|
|
Post by dem on Oct 4, 2013 5:58:09 GMT
I Am The Secret Footballer (Guardian Books, 2013)
Blurb:
It is often said that 95% of what happens in football takes place behind closed doors.
Many of these stories I shouldn't be telling you about.
But I will.
Who is the Secret Footballer? Only a few people know the true identity of the man inside the game. But whoever he is - and whoever he plays for - he is always honest, always fearless and always opinionated. Here he reveals everything you need to know about the hidden world of professional football, and what it's really like to do the job that most of us can only dream of.
`Perhaps the holy grail of sports-writing is the quest to understand what it's like "out there" on the field and in the changing room. Very few athletes have managed to convey it. The Secret Footballer does. - Financial Times Sports Books of the Year
`Managers, bad behaviour and fans . – prompts a fierce reassessment of who we lionise as heroes' - Metro Sports Books of the Year
"I know that, If I'm honest with myself, for about a year I have been drinking too heavily and eating excessively in a pathetic attempt to develop a gut so that they won't pick me any more. The last thing I want to do is play football again. I don't want to go back. Don't make me go back."
Perhaps its the steady diet of scandal we're force-fed by the media, but the secret footballer's revelations are far less shocking than they really ought to be. Where Eamon Dunphy's ground-breaking It's Only A Game? was a warts and more warts account of a second division footballer's not especially glamorous lot in the early 'seventies, our soccer super-grass trains his or her sights on today's money no object Premier league, which, if the Secret Footballer's experience is anything to go by, is, for the most part, very much the spiritual wasteland depicted in the tabloids. Fans, Managers, Agents, WAGs (or "creatures,"as they're known in the trade), groupies, all come under the microscope, and, while TSF is not one to name the guilty, should you care to join the dots, it's easy to draw entirely wrong conclusions and implicate any player or celeb hanger-on you don't happen to like.
Always assuming they've not lobbed in a few red herrings, our narrator is a former premiership star, capped for his country and frequently among the goals, whose playing career has now entered it's twilight years. Married with kids, liberal minded, his off-field interests include literature, art, and fine wines. His iPod play-list includes (or did) Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, Bob Dylan's It's Alright, Ma, I'm only Bleeding, Peter Gabriels We Do What We're Told (Milgrams 37) - "the song includes distant tortured screaming which I used to appreciate very much" - and Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. He suffers with depression, to the point where he very nearly hung up his boots at the end of last season, but still plies his trade lower down the league Of those players he's faced, he most admires Paul Scholes. He's no big fan of John Terry, and a crunching tackle from Antonio Valencia once sent him hurtling over the advertising hoardings. He is far from alone in his estimation of all-round media buffoon Robbie Savage's negligible prowess as a pundit.
Provided you've an interest in the subject, I Am The Secret Footballer is as quick a 240 page read as you'll ever encounter. I'd hesitate to elevate it to 'Sports book of the Year' status - it's not even a contender for Sport's book of this thread - but am glad to have made the acquaintance. Of almost equal interest is the unhelpful on-line campaign to identify the mystery man. At time of writing, the current number one suspect is Dave Kitson, while previous names in the frame include Kevin Davies, Danny Murphy, Kevin Nolan, David Bentley, Joey 'Friedrich' Barton, and Peter Crouch, not all of them entirely exonerated.
A sequel, Tales From The Secret Footballer, is published in hard-cover next month.
|
|
|
|
Post by dem on Oct 8, 2013 15:48:13 GMT
One for pulphack, well, chapter two is at any rate. David Winner - Those Feet: An Intimate History Of English Football (Bloomsbury, 2005)  Cover image: © London Transport Museum
Introduction
Sexy Football
Roys, Keens, and Rovers
In Ancient Time
The Phantom Limb
It's Cold And we're Rubbish
Cooling The Blood
The Italian Job
English Grace
Boots and Balls
Meet the Ancestors
IndexBlurb `Highly original ... There's a wealth of thought-provoking material here ... Winner has an easy, witty, often evocative style' - Sunday Telegraph
In this playful, witty and highly original look at English football, David Winner, author of the acclaimed Brilliant Orange, journeys to the heart of Englishness and sheds new light on the true nature of a rapidly changing game that was never really meant to be beautiful. He shows how Victorian sexual anxiety underlies England's many World Cup failures. He reveals the connection between Roy Keane and a soldier who died in the Charge of the Light Brigade. And he demonstrates how thick mud and wet leather shaped the contours of the English soul.So, 'Hell week' for Roy Hodgson's warriors. Beat Montenegro on Friday and Poland five days later, and England will qualify as group winners for the Brazil 2014 World Cup. Fail to do so, and it gets tricky, a play-off place at best, elimination at worst. How better to calm the nerves than with, not one but two book-length examinations of our boys' grim history of perceived "underachievement" and general woefulness at international level? Will come to Simon Briggs' Don't Mention The Score: A Masochists History of the England Football Team (Quercus, 2011) in due course, but first, we've Mr. Winner's gallant attempt at answering his own conundrum. "I don't know why, but we've always preferred running and fighting to being skilful" Sexy Football: Or, how football was introduced to the school curriculum as an antidote to the masturbation. Rutland, England, 1853. God is in his heaven, Victoria's on the throne, Britannia rules the waves, and the Rev. Edward Thring, headmaster of Uppingham School and a devotee of "muscular Christianity", introduces compulsory sports to the curriculum. No namby pamby, non-contact sports but manly, physical team games to prepare a boy for life and, more importantly, fighting for his country. Because Empire was under threat from an enemy within. Thring hinted at this direst of perils in a sermon, Death, and Death, and Death. "I say that, by and by, all of a sudden, you know not how, all that you have learned to love through years of basement will drop off." To stamp out this love that dare not speak its name, Thring encouraged his pupils to spy upon one another. Loners were treated with the gravest suspicion. To be caught indulging in solitary vice was to be expelled on the spot, and the stigma would comfortably see the transgressor through the rest of his lifetime. It fell to the Reverend's brother, J.C. Thring, to set down his ten commandments of the game in 1862. These in turn were developed by the Cambridge set at a cataclysmic Pub meeting that saw the birth of the FA in October of the following year. Despite much protest - "Better that our sports should be a little too rough than that we should run a risk of effeminacy," opined Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, who was alternating as goalkeeper and full back for a prototype Portsmouth F.C. at the time.- 'hacking' (kicking one's opponent on the shin with hobnailed boots), was outlawed, and the 'beautiful game' as we know it (more or less) was born! Roys, Keens, and Rovers: "In P. W. Batten's 1927 Aldine novel, Dan of the Rovers, we meet Rothsdale Rovers' centre-half Dan Burnby ('broad of shoulder and clean of limb'), who is drugged during a match by an evil odd-job man and falsely accused of accepting a bribe. Dan inherits £50,000 from the father he never knew but turns the money down to clear his name before rescuing a baby from a fire in which he gets horribly disfigured, which leads to a new identity, a new chance with another team ... and you can probably guess the rest."This chapter is a celebration of boy's football fiction through the ages, tracking various, all conquering 'Rovers' teams and the several manifestations of an uncompromising midfield enforcer who led Manchester United to domestic and European triumph. Sadly for the book's premise, this last known incarnation is a proud Irishman, but we get Mr Winner's point. The complex lineage can be traced back to 1859 and a racy Victorian novel, George Alfred Lawrence's Sword & Gown, wherein the hero, Royston Keene, is a psychopathic, all-round sportsman, fighting in the Crimean War. After his death leading the Charge of the Light Brigade, Keene emigrates to the Wild West for a new, non-sporting life as Roy Of The Ranches, but the lure of this violent, round ball game he keeps hearing about proves too strong. Once back in England, he embarks on a career the like of which we will never see repeated. As rich yank 'OK O'Keefe of the Rovers', he transforms the fortunes of terminal no-hopers Rockvale. A pioneering sex change in 1922 sees him achieve stardom as Ray of the Rovers, the first girl ever to play in the cup final (She score's the winning goal). And so on and so on through countless manifestations including Tiger Keen, Edmund Keen Ace Detective, Maxwell Keene (who presumably solves The Riddle Of The Missing Star). 'Dead Shot' Keen, Roy Race, Scorer, and half man, half halibut Billy The Fish. Sadly, no mention of The Worst Man In The World, Tiger Standish, or W. J. Lomax's ace Sexton Blake adventure, A Football Mystery, in which the lionhearted sleuth captains England to victory over those cheating foreign Johnnies, which goes to show there was a lot of this kind of material around. Meet The Ancestors is another highlight, the author's first-hand account of the bizarre, energy sapping Eton Wall Game in a chapter investigating surviving local contests which bear some strange resemblance to football at its most primal. Cheif among these war-like competitions, Derbyshire's brutal Ashbourne Shrovetide match ("one of the few rules states that a player is not permitted to commit manslaughter during a game"), and the, frankly, terrifying Hallaton Bottle-Kicking & Hare Pie Scramble, essentially an afternoon of legitimised riot. |
|
|
|
Post by Craig Herbertson on Oct 9, 2013 7:01:31 GMT
Sexy Football: Or, how football was introduced to the school curriculum as an antidote to the masturbation. Rutland, England, 1853. God is in his heaven, Victoria's on the throne, Britannia rules the waves, and the Rev. Edward Thring, headmaster of Uppingham School and a devotee of "muscular Christianity", introduces compulsory sports to the curriculum. No namby pamby, non-contact sports but manly, physical team games to prepare a boy for life and, more importantly, fighting for his country. Because Empire was under threat from an enemy within. Thring hinted at this direst of perils in a sermon, Death, and Death, and Death. "I say that, by and by, all of a sudden, you know not how, all that you have learned to love through years of basement will drop off." To stamp out this love that dare not speak its name, Thring encouraged his pupils to spy upon one another. Loners were treated with the gravest suspicion. To be caught indulging in solitary vice was to be expelled on the spot, and the stigma would comfortably see the transgressor through the rest of his lifetime. It fell to the Reverend's brother, J.C. Thring, to set down his ten commandments of the game in 1862. These in turn were developed by the Cambridge set at a cataclysmic Pub meeting that saw the birth of the FA in October of the following year. Despite much protest - "Better that our sports should be a little too rough than that we should run a risk of effeminacy," opined Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, who was alternating as goalkeeper and full back for a prototype Portsmouth F.C. at the time.- 'hacking' (kicking one's opponent on the shin with hobnailed boots), was outlawed, and the 'beautiful game' as we know it (more or less) was born! Rev. Edward Thring sounds like he'd get on well in today's society. I can imagine my old head teacher suggesting that the young chaps spy on each other and out any secret onanists. Would go down a treat with the social services. At the time it must have been awful for those affected but it really is hysterical now to think of some older bloke trying to join the golf club only to encounter a huddled group of frowning men shaking their heads in affront. 'Loner at school' - nods of understanding as the black balls are dropped in the hat. Slumps off into the social wilderness. |
|
|
|
Post by dem on Oct 11, 2013 17:16:00 GMT
Rev. Edward Thring sounds like he'd get on well in today's society. I can imagine my old head teacher suggesting that the young chaps spy on each other and out any secret onanists. Would go down a treat with the social services. At the time it must have been awful for those affected but it really is hysterical now to think of some older bloke trying to join the golf club only to encounter a huddled group of frowning men shaking their heads in affront. 'Loner at school' - nods of understanding as the black balls are dropped in the hat. Slumps off into the social wilderness. According to the author, if two boys were found sleeping together, it wasn't considered such a big deal provided there was no evidence of, um, "foul play." But should a pupil be caught "bashing the bishop", the poor chap was frog-marched through the school gates, never to return. Who knows how many psychological fuck ups Uppingham manufactured? Consult the list of expulsions during the 34 year tenure of the Rev Thring and you could be halfway to identifying Jack the Ripper. Incidentally, a quick google reveals famous alumni include Boris Karloff (born the same year Rev Thring's 34 year satanic reign at the school came to an end in 1887), and William Sansom. Stephen Fry was expelled in 1972, but i think "hosting a private party in one's plus fours" was less frowned upon by then, so it was probably for something else. I ordered Those Feet purely on the promise of a chapter on boys' fiction, but found Mr. Winner's history lesson so compelling, I stuck with it, read it cover to cover in two sessions. May have some more to say about it later, but first there's the torture of tonight's crucial qualifier v. the mighty Montenegro to squirm through .... |
|
|
|
Post by Craig Herbertson on Oct 12, 2013 7:46:27 GMT
May have some more to say about it later, but first there's the torture of tonight's crucial qualifier v. the mighty Montenegro to squirm through .... Well you sorted out Montenegro. I just read Rooney was offered the chance to play for Scotland as his grandma hailed from the land of cakes. You know, he might have sneaked his way into our squad. Is there a list of expulsions? That would be a great who's who. Some of the more sadistic alumni might have checked it. I can imagine them seeking out the offenders wherever they went. You could be in the foreign office up the Amazon or at the Khyber Pass and some callow fellow would denounce you (but not in front of the ladies or the natives) I bet the foreign legion was full of ex pupils. |
|
|
|
Post by dem on Oct 15, 2013 6:20:45 GMT
Is there a list of expulsions? That would be a great who's who. Some of the more sadistic alumni might have checked it. I can imagine them seeking out the offenders wherever they went. You could be in the foreign office up the Amazon or at the Khyber Pass and some callow fellow would denounce you (but not in front of the ladies or the natives) I bet the foreign legion was full of ex pupils. With the advent of the football league and the FA Cup, a new enemy was identified. Passing the ball to a team-mate was considered not only to be cheating, but an act of despicable cowardice, and practitioners of this infamy were regarded as lower down the social scale than even the most rabid devotee of "the tug of war with cyclops". These troublemakers, whose other supposed 'attributes' included developing ball skills, avoiding a broken leg whenever possible, and knocking the 40-a-day Woobines habit on the head, came to be known as 'stormy petrels', flair players to us, and a succession of England managers (or rather, their selection committees) had no time for them. Stanley Matthews, for example, was frequently left out of the international side on grounds of alleged stormy petrelism. On at least one such occasion, he had much to be thankful for. The FA finally condescended to recognise the World Cup in time for the 1950 tournament, and duly qualified as current Home International champions (runners-up Scotland declined their invitation). Walter Winterbottom's team had recently destroyed the current holders, Italy, 4-0 in Turin, so "The Kings of Football" could look forward to the junket in Brazil as a stroll in the park. They were drawn in a group with Chile, Spain, and, in the words of Brian Glanville, "The United States of America was also competing, but this was regarded as little more than a joke in doubtful taste." Chile were seen off 2-0 in the opening game, and the team flew to Belo Horizonte for the formality of a walkover against a US scratch side comprised of part-timers whose first eleven included two Scottish ex-pats, a free-transfer from Wrexham, a postman, a hearse driver, a mechanic and - anticipating Sylvester Stallone in Escape To Victory - a baseball player between the sticks. On the evidence of their performances in this summer's Confederations Cup , the current Tahiti side would have murdered them. England didn't. Woeful finishing, dubious refereeing, and a bizarre deflected goal saw the amateurs, many of whom had been out partying until 2am on the eve of the match, win a remarkable victory over the supposed champions elect at full-strength. Full strength, that is, save for Matthews, who'd again been dropped by the selectors for possessing a footballing brain. Defeat to a streetwise Spain in the final group game saw the World champs by divine right eliminated at the first hurdle. Throughout the book, Mr Winner addresses the increasingly widespread belief (outside of the more jingoistic elements of the press, at least) that the fabled "Russian" linesman did us no favours when he convinced the ref Geoff Hurst's shot had crossed the line in 1966. The triumph of Sir Alf's 'No flair please, we're English' approach to the beautiful game proved beyond doubt that nancy boy skilful stuff, as peddled by Brazil and Argentina (when they dropped the skulduggery), was no match for the REAL THING. Nobody argued too loudly until a better England side blew a two goal lead to lose to West Germany at Mexico 70, a result which Harold Wilson blamed for costing him the election (he'd rather optimistically called it for four days after the semi's, hoping to capitalise on the feel-good factor, because "England only win the world cup under Labour"). Ramsey's response to this defeat was to adopt a style of play so negative, it made Uruguay at their most psychotic seem like the Harlem Globetrotters. The effect on the domestic game was appalling. Three years of anti-football later, after failing to overcome Poland to make the West Germany 74 finals, the man who but seven years earlier had been hailed as a national hero, was unceremoniously sacked in favour of Don Revie of the Elland Road maulers. And the rest is ... well, it's rarely lacked a sense of black comedy, that's for sure. |
|
|
|
Post by ripper on Oct 17, 2013 12:20:55 GMT
The David Winner book sounds a very interesting read. I remember the furore when Don Revie quit the England job and went to the UAE to manage their national team. There was an expectation that Brian Clough would become England's manager but it wasn't to be.
Now that England have qualified for Brazil 2014 I hope that the press won't build up England's chances too highly. I think Hodgson is a decent manager, doing his best with limited resources at his disposal. Hopefully, England will be seeded and get an easier route out of the group stage (though "easier" is relative as too often they make heavy weather of getting out of the group). After that, we shall see. We are probably never going to be a Brazil or Spain in terms of skills and talent, but having watched England for 40+ years it seems to me that the whole is less than the sum of the parts on far too many occasions.
|
|
|
|
Post by dem on Nov 19, 2013 14:01:10 GMT
Daniel Tatarsky - Flick to Kick: An Illustrated History of Subbuteo (Orion, 2004) Admittedly, the cover painting is just plain creepy, but take heart. Daniel Tatarsky's debut tells you everything you could possibly wish to know about the beautiful flicking game. The best and worst accessories, celebrity endorsements, the Beatles connection, Hone your subbuteo skills (top tips on how to master the basic flick, the chip, "the curly free kick": anybody worked out how to perform a two-footed tackle?), indie pop references (the Undertones, Half Man Half Biscuit - surely there must be more than two?), the collectibles, disastrous DIY repairs and paint jobs, the Subbuteo Sound 7", the attractive but ultimately useless floodlights, the essential Television Tower, spin offs (including cricket, rugby, golf, speedway, hockey ("for girls"), angling (!) and the ambitious Journey Into Space. [Chapter two, i]Life Before Subbuteo[/i] examines the lo-tech, phlegm-flecked world of blow football, and something called NewFooty which proved a huge influence on Peter Arthur Adoph, the visionary "Father of Subbuteo." Even before he'd applied for a patent, Mr. Adolph placed an advertisement for the game he'd not yet finalised in The Boys Own Paper for August 1946, and just ran with it. We learn that Mr. Adolph, a devoted ornithologist, named the game after his favourite bird, the Hobby Hawk, or Falco Subbuteo. A steady seller throughout its early years, the game really took off with the 1966 World Cup for which Waddington's teams in the colours of each team to qualify for the finals. At close of the 'nineties, the company sold Subbuteo to overseas giants Hasbro, which, while not sounding the death knell, kind of went against the spirit of the thing.
|
|
|
|
Post by jamesdoig on Nov 20, 2013 7:58:37 GMT
the attractive but ultimately useless floodlights Ah yes, I remember them well, and that corner-kicking thing and scoreboard and other crap - loved Subbuteo as a kid. Goes in the same nostalgia pile as the missile firing Corgi batmobile and Whizzer & Chips annuals. |
|
|
|
Post by dem on Nov 20, 2013 12:31:22 GMT
the attractive but ultimately useless floodlights Ah yes, I remember them well, and that corner-kicking thing and scoreboard and other crap - loved Subbuteo as a kid. Goes in the same nostalgia pile as the missile firing Corgi batmobile and . The "corner-kicking thing" is in here, but no scoreboard, far as I can remember. The worst accessories section is class. A track-suited team "for warming up", the "Subbuteo material for keeping the ball in the net" (glorified flypaper), and the adhesive shirt numbers that required a feat of advanced micro-surgery to apply and fell off approximately five seconds into River Plate - Uruguay grudge match. Whizzer & Chips annuals? Now you're talking the classics. |
|
|
|
Post by Craig Herbertson on Nov 20, 2013 15:14:15 GMT
The referees, the crowd, that oversize ball. I had the camera men and my brother built a balsa wood stadium. Nobody seemed to think in advance in those days.
'Right, everything's there - teams, floodlights, ref, crowd,streakers, cameramen, balsa wood stadium...eh how do i get near enough to start?' |
|
|
|
Post by jamesdoig on Nov 20, 2013 19:39:52 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by Craig Herbertson on Nov 21, 2013 7:01:20 GMT
Is it shameful to admit that, lying upstairs, I still have mine - (including original pitches, hand painted teams (Celtic with numbers personally painted on the shorts which my eyes can no longer make out and the special metal goals you had to send away for). My Hearts team are still in the box with the names of the team written in.
|
|
|
|
Post by jamesdoig on Nov 21, 2013 7:42:16 GMT
Is it shameful to admit that, lying upstairs, I still have mine Not shameful at all, you bloody lucky sod!  |
|
|
|
Post by dem on Nov 21, 2013 8:07:15 GMT
It was dead handy the standard set came with a blue & white team as that was me immediately sorted for the mighty Stones. Later added Watford/ Barnet, Uruguay (I was very impressed by their masterly of the dark arts; one of their assassins ended the playing career of Aussie goal-machine Ray Baartz with a karate-chop to the throat. In a friendly), and River Plate (no idea, think I was taken by the diagonal red stripe down their shirt). Bought the TV tower, the flashy rounded goalposts with the white netting, and the dayglo yellow ball for floodlit matches - like it made any difference. Wealdstone won the World cup and the European doorknob in successive seasons, mainly due to my not having any friends for some mysterious reason. The babysitter gave me a game once, but otherwise I was obliged to play with myself. Story of my "life" in microcosm. I'm so f**king grateful to Mr. Tatarsky and his (very entertaining) rotten book for bringing it all back.
|
|
Wish I'd kept mine.