Read The Game: Our writers review a selection of the year's soccer books
Living On The Volcano
Michael Calvin (Random House UK, €26.85)
In 2014, the author wrote a very-well received book on the lives of football scouts and this time he turns his attentions to managers and how they survive the endless stress their roles bring.
Former Republic of Ireland manager Eoin Hand once said that the only two certainties in life were that people die and football managers get the sack. It was uttered at a time when bosses were given time to develop sides, but the shorter tenures of current times make it all the more true and makes the men in charge phlegmatic about the whole thing.
The access given to Calvin, a superb writer and interviewer, mean that he is able to give rounded profiles of these men, far removed from the impression we’re given that they’re clueless clowns. That said, Brendan Rodgers – still at Liverpool when he was interviewed – doesn’t do anything to dilute the David Brent comparisons, so much so that Calvin feels the introduction to that chapter deserves a re-write.
If there is one disappointment, it’s that Arsène Wenger writes the foreword but doesn’t feature as an interview subject. In an age when an average period in charge is around the year mark, a look at how the longest-serving manager has survived for as long as he has would have provided a nice contrast.
Big Sam: My Autobiography
Sam Allardyce (Headline, €16.99)
Sam Allardyce was 36 years old. His playing career as a footballer in England was over. His pub business in Bolton was going under, which risked losing him his family home, which he’d put up as collateral. It felt like only God could help his family when, he writes, in his biography, He did.
Big Sam got a call one evening. “Hello, Sam, it’s Father Joe Young here!” “Piss off,” said Allardyce, and put the receiver down. He was in no mood for prank phone calls. The phone rang again. The priest, as chairman of Limerick FC, persuaded him to become the club’s player-manager, and so began another interesting chapter in the life of Allardyce, who spent his year in charge combing the pubs of Limerick on Friday and Saturday nights to make sure his players weren’t on the booze.
Allardyce’s biography is a light-hearted romp. There’s lots of vainglorious justification of his managerial record, but he just about gets away with it because he has good yarns to tell like, for example, the hatred Stuart Pearce has for Ruud Gullit. During ITV’s coverage of the 2006 World Cup, “Psycho” Pearce wouldn’t sit beside Gullit in studio because he still harboured a grudge at being dropped by him at Newcastle United.
Leading
Alex Ferguson with Michael Moritz (Hodder & Stoughton, €27.00)
You might think Alex Ferguson has told us enough about his management style, having published three football memoirs (1985, 1999, 2013). You’d be wrong. For a serving of “Fergie Time”, he’s gathered his thoughts on the elixir to successful leadership, culled from a lecture series at Harvard Business School, and co-authored with business guru Michael Moritz.
The business secrets may be a bit trite and it’s inevitably self-serving but it’s worth a read. It’s devoid of business jargon and full of Ferguson’s inimitable war stories. He cites Jock Stein as his greatest football mentor. He advised him never to lose his temper with players straight after a game, urging him to wait until Monday when things had calmed down. “It was sound advice; it just didn’t happen to suit my style,” writes Ferguson.
It’s fascinating to consider he dropped three players for a Manchester United game after they broke curfew and went on a night-out on Boxing Day 2011. The squad was struggling with injuries and duly lost 3-2 to Blackburn. Several months later, United lost the league title to “noisy neighbours” Man City on goal difference. Principles are more important than expediency, he maintains.
Cristiano Ronaldo: The Biography
Guillem Balague (Orion Books, €22.00)
Guillem Balague’s biography of Cristiano Ronaldo is a good companion piece to the fascinating Ronaldo – the Movie, which came out in the same month. What a strange man is the Portuguese star, cocooned, isolated and possessed of an arrested development, which didn’t, however, stop him from leaving home at 12 years of age to travel 600 miles from his native Madeira to mainland Portugal to pursue his dream of becoming the world’s greatest footballer.
He has an incredible self-drive and discipline, which is even more remarkable given the alcohol addiction which killed his father in 2005.
Ronaldo is a far more interesting beast than, say, his great rival, Lionel Messi, who Balague has already written about in an authorised biography. There is more grit to Ronaldo’s story, which is written in an unauthorised account by Balague, an antidote to the image campaign that Ronaldo’s agent, Jorge Mendes, has been running since 2012 when football’s most successful Svengali realised the world didn’t understand his prize galáctico.
We know more now. Balague – who engages expert interviewees, as well as drawing on his own interviews over the years with Ronaldo – has some interesting pop psychology ideas about his subject.
A Season in the Red: Managing Manchester United in the Shadow of Sir Alex Ferguson
Jamie Jackson (Aurum Press, €20.99)
It’s interesting what’s going on at Manchester United these days. The club has been in a tizzy since Alex Ferguson’s departure after almost 27 years at the helm. The Guardian’s Jamie Jackson, who does the football beat at United, has written a book about the transition from the Ferguson era to 10 months of crisis under David Moyes and the boring, fussy football of the Louis van Gaal reign.
Jackson charts these troubled waters in rich detail. He’s excellent on the corporate side of the house, especially on the club’s chummy executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward, although the book lacks editorial insight on this strange moment in the club’s history to make it a “top, top” read.
The Moyes section of the book is the most engaging. He was clearly never cut out to fill the shoes of his fellow Scot. Ferguson admits he purposefully oozes authority. It’s always chest out. He never slinks into a room. People notice him enter.
Poor old Moyes doesn’t have that sense of entitlement. On his first official day at Carrington, the club’s training ground, he stole a moment alone in the manager’s office to try Ferguson’s old chair because “I thought I would have to see how it feels in case anybody thought I looked stupid”.
Forever Boys: The Days of Citizens and Heroes
James Lawton (Wisden, €20.99)
The funeral of Malcolm Allison in October 2010 prompted James Lawton to write his spellbinding history of Manchester City’s late-1960s team. During a brief burst of sunshine, City, coached by Allison, won four trophies in three seasons, including the league title in 1968 and the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1970.
The book was a personal mission for Lawton. He knew the characters involved. Manchester was his hunting ground in the Sixties. He witnessed George Best’s first game for Man United. He ghosted Allison’s football articles. It was where he started his married life, living in “a rabbit hutch”, according to his mother-in-law, and rubbing shoulders with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones from the Stones in the city’s nightclubs.
Allison liked the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle too. On a pre-season tour to Australia, he tasked the team hotel’s receptionist with making sure his room was supplied with a bottle of pink champagne every day, and two each for the boys’ rooms. His second wife was a Playboy Bunny. An affair with one of the directors’ wives at Plymouth Argyle, where he coached before City, hastened his departure from the club.
He was inspiring as a coach at City (although a second coming in the late-1970s proved disastrous). The wife of Mike Summerbee, one of the three stars of the team alongside Colin Bell and Francis Lee, used to say, “you love Malcolm Allison more than you love me”. He had that rare gift for motivating men.
Lawton brings the team’s old soldiers vividly to light, including Tony Coleman, who has disappeared; last anyone heard he could be in Thailand. Some endured embittered days as their football careers petered out, including Mike Doyle, who succumbed to alcoholism, and Neil Young, who never got over being cut adrift without a testimonial.
One of the most poignant postscripts to the team’s story is the on-going feud between Lee and Bell who was, according to Bill Shankly “so good he could have played in his overcoat”.
Lee is a fascinating, bolshie character. He was a self-made millionaire by the age of 30 from business interests but his fairytale return to City as chairman in the 1990s turned sour. One of his legacies was the dismissal of Bell as a youth team coach. Bell has never forgiven him. When Lee passes him in the VIP seats at the stadium during matches, he murmurs: “Excuse, Mr Colin Bell, can I get past?”
Arsene Wenger: The Inside Story of Arsenal Under Wenger
John Cross (Simon & Schuster, €17:99)
The challenge of bringing something fresh when writing a book on Arsene Wenger is a mammoth one. The astonishing success of the first part of Wenger’s reign at Arsenal has been well documented as has his struggle to recreate the glory days in the post-Highbury era.
John Cross has produced a balanced, readable account of the Wenger era, albeit one that reveals precious little that wasn’t already known.
Some of the most interesting titbits come courtesy of broadcaster Clare Tomlinson, Wenger’s first press officer at Arsenal. She reveals, for instance, how fellow managers, specifically Alex Ferguson sycophants, treated the new foreign arrival to the English game. “The whole Fergie clique were horrible to him,” Tomlinson says.
One of the more amusing moments in the book comes late on when, during a Q&A with supporters, Wenger was asked if a delay in Theo Walcott signing a new contract was down to his desire to play through the middle rather than on the wing. Wenger, Cross writes, leaned back in his chair and gently sang the Abba song: Money, Money, Money.
It’s a revealing, funny story (if you’re not Theo Walcott) but the book would have benefitted from a few more gems like it.
‘The Last Line – My Autobiography’
Packie Bonner (Ebury Press, €31.65)
Did you know that Packie Bonner ended up with a boat in Donegal called ‘Timofte’ and Daniel Timofte ended up with a bar in Bucharest called ‘The Penalty’?
You might think all there is to say about the most famous shoot-out in Irish football history has already been said but here, at long last, is the full story, told by the man whose great leap of faith in Genoa propelled him to the forefront of Irish life.
But there’s much more in this engaging autobiography, from Bonner’s finest hour in Stuttgart in 1988 to the low of his costly mistake in the defeat in Orlando to Holland in 1994, plus ample material from behind the scenes in all his years at Celtic Park as well as the startled view from a ringside seat for what he calls the ‘Watergate’ of Irish sport – Saipan.
At root, however, this is the story of how, as Packie himself puts it, “a raw Donegal boy, reared on the northwest coast of Ireland and only truly comfortable within the roots of family and home could have made a journey that crossed onto the international stage.”
And the pull of his home place is never too far away – he even somehow managed to pick out a familiar Dungloe face in the crowd as he took his place on the line during the penalty drama against Romania that would change his life.
A modest man with little to be modest about, it has taken 25 years since Italia '90 for the country’s greatest goalkeeping legend to be persuaded to tell his tale, to a sensitive ghost writer in Gerry McDade. The wait has been worthwhile.
I Believe in Miracles: The Remarkable Story of Brian Clough’s European Cup-winning Team
Daniel Taylor (Headline, €18.99)
It’s difficult to think of a more romantic story in British football than Nottingham Forest’s improbable rise to the top of European football. When Brian Clough took over the club in 1975 (along with his legendary sidekick, Peter Taylor), it was languishing in the old Second Division. He won promotion at the end of the 1976-77 season, stormed to a league title at the first attempt and then to successive European Cup wins in 1979 and 1980, the second one a win at Madrid’s Bernabéu Stadium over Kevin Keegan’s Hamburg.
He did it with a team of journeymen; a couple of stars, Peter Shilton and Trevor Francis; Clough’s ‘Picasso’ John Robertson; and the indomitable hardman, Kenny Burns. Republic of Ireland coach Martin O’Neill owes much to him. He had been treading water at the club for four years before Clough arrived. It’s highly likely he’d never have known such playing glory if he wasn’t sprinkled with Clough’s stardust.
Old Big ‘Ead had some comical management techniques. He once abandoned training after a few minutes and sent his players into a nearby field to pick some mushrooms. When his centre half Larry Lloyd shouted across that he’d found some magic mushrooms, Clough shot back: “Chuck them in as well.”
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