consciousness)
• Cloughie: Walking on Water by Brian CLOUGH (The best reflections and discussion of the realities of football management, wrapped up in a compelling memoir)
• The Glory Game by Hunter DAVIES (What it’s really like inside a top club - 35 years old and still unique)
• All Played Out by Pete DAVIES (Football culture in England through the prism of the 1990 World Cup Campaign)
• Serious by John MCENROE (Inside a winner’s mind)
• 3:59.4: The Quest to Break the Four Minute Mile by John BRYANT (Excellent on changing cultures in British sport as a whole)

In terms of the whole passion/commitment debate, Clough’s book is pretty much definitive.

It’s a serious list. Here’s why it has to be. A story of a brave man taking bad advice - and one good reason why parts of British sport remain spooked by sports psychotherapy. Watch this and see if you blame them! Very much my worst nightmare:

Football Clubs With Spiritual Origins

Here’s an interesting review of a book I’m going to have to buy, Thank God For Football! by Peter Lupson, on the churchly origins of eleven major clubs, Aston Villa, Barnsley, Birmingham City, Bolton Wanderers, Everton,Fulham, Manchester City, Queens Park Rangers, Southampton, Swindon Town and Tottenham Hotspur.

One of the most moving stories is that of the “father and founder” of Spurs, John Ripsher, the bible class teacher at All Hallows Church. He served the club as president for its first 11 years, stepping down in 1894 with Spurs, still amateur, playing in the Southern Alliance League at their own ground at Northumberland Park - the early days on the Tottenham Marshes had been rough. The last the club heard of Ripsher was in the early 1900s, when he had moved to Dover and gone blind. Lupson, dedicated in his research of these men, tracked down what happened: Ripsher had lost his health, could no longer work and in January 1906 was admitted to the Union Road workhouse where he died the following year. Lupson tramped to the Dover cemetery to find Ripsher’s unmarked, overgrown pauper’s plot, a shocking spot to contemplate the man’s contribution to Spurs.

At least Spurs have a fitness coach now.

Lupson’s quest was to rediscover football’s Christian roots and the men, such as John Henry Cardwell, the founder of Fulham, who gave their lives to promoting the sport as a civilising force amid grime and squalor. His book does not greatly explore what followed: how the game so quickly grew into a raw, passionate spectator sport, competition led to players being paid and then rich local men, often brewers, arrived, sensing a commercial opportunity, and backed the clubs. In the 1890s most clubs changed from members’ associations into limited companies, although Lupson does not mention the FA rules that sought to restrict shareholders’ ability to make money from them. One by one, the book notes, the clubs dropped the churches from their names and ploughed on for Football League fame and glory.

Clubs had a wide variety of origins, and a day at Colindale will rid most people of the idea that there was ever a time when football wasn’t financially compromised, in a state of conflict between directors and players, liable to cause local unrest and disorder, or dominated by the wealthiest clubs.

The research led Lupson to mixed thoughts about today’s Premiership juggernaut. “I do believe the clubs’ relentless pursuit of profit is a betrayal of the founding spirit, which was about recreation and fellowship for the poor. It is a major betrayal that the clubs have priced out poorer and younger people from watching their games.

“But I also see the top clubs running genuine community programmes, working with disadvantaged people, and I sense a desire within people at the clubs to understand where they’ve come from and be true to those roots. There is an undercurrent of supporters wanting their clubs back and, although it might seem terribly naive, I see a possibility that clubs will rediscover that founding ethos, the spiritual dimension which is at the heart of sport.”

The “relentless pursuit of profit” we are told we see today isn’t a patch on 1890-1914, but that’s for another day and another post. As for the desire for football to know more about where it’s coming from, I wholly concur. Lupson’s book is a very welcome step in that direction.

ADDENDUM: I simply can’t leave this without giving you the first comment on the Guardian’s review, left by someone whose parents called them TheGlobalArtofSoccer:

Brillant article. Many similar points are made in a new book by Richard Witzig, The Global Art of Soccer/Football. Football has always been a poor man’s game, as opposed to cricket, rugby, polo, or hunting foxes. As such, football was charged with teaching these men (and women) the nuances of society, and often did it well. Just ask the Nobel prize winning author, Albert Camus.

I will, next time I see him.

Kervin on Woodward

One late addition to my books of the year is Alison Kervin’s Clive Woodward: The Biography.

Usually a sporting biography will fall into one of these categories:

• The pointless but money-spinning autobiography
• The tabloid hatchet job
• The ivory tower hatchet job
• The hagiography

Kervin manages to stay clear of any of these, partly because she is genuinely finds Clive Woodward interesting. That doesn’t happen often in sports biography. I wonder how it’s selling?

She builds up a complex picture of her subject, which is why I’m not going to attempt a five-word summary. Enough to say that the usual themes are very much in evidence. Defeat and desperation drives reluctant change in traditional sport with spectacular results, but because few people are comfortable with innovation on that scale, everything new is jettisoned as soon as possible after the victory which is credited to traditional English sporting values. And the usual picture is there: our sportsmen are as talented as their foreign opponents, but our sports don’t attract sufficient numbers of intelligent, imaginative, communicative people to sustain a top-level coaching regime so there is no one around capable of pulling the talent together into a successful unit.

All of which rather highlights one of only two weaknesses in the book. Kervin is apt to describe anyone with new ideas in the same way: Paddi Lund, who had a huge impact on Woodward, is described as “crazy”, and Woodward himself as “nuts”. It’s not much of a weakness - her lengthy description of Lund’s ideas is actually better than Lund’s, and she takes what he has to say seriously enough. But who’s bats now? Woodward? or the people running English rugby with such effect that we lose at home to Argentina?

I’d also like to have known about Woodward’s business career in much greater detail - we learn that he has been financially very successful, but not how - I want to learn what it was he did, specifically, day to day.

Kervin’s is also the first account we have of Woodward’s Southampton. I’m personally bitter that he has been forced out of football and I’m eagerly awaiting the nemesis of the vandals responsible for that. Luckily, Simon Clifford, with Woodward at Southampton, is still in football, but what follows shows just how much work he and the few like him still have to do:

The situation reached an all-time low when Clifford told a local newspaper that, in his opinion, professional players did not work hard enough. ‘I said it because I believe it,’ Clifford said afterwards. ‘But one of the coaches copied the article and stuck it on all the players’ lockers. I found it hard to stay from that moment on. The cuttings were up on the lockers for 72 hours. Now if that had happened to another member of staff, the chairman would have hit the roof. But because it was among the coaching staff, nothing happened. To me, the fact that that kind of thing was allowed was a sign there was something wrong with the coaching culture at the club. When I asked one player why the piece hadn’t been torn down, he told me he couldn’t touch it because he wanted to keep his place in the side.’

Clifford was very critical of this ‘fear factor’, whereby players were warned about speaking up or standing out from the crowd. No one pulled his notice down because no one wanted to step out of line. Clifford also spoke about the ‘busy bastard’ mentality at Southampton - saying players were accused to being ‘busy bastards’ as soon as they did any work other than that which was directly forced on them. When Clifford ran early-morning training sessions, he said they left the players tired after 45 minutes. ‘This was a team which had been relegated the previous year, and this season they’re still letting results slip in the last five or ten minutes of a game. Right now at Southampton, goal scoring is a problem but I didn’t see one player hitting a ball in a shooting exercise,’ he said. But none of the players wanted to do extra training, or spend hours alone with a ball. That was being a ‘busy bastard’, and though men like Steve Redgrave, Jonny Wilkinson, Freddie Flintoff and Ronaldo may have been the busiest bastards in sport, no one at Southampton would tolerate it.

Not that things were all that easier for Woodward, despite a warmer relationship with Harry Redknapp than was reported at the time. Of Clive at Southampton, Kervin has this to say:

I recall being at a drinks party soon after Clive had done this (attempt to improve Nigel Quashie’s kicking of the ball), and news of his ‘arrogance’ had swept through the media. A highly respected football writer told me the story of how Clive had dared to suggest to a player that he could improve his kicking. ‘What makes you think he can’t?’ I asked innocently. ‘What makes you think Clive cannot bring in a host of professionals who could totally transform the guy’s kicking?’ The journalist’s response was that Quashie wouldn’t be in the team if he couldn’t kick. That’s true, too. But what about improving performance? It happens in every other discipline - sporting or otherwise. The greatest writers still have agents, editors and publishers to advise them. Their work is edited. No one is perfect. The perfect footballer will never exist. It is in the striving for perfection that the essence of coaching can be found.

The fact that the striving in football stopped once the phone call had been made and the cheque signed was a source of constant frustration for Clive. He felt it created a block in the skills being learned by players in most English clubs. Jonny Wilkinson was taught to improve his kicking every day of his life, and he could hit a centimetre square target by the time he ran out for the World Cup final. Football players across the country were missing the goalmouth because no one was improving them, motivating them, inspiring them, explaining to them, giving them feedback, testing them under pressure.

I’m writing in December 2006, and thus far Simon Clifford has seen two of his direct protegees play for England (Theo Walcott and Micah Richards). Not bad for a man who has spent less than three months working for a professional football club, really, is it? I wonder how well his fellow coaches at Southampton score? Redknapp himself can account for six significant England players, including his own son, plus Neil Ruddock who won his cap against Nigeria in 1994.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’d like to see Woodward and Clifford really given their head for a sustained period at a good club - nor that I think Southampton have passed up a supreme opportunity. Passing up opportunities - well, perhaps with the Ashes win and the Rugby World Cup, there are some signs that we as a sporting nation are beginning to take the odd chance when it comes. Here’s a footballing one, if we feel inclined.

Books of the Year, People of the Year

I need something to distract myself from Chris Oakley’s execrable contribution to the Guardian’s football pages this morning (really - it would help if it were funny, but it’s like being trapped in a lift) so, completely off the cuff, I’m going to name my books and people of the footballing year 2006. If someone comes up on the rails in the next two months, I’ll revise, obviously.

Books:David Peace’s The Damned United was far and away the biggest surprise. It’s probably the first football novel that succeeds as a novel, whilst remaining about football. On the face of it, it follows Brian Clough’s life from the moment of his career-ending injury to his sacking by Leeds, but that’s almost incidental and not the reason why the novel is worth picking up. There’s been decent football fiction in the past - Bill Naughton’s The Goalkeeper’s Revenge, set amongst working class boys in the industrial north of England, and J.L.Carr’s How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won The FA Cup, in which a foreign coach takes a village team to etc., but Peace operates at another level entirely. (Carr’s novel isn’t really at a level with his others, and certainly not with A Month In The Country).

In terms of the best non-fiction sporting book of the year, I’m torn between The Italian Job by Luca Vialli and Simon Barnes’ book-length meditation, The Meaning of Sport, from which this:

..They are generally referred to as ‘characters’: where would the game be without characters? There just aren’t the characters any more, and so forth. Anyone can be a character, and it is generally the hallmark of inferior performance. To be a character requires some kind of superstructure built onto a personality: as compensation for the inadequacies of the original personality.

Chris Oakley can whistle for that much insight, let alone the ability to write like that.

Vialli’s book is, as far as I am aware, pretty much the only one we have that has made a serious attempt to answer questions of English football from outside the English cultural wagon ring. Why less ball skill, why such uninterest in tactical possibilities, why the managerial merry-go-round, why is the English football press not really interested in football - all and more deeply explored without apparent agenda or mockery or dislike. It’s incredibly dense, slow reading simply because of the sheer amount of material on every page. I think it renders just about every other “state of the game” book of the last ten years utterly pointless. It’s all here.

What about some players? This was supposed to have been Rooney’s year, but injury has restricted his contribution to a variety of interesting sideshows. It may be that in six months’ time we’ll know that what he is doing now is inspiring a new Manchester United side to a league title and a Champions League Final, but that will make him 2007’s man.

No prizes for guessing that Peter Crouch is my outstanding player of 2006. He began as the most fringe of fringe England players, still fresh from what was for most commentators a shock move to Liverpool (”Well, I was surprised,” WSC would have us believe he told them). From there, via boos from “the best fans in the world” he progressed to a permanently-good position on the all-time England international scoring table, some genuinely outstanding goals and the enduring memory of his wonderful, brave performance against Portugal. A team man and a fine man, he is being primed by the England set-up to be their next fall guy, but he’s young enough still to return when our traditional English managers run out of excuses and fall on their swords.

A warm mention also for Owen Hargreaves and Theo Walcott, both of whom have amply demonstrated now why they were in the World Cup squad. They take into 2007 the uncomfortable silence of their critics, who were in many cases older men who had watched a lot of football and perhaps should have known better. They certainly should have understood better.

My manager of the year is Adrian Boothroyd. This isn’t just because he took Watford up into the Premiership when all he had been asked was to avoid relegation. It’s because he’s going to keep them there this season, and because under him Ben Foster is turning into the best English goalkeeper since the peerless David Seaman. Given poor Chris Kirkland’s endless injury travails, and Paul Robinson’s ill luck, we need another good ‘un, and one’s coming.

The match of the year is of course that absurd jumpers-for-goalposts FA Cup Final. But I’d have preferred a West Ham win.

Bray and Kerwin on Penalties

In comments, I referred to Dr. Ken Bray’s book, How To Score: Science and the Beautiful Game. Warmly recommended - even the relatively weak chapter on psychology, which at least gets beyond the English obsession with “motivation” and “inspiration”, and gives you a good idea of what it was Erickson was trying to achieve and why it might have gone wrong in the end.
Here is a summary of his and David Kerwin’s excellent breakdown of the physical penalty kick, complete with diagram.

Review: Leo McKinstry, Sir Alf

Leo McKinstry’s other football book, Jack and Bobby, was my desert island volume. That’s the Charltons, not the Kennedys, and this time it’s Bobby who gets to be President and no one is shot unless you count Jack’s interest in game birds. Sir Alf is cut from the same quality of cloth. Painstakingly researched and beautifully written, I am able to disagree with McKinstry’s interpretation of Ramsey purely because the book gives me enough to do so.

We all know the Alf Ramsey story by now. Born in Dagenham, a keen footballer who didn’t get into the game until during the War, shining at Southampton and Spurs, an unusually regular player for England and sometime captain before his international career ended in the debacle at Wembley against the magic Magyars. He loses the race to boss Spurs to Bill Nicholson, then takes Ipswich from the Third Division (South) to the First Division title before succeeding Sir Walter Winterbottom as England manager. He scraps wingers and wins the World Cup, before losing it in agonising circumstances in 1970. Rapid decline follows, and England fail to qualify for the 1974 Finals after a brilliant display by “clown” goalkeeper.. and I don’t think I can bring myself to type the rest (unless the Daily Express is prepared to pay me).

McKinstry’s book is in many ways an old fashioned apology for Ramsey, a defense of the man against his critics. They’re nearly all dead now, of course, and I wasn’t aware that the deed needed to be done - but done it has been, now, and done well. I’ll take McKinstry’s points in turn.

4-3-3: Ramsey’s abandonment of wingers was not a result of excessive caution or disbelief in the quality of his players. No, it was a recognition that Thompson, Connelly and co. were not quite international standard - and that the likes of Peters and Ball were better suited to a more compact formation. That Ramsay doesn’t seem to have settled on the 4-3-3 formation until halfway through the actual 1966 tournament was not indecision but an attempt to hide his tactical intentions from the teams he saw as England’s real opponents, the likes of Portugal, Argentina, France and Germany.

I say: I believe that Ramsey was undecided, in fact, about his team until very late in the day - later than Erickson was allowed when his turn came. However, he did indeed find a formation that worked very well, in the end, and that’s all that can be asked. I think it’s significant that England line-ups vary hugely until the 1966 quarter final, and hold firm for almost a year after the Final. And Ramsey was right - the best winger England had in the 1960s was Bobby Charlton, and come ‘66, he was playing in central midfield. None of the others really made much of an impact.

Jimmy Greaves: McKinstry explains the dropping of Greaves after the quarter final as a combination of two principal factors: Greaves wasn’t a team player, and he didn’t quite fit the team plan Ramsey had in mind. Greaves’s attitude whilst with England was lacking - he was one of the prime troublemakers, and never really respected Ramsey as a coach or as a man. (Interestingly, McKinstry hints similar things about Greaves’ great friend, Bobby Moore).

I say: Greaves’ omission was made possible by the very late emergence of Geoff Hurst. Hurst was an England debutante in 1966, which puts the emergence of Peter Crouch into some kind of perspective. He was better in the air than Greaves, an ability that was, it turned out, decisive in England’s progress. Greaves hadn’t scored in the early rounds, whereas Roger Hunt had put away three - indeed, Greaves had come into the World Cup on the back of a series of inconsistent displays, scoring four against hapless Norway but failing to feature against better teams. In short, dropping Greaves was the right decision on purely footballing terms, and one that benefitted England in the following years.

Ramsey’s Man-Management: McKinstrey’s Alf was a man uncomfortable in the world but utterly at home in football, and an incomparable communicator to footballers. McKinstrey has researched Alf’s football conversation in incredible depth - the book digs up long inquisitions on train journeys, in dressing rooms, on pitches surrounded by 100,000 baying fans - and the story is consistent. It’s backed up by players from all parts of Ramsey’s playing career - including the last, disappointing England years after 1970.

I say: McKinstrey’s case is very strong. It’s not bullet-proof. Ramsey seems to have had as much trouble as other coaches in telling certain players that they weren’t playing - and Greaves was left looking for the white or black smoke in 1966. But Ramsey’s strong tactical eye, combined with his ability to talk to players and make his ideas understood, were real and achieved results.

Luck, dearie, had nothing to do with it: McKinstrey has Alf running out of luck in 1970 when Gordon Banks fell ill on the eve of the quarter-final against Germany. Peter Bonetti, a talented but nervous keeper, let in goals Banks would have saved, and in the process exposed Ramsey’s substitution of Charlton as a mistake.

I say: England rode their luck in ‘66 to a degree that must have had Erickson ruing his in retrospect. Rattin’s sending off in the match against Argentina, plus Nobby Stiles’ staying on the pitch against France, a linesman with an agenda in the Final.. luck plays a huge factor in football, and we in Britain seem reluctant to give it its due. In 1970, what happened to Banks was just gutting (sorry) and in the context of a 2-0 lead, taking Charlton off to rest him made perfect sense. Sometimes, the dice just roll. Think of Rooney’s injury in 2004 and Campbell’s disallowed goal; think of Rooney’s sending off in 2006, which a more alert referee might have been able to avoid - and remember John Terry’s terrible miss later on in the game. Think of injuries to Gerrard, Beckham, Neville (twice), Owen (effectively twice), against Ramsey’s loss of one key player across two tournaments.

Ramsey and negative football: McKinstrey defends Ramsey against charges that he ended the English tradition of attacking football and brought in a cowardly, negative approach to the game that it has never quite shaken off since. England’s 4-3-3 produced flowing, attractive games against opposition who were also interested in playing their game, as seen against France, Portugal and Germany. England’s game against Brazil in 1970 is thought by many (including me) to be the best ever played.

I say: There are deep similarities between the way Ramsey’s teams were reported upon and the way Erickson’s were. Too much caution, players not knowing how to play together, undemonstrative coach, lack of imagination… it’s all there. If lesser coaches than Ramsey adopted 4-3-3 without possessing the players to make it work (something similar’s happening now with 4-5-1) that’s hardly Ramsey’s fault. Somewhere out there in the ethereal imaginations of football writers and journalists are the teams who swashbuckle uninterrupted, led by men who… churchillian inspiration… motivating the players…

Ramsey was slow to rebuild England: McKinstrey has a certain amount of time for this view. His loyalty to his players was part of the strength of his teams. Loyalty to players is favoured by the press when it’s least in evidence - at other times, it means, not good man-management but lack of courage and failure to stand up to superstars. Perhaps Moore was kept on too long by England - perhaps Ramsey was too slow to allow in great young players and too impatient with them when he did.

I say: England were successfully rebuilt between 1966 and 1970. Only Moore survived from the defence, Hunt and Stiles were gone, and Hurst, Peters and Ball (all very young players in ‘66) were coming into their prime. Only Peters survived to see the crucial game against Poland in 1973. But… in ‘66, it could be argued that the England side did indeed represent the best players available. Between ‘73 and ‘78, England had available Bell, Lee, Currie, Marsh, Osgood, Worthington, Hudson, Latchford, George and Mackenzie.. and, by and large, failed to use them. Ramsey is perhaps less at fault for this than Don Revie, but wherever the blame lies, it remains the fact that the standard of English players probably rose in the early 1970s, at a time when the national team was at an all-time nadir.
It can’t have helped that Alf Ramsey was something of an all-out xenophobe, a fact McKinstrey would have been forgiven for keeping out of sight. But such a good biographer doesn’t decline to his subject to that degree. A great manager, perhaps less of a success in his dealings with the world outside football, is a fair assessment.

Review: David Peace - The Damned Utd

There’ve been relatively few great football novels. The best of them all, of course, was Hamilton of the “Ringers”, 1959, in which a chap named Hamilton joins a First Division side as an amateur, and in his first season as centre-forward helps the Ringers to the title and the FA Cup, helps himself to some England caps, and finds himself a wife. I must have read it a hundred times, and it’s yet to lose its shine. Then there’s How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup by J.L.Carr, which might have been the inspiration for Graham Taylor’s Watford. It’s a charming fable about a village team who are taken under the wing of an enigmatic foreign manager, who teaches them the long ball game with stunning results.

The Damned Utd isn’t like that. In its way, it’s actually the first successful football novel. As opposed to the first football novel in which I’m successful..

David Peace is our primary chronicler of that complicated time between the end of the post-War boom and the end of Britain’s decline; from the 1973 oil crisis, say, until the 50th D-Day Anniversary celebrations in London in 1995. His trilogy of novels about, among other things, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, are what he’s best known for, and The Damned Utd grows straight out of these and shares their purpose and atmosphere.

The Damned Utd consists entirely of first person narrative, one first person narrative, and our interlocutor is one Brian Clough. Peace’s first achievement is to prevent that one thing alone derailing the novel as a novel. You are never tempted to treat Peace’s Clough as an attempt to explore the real man - this is clearly not biography, and Peace trims his Clough to fit his method.

The narrative follows two timescales, which play tag with one another as the novel proceeds. Timescale one concerns Clough from the moment of his career-ending injury to the fallout from his resignation with Peter Taylor from Derby County. The theme is Clough’s revenge upon his fate. Timescale two covers his 44 days as manager of Leeds United, when he alone, without Taylor, plays successor to Don Revie.

Don Revie barely appears in the novel, but his presence is always felt. He and his team, his philosophy, his success, his mini-me John Giles, (”The Irishman”) obsess and madden Peace’s Clough. Does he want Revie to notice him, to acknowledge him, or just cease to be? Don is always out there, omniscient and all powerful, and the hard-drinking, hard-smoking insomniac Clough of the novel rages against him impotently before, in effect, falling to him altogether. Left unspoken at the end of the novel, as Clough leaves Elland Road for the last time, is what happens next: the permanant eclipse of Leeds, coinciding with the city’s own eclipse, and the rebirth of Clough and Taylor’s footballing East Midlands, which finally buries Revie’s legacy and leaves Clough, not Revie, as the great hope of the English game.

The Clough/Taylor relationship is thorougly explored, in this case to portray Clough as a torn man, dependent on others but longing to hog the limelight, perpetually in search of dominance (Arthur Hopcraft’s idea of the core drive for successful managers) but unable to gain it without his partner. Taylor is always about to settle for the quiet, remunerative life, money and comfort now: Clough is the risk-taker and visionary who, on the inside, is in a perpetual state of psychological flight.

Clough is also illustrated by his relationships with his two chairmen, Sam Longson at Derby and Manny Cussins at Leeds. Both begin as his closest allies, banking the farm on Clough in the teeth of opposition from their fellow directors. Sharing Clough’s desires for fame, attention and domination, each moves at his own pace to an anagonistic position, Longson over years, Cussins in the space of a lunar month.

Football, and footballers, represent the whole world of the novel - nothing else is admitted as a possibility, nothing else is given the least notice or importance. Frankly, the way it’s portrayed would put you off if you were new to it. Here’s the ’70s working class world in all its unnecessary, put-on machismo and brutality, its deliberate, chosen stupidity and parochial malice. Everyone, except for Roy McFarland! is out for themselves, and quite incapable of appreciating the virtues of solidarity save in rhetoric. The players, except for Roy McFarland! are monosyllabic sharp-stud bruisers, who can’t think.

I can’t resist adding my own reflections on the portrayal of Clough - acknowledging that Peace has written a novel here, not a biography, and that the demands he has set himself are quite different from a biographer’s. The influence of Clough’s autobiography, Cloughie: Walking on Water and Patrick Murphy’s His Way are obvious. There’s Clough’s love for Derby, never matched elsewhere; his family orientation and his attitude to fair play. Peace’s Clough is a hopeless alcoholic from the off, whereas the real Clough only took to drink properly after his trophies were all won. There too is the on-off relationship with Taylor, and the bitter regret at things said. Nothing, really, on what made Clough a great manager. Peace identifies Taylor’s role well enough, and Taylor’s absence from Leeds, heightening Clough’s already intense isolation, is a theme of the second timeline. But Peace’s Derby players come out for Clough - and we don’t really know why: there’s no insight beyond the old saw of “a kick up the backside, a hand around the shoulder”.

In truth, there isn’t room for that - or wouldn’t be without interrupting the real themes of the novel, which is very deliberately a modern Greek tragedy. We know, of course, that the gods were unable in the end to destroy Clough, and neither were the brewers. Clough died of cancer, not from drinking (George Best didn’t die from drinking, either, not by direct means at any rate).

The real Clough said, late in life, that his secret as a man-manager had come from his ability to break a player down until he knew who he really was. True confidence, said Clough, came from accurate self-knowledge: if you are John Robertson and you know you are a tub of lard who can deliver a cross - then not only do you know the worst and can deal with it, but you have absolute confidence in yourself in that place where you do your best work. And you’re that much more likely to be a team player, not a fantasy-prone prima donna or a talent liable to waste energy finding out the hard way where that talent ends.

That’s simple, sure, but also acute - too acute for most of the current professional psychological manuals on low self esteem. Clough wasn’t a “natural psychologist”, but a very clever man able to work his principles out for himself. It’s not that Clough you’ll meet in Peace’s novel - but a compelling character of Peace’s own, in the first football novel that has the game properly, not embarrassingly, built into it.