I was lucky enough a few weeks ago to find a copy of the out-of-print Mr and Mrs Soccer by Andy Harper at a local op-shop (or charity shop for the non-Australians). After handing over the spare change in my pocket to buy the book, I beamed at having finally secured the missing book in what I think of as a set of three books that make up the early oeuvre of Australian football literature up until the mid-2000s. Along with Mr and Mrs Soccer, this triumvirate also includes Sheilas, Wogs, and Poofters by Johnny Warren, and By the Balls by Les Murray.
So, needless to say, it gave me great pleasure to read Mr and Mrs Soccer. The titular ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ are Johnny Warren and Les Murray (or vice versa), the indefatigable, indomitable, and inimitable broadcasting duo that carried the flame of Australian football from the 1970s until the mid-2000s. In this book, commentator and writer Andy Harper interviews Johnny and Les as they look over their career on television together, each the yin to the other’s yang, and as surrogate football missionaries to a generation finally opening its eyes to the wonders of the world game.
“Johnny: Seven didn’t show much interest in football at all. I remember when Rex was commentating on a game between England and Australia. Off air, during a break in play or at half time, he turned and said, ‘If this game ever takes over from rugby league you can fuck me in Pitt Street.’ He was flabbergasted. Then he proceeded to call the ball as ‘going into touch’, ‘out on the full’, as well as ‘touch judge has his flag up’ and references to ‘the umpire’. The football media landscape was barren in the extreme” (pg. 36)
Andy Harper, the co-author of Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters with Johnny Warren, goes to the productive well of Australian footballing heartbreak to interview Johnny and Les on the state of football in the country from the 1960s to 2004. Johnny and Les reminisce about growing up amongst the Hungarian diaspora in Sydney, as well as their early forays into football broadcasting that steeled them into the weathered, consummate professionals and doyens of SBS later. They also discuss their anger, driving skills, and the pleasures of smoking. Johnny reflects on his cancer diagnosis and, in gracefully accepting his fate borne from his chain-smoking sins over decades, readers (especially Australian readers) can be forgiven for getting misty-eyed in the present day. There is a bit of room at the end of the book for the duo to opine on Australian identity through the prism of football, and the future of the world game generally; but these asides are like sipping on sweet coffee after already devouring the filling meal.
Of particular interest is the change in cadence when Johnny and Les talk about their chief analyst and SBS Head of Sport roles respectively during the coverage of the 2002 World Cup. The power dynamics between the two, with Johnny, offended for his viewers after chief match commentator Martin Tyler was allowed to jump to Channel 9 for the World Cup Final, while Les defended his decision-making in dealing with a combustible Johnny, is fascinating to read about. This account serves up some humility and regret in a remarkable friendship that allows for this kind of reflection without any lingering animosity, reflected by the various ‘on the balls’ (vigorous, spirited debates on football) and ‘Tre collis’ (their bursts of anger and frustration in dealing with the pressures of travel) that they mention.
“Les: Johnny’s contract came up for renewal and there were further discussions. That was probably the most uncomfortable time I have ever had with Johnny; discussing Johnny’s performance and his future, arguing SBS’s position to Johnny’s lawyer, with Johnny sitting next to him. It was a rare occasion when we were on opposite sides, and it was pretty unpleasant.” (pg 146)
Stylistically, Mr and Mrs Soccer is an appropriate representation of Murray and Warren’s friendship and working relationship. Reading the alternating passages between the two, you can picture them both sitting at angles to each other behind that desk on The World Game, as the television screen places them at such a distance apart that you can’t figure out if it’s out of deference or annoyance with each other. Writer Andy Harper must be given credit for marshalling the experience, knowledge, and cachet of the duo to give such a warts-and-all account of their experiences. In doing so, Harper uses Mr and Mrs Soccer as a bridge between the before (Australia’s footballing oblivion) and the after (achieving the seemingly mythical in qualifying for the World Cup) for a new generation of Australian footballing fans that must be humbled to remember that the relative success of Australian football is underpinned by ignominy and adversity, yet was foretold and beckoned with the unrelenting support of this rare breed of men.
Even if some of their hopes and suggestions in Mr and Mrs Soccer come off as naff (reducing the number of players to 10-a-side) and quixotic (Australia to win the World Cup someday) twenty years later, we have to remember that such ideas were borne out of the bloody-minded idealism that all mavericks possess. Their ideas, as challenging and provocative now as they were before, have a great timbre and lustre. The prescience is there, too. Johnny must be spinning in his grave with the “vested interests of [more than] a small number of money-hungry European clubs” in modern times; and Les must be fuming with the introduction of video technology to deliberate on far more than whether a ball crossed a line or not.
Johnny and Les at USA 1994 in San Francisco. (Courtesy SBS Television)
Quite rightly, the Warren-Murray partnership, in all its forthright, pioneering, and ornery vicissitudes, is the focus of Mr and Mrs Soccer. The book was published before the Australian footballing renaissance in the mid-2000s. They lived, worked (and Johnny played) through the highs, lows, and intolerable doldrums of the Australian football domestic and international scene. Although Australian football suffered the crushing blows of the 1997 loss to Iran in the World Cup Playoff match and the Uruguay defeat in 2002, Warren and Murray had long before rallied an apathetic nation to finally feel something—even if it was soul-crushing defeat—by unfailingly appearing on our screens and replanting the football flag. It mattered because it hurt, and badly.
It is bittersweet to be able to refer to Johnny and Les in the present tense in parts of this review, for although they passed away in 2004 and 2017 respectively, such has been their legacy on football in Australia that I still think of them as alive and kicking, spreading the football gospel on SBS every Sunday morning on The World Game. While reading Mr and Mrs Soccer, I could hear Les’ sophisticated, Euro-inflected English and Johnny’s forthright erudition in every sentence attributed to them.
“Johnny: …the politics and administration of the game in this country have been a disgrace. There have been some very strong anti-soccer forces that have enjoyed this and used it for their own ends but the things that soccer administrators have been able to control have been mismanaged by organisational incompetence and political skullduggery.” (pg. 155)
Mr and Mrs Soccer is Andy Harper’s second book publication behind Sheilas, Wogs, and Poofters. After his professional football career in the National Soccer League (NSL) ended in 2001, he embarked on a productive career in journalism and commentating. Along the way he has gained many fans (and detractors). Clearly, he has contributed much to the domestic football media and literature scenes, and even published a doctoral thesis titled ‘Australia’s Power Structures and the Legitimisation of Soccer (2003-2015)’ in 2020. In a way, he belongs to the second-generation vanguard of Australian football broadcasting talent that was given wings by Johnny and Les.
So, it is quite fitting that Harper, in Mr and Mrs Soccer, plays the role of convener, editor, and witness to this venerable duo; and in doing so, he imparts some of that fiery wisdom to a generation that now knows what it feels like to feel something about football. Johnny and Les’ journey together needed to be told. Read this book, and live again amidst the hopes of the times when things would get better—all the while knowing, full well, that they did.
“Johnny: When we start talking about winning the World Cup, we’ll know the mission is complete. It’s a big task, but it is doable.” (pg. 156)
STARS: 4.5/5
UNDER 20: A fantastic look back on a dynamic duo that contributed so, so much to the development of football in Australia.
FULL-TIME SCORE: Like a 3-0 win remembered from long ago, the layers of affection and nostalgia added over the years burnish the legend and mythos of that victory.
RELATED READING:Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters by Johnny Warren (2002); By the Balls by Les Murray (2006)
Here I am, sipping on my crisp Wrexham Lager in Melbourne, Australia. I don’t think it would ever have been sold elsewhere around the world far outside of the UK–let alone in Australia–if not for the phenomenon that is Welcome to Wrexham and the cachet of Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac. Globalisation is a remarkable thing.
I happened to come across a six-pack of Wrexham Lager at my local bottle shop, and simply had to buy it. I’m now content that I don’t have to travel all the way to Wrexham to try it! Admittedly, I’m not the best when it comes to describing beer notes, but I can say that it is crisp, malty, and refreshing. Take that as a seal of approval if you like!
You’ve probably seen or heard that Ryan Reynolds’ and Rob McElhenney’s ownership of Wrexham has propelled the club to trophy glory, commercial success, and into American popular consciousness. Welcome to Wrexham, the fly-on-the-wall documentary series and cultural phenomenon that charts Wrexham’s startling rise from National League to Championship over four entertaining seasons, addresses the cynicism of modern-day club ownership by thumbing its nose at PR-massage jobs like All or Nothing.
And if you haven’t seen or heard about it—perhaps that rock that you’ve been living under needs some lifting. For Welcome to Wrexham is stirring viewing, and deserves your attention.
Tinseltown: Hollywood and the Beautiful Game by Ian Herbert is a well-researched and straight-man foil companion piece to Welcome to Wrexham. There is little of the charming snark and wit of the documentary series in Tinseltown, but through Herbert (a Wrexham fan and respected Daily Mail journalist), we can learn more about the club and the city’s history to fully flesh out the angles of anxiety, faded glory, missed chances, and tragedy that haven’t been given the Disney treatment in Welcome to Wrexham.
“Covid’s arrival might have saved Wrexham from relegation but its refusal to go away took what little hope there was left. The turnstile money disappeared, along with the perimeter-board advertisers and the broadcast revenue from occasional live matches on BT Sport. The water and electricity were switched off, the groundsman was paid a retainer to keep out intruders but the turf was no longer cultivated and weeds took over the ground.” (pg. 21)
Herbert writes affectionately about his beloved Wrexham whilst acknowledging the city’s working-class history that is greatly coloured by tragedy. This is a city very obviously under the cosh and living off the fumes of past footballing and industrial glories. Tinseltown’s stories of drug use, juvenile delinquency, and matchday hooliganism underlie the homely football chats over coffee, slow motion redemption shots, and charming stoicism that Welcome to Wrexham routinely serves up.
Tinseltown covers Wrexham’s 2021-23 seasons (which correspond with Season 1 and 2 of Welcome to Wrexham). Familiarity with the documentary series quickly helps us to recognise the knockabout characters around the city (Wayne Jones and Wayne Clarke), the pragmatic heads in the clubrooms (Shaun Harvey, Kevin Mulholland), and the breakout stars (Lili Jones and Rosie Hughes) that are further described in Tinseltown. Herbert also introduces others who don’t appear in the series (for example, club advisor Les Reed, and the shoe repair expert) yet still contribute to the fabric of community and success at the club and around the city.
History features prominently in Tinseltown. Herbert expertly recounts how the Gresford Colliery coal mine disaster of 1934 inflicted multi-generational and shared civic trauma on the city of Wrexham, and how this trauma has infused with the club’s brief snatches of success and its more recent freefall into the depths of the National League. The trauma is palpable as we read that Wrexham’s ignominious survival from relegation from the National League was guaranteed by 0.08 points—a computational reprieve derived from calculating their points-per-game number after Covid lockdown brought an early end to the 2019-20 season. At the lowest ebb of the club’s 156-year history, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney come in and, well, you probably know the rest of the story (or fairytale).
As an invaluable resource the Wrexham story, Tinseltown shines when providing depth and granular detail to what is only hinted at, or glossed over, in Welcome to Wrexham. Such depth includes:a McElhenney thought bubble is followed up by Humphrey Ker as he scours Transfermarkt and FM for a suitable club for McElhenney to invest in (Wrexham? Macclesfield? Hartlepool?); rumours of a Russell Crowe takeover abound; Les Reed’s incisive spotting of playing talent; the sliding doors moment of Stockport signing Paddy Madden instead of Paul Mullin; and the club being happy to eat fines earned from using the wrong kind of signage for a televised FA Cup game. The nature of these details is darkly humourous considering how the club was run on the thinnest of shoestrings not so long ago—a humour that its owners, as they shoot self-deprecating commercials in the Wrexham dressing room, would readily recognise.
“At a stroke, a decades-old narrative at Wrexham was being rewritten. This was a club which had generally prevailed through managers squeezing value and building quality out of players who cost relatively little, though progress this time (if and when it came) would be inorganic. They were spending for success.” (pg. 133)
Herbert casts his journalistic eye far and wide across Wrexham in weaving Tinseltown’s narrative. He occasionally breaks away to give short, italicised vignettes of various characters around Wrexham. These asides do not always emotionally land, and can feel intrusive and jarring. The methodical pacing of relating Wrexham history and Reynolds’ and McElhenney’s genuineness in conducting due diligence on their ambitious new venture, is blunted by pages of quickfire form and result dispatches from the games in the final run in to the 2021-22 season. These dispatches attempt to set up a thrilling denouement, yet since we already know the ultimate result of it all—having already white-knuckled it through the slick production values in Welcome to Wrexham’s final episodes of Season 2—doesn’t impact as much as Herbert intends.
The quickened pace in the final third of Tinseltown also throws up some avoidable errors, with the most glaring being whirlwind striker for the women’s team and legitimate star of the series, Rosie Hughes, being called ‘Rosie Jones’ across several pages, including a reference to Paul Mullin being “the male Rosie Jones”. These editorial lapses chip away slightly at the credibility that Herbert has worked hard to establish.
One of the most fascinating insights that Tinseltown offers (and is hinted at by the connotation of glittering superficiality of the word itself) come with Herbert’s brief observations of Wrexham becoming a commercial vehicle for advertisers and content creators. Welcome to Wrexham shows replacement goalkeeper Ben Foster coming out of retirement to continue his vlogging of goalmouth scrambles, and using the content for his online channel and podcast. Herbert even writes of how attempts to bring in Hal Robson-Kanu and Gareth Bale to wreak havoc on hapless lower league defences fell through. “Fans didn’t want the club to become a content factory” Herbert writes, “a place where old pros went for a last pay cheque.” As objective viewers of Wrexham’s bankrolled success, we cannot help but feel cynical in an age of contemporary football that gives us more than enough reason to be so. Herbert continues: “…amid the team’s inconsistency, the documentary team began seeing the potential of an episode built around that. It would be called ‘Sack the gaffer’. Again, sensitivities were not spared in the quest for creative output.”
Reading Tinseltown is important because it contextualises and voices our cynicism to Wrexham’s newfound success. What can we make of Reynolds’ and McElhenney’s ownership and social philanthropy in an age when ruthless asset-stripping owners and oligarchs who mobilise the wealth of nation-states to launder reputations, continue to run roughshod over proud club histories? “Why had this story of Rob, Ryan and Wrexham captured the zeitgeist in such an extraordinary way?” Herbert asks. He parses the elements of the Wrexham rags-to-riches story and excels in cutting through the cynicism to give us some answers. These answers help us to cheer Wrexham and Reynolds-McElhenney on, even if only begrudgingly, as the freewheeling counterpoints to the scores of irresponsible owners who have, and continue to, grind proud clubs into dust.
Following Tinseltown’s publication, Welcome to Wrexham has stretched to four seasons, and a fifth (filming Wrexham’s Championship tilt in 2025-26) is forthcoming. Over seasons three and four, we watch as footballing journeymen Steven Fletcher and Jay Rodriguez join Wrexham. These expensive signings are the predictable, banal trappings of bankrolled success; the kind of well-worn names that are somewhat antithetical to the community-focused mandate that Reynolds and McElhenney espouse. Where there’s money to spend, there will be a late-30s, in-from-the-cold big earner to vindicate the realists who know that the price of the relentless push for success in the short-term is long-term unsustainability. When will the fatigue hit? Or even the content fatigue? In Herbert’s Daily Mail article from 4th March, 2025, he writes:
“…it sounds perverse to hope that the club actually don’t win a third successive promotion and make the unprecedented leap from National League to Championship inside three years this spring. I don’t think I’m the only one feeling a sense of unease about that, though. In the cold light of day, I don’t want it to happen… It’s hard to dispel a sneaking suspicion that the breakneck pursuit of Championship football is, to some extent, driven by [Reynolds’s and McElhenney’s] ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ documentary. While the Championship secures more documentary seasons, it’s hard to see a year’s consolidation in League One providing quite the same streaming gold… Wrexham don’t have a training ground. They still only have a temporary stand in place of the old Kop, so the Racecourse will be three-sided when work on a permanent Kop starts… The football journey may have been incredible, but at ground level, little has changed in the five years since McElhenney and Reynolds bought Wrexham.”
Whether Herbert likes it or not, Wrexham currently sit in a respectable 15th place in the 2025-26 Championship season. Tinseltown, in covering up to Wrexham’s promotion to League Two, only tells half of the Wrexham story under Reynolds and McElhenney. And considering Herbert’s recent scepticism, perhaps he has only told half of his story. On the strength and depth of his writing in Tinseltown, a follow-up would undoubtedly be warmly welcomed and similarly fascinating to read.
“We want to become part of your story. We don’t want you to be our story.” (pg. 378)
STARS: 4/5
UNDER 20: A gripping exploration of the Welcome to Wrexham phenomenon that provides a counterpoint to the soullessness of modern club ownership.
FULL-TIME SCORE: Home-grown Herbert, the defensive cover, works tirelessly to ensure that the depth of glittering new talent further up the pitch put in a shift to win the game 3-0.
RELATED READING:My Wrexham Story: The Inspirational Autobiography from the Beloved Football Hero by Paul Mullin (2023); From Hollywood to Wrexham by Peter Read (2023)
“I cannot dissociate football from dreams and childhood,” Jean-Philippe Toussaint writes in Football. And we, as readers, can be thankful for this. Across eighty-five pages of evocative writing, Toussaint treats us to a selection of lingering vignettes across a life of following football. Framing most of his writing across five World Cups (1998-2014), Toussaint is the aging, harried, and thoughtful everyman who shuffles and scuffs along and against the passing of time.
“This is a book that no one will like, not intellectuals, who aren’t interested in football, or football-lovers, who will find it too intellectual. But I had to write it, I didn’t want to break the fine thread that still connects me to the world.” (pg. 7)
Football begins in 1998, with Toussaint at forty years of age. The year, “though still intimately connected to our lives, to our time, to our flesh and to our history…had accidently sunk its teeth into the edge of the previous century, and inadvertently, found its feet dangling in the past.” In experiencing this transition into middle age, Toussaint recounts early footballing memories. He introduces a recurring motif of the lag and mismatch with time, first in a description of players at the 1970 World Cup, colourised on TV for the first time, leaving their “physical envelope behind and now pursued [their] moves in black and white, leaving behind him the colour of his jersey, which followed him in slight delay.” Despite such vivid memories, he feels a growing detachment with football (realised through his inability to name more than one player of the Belgian national team at the 1998 World Cup). This detachment hints at his general melancholy with life.
“Never have I, as I did in Japan in 2002, sensed such a perfect concordance of times, in which the time of football, reassuring and abstract had, for a month, not substituted but slid, merged into the most enormous gangue of real time, and had made me feel the passing of time like a long protective caress, beneficiary, tutelary, apotropaic.” (pg. 27)
One third of Football is dedicated to Toussaint describing his experiences watching the 2002 World Cup in Japan. Japan is clearly a place that he is comfortable describing in equally rich colour and gloomy substance. Through the neon signs of Shibuya, rain dripping from the ribs of transparent umbrellas, and the convenience culture of 7-Elevens and Family Marts on every other corner, Toussaint effortlessly portrays the buttoned-down culture and colourful, waterlogged kitsch of Japan. The striking scene of a torrential downpour in Yokohama following the end of the World Cup final, where overcautious and polite stewards herd fans with fluorescent truncheons into the Yokohama Metro, is particularly memorable for what it represents: the clashing and melding of cultures at a time when the term ‘globalisation’ was still an unfamiliar concept to many. The 2002 World Cup ushered in an exciting new age for football, represented by Senegal defeating France in the opening match; co-hosts South Korea narrowly missing out on overall third place; European teams flattering to deceive; the raucous partisan Japanese crowds reminding the European and American markets of the UTC+9 time zone…
Like Toussaint does, I must also beg my readers to forgive me for wandering off and dawdling here, for I’m getting to my central point. The 2002 World Cup was a formative footballing moment for many of us, that “perfect concordance of times” that in memory becomes melancholic and slightly discordant. And this is the take-away from Football: thatwhere there was once colour will soon fade and become monotone. As Toussaint tells us plainly, “I am pretending to write about football, but I am writing, as always, about the passing of time.”
Throughout less-than-satisfying experiences attending and watching subsequent World Cups, Toussaint wrestles with his disaffection until difficult times in 2014 force him to face another concordance—that of professional crisis and the absence of existential meaning. The passage where Toussaint struggles with the buffer and lag in a paid stream of the Argentina v Netherlands semi-final in the 2014 World Cup illustrates him as a man also discordant with technology, and with technology being a gauge of progress, he becomes further displaced in modern times. Another storm and downpour frames this closing to Football, providing a form of cleansing and reconciliation to finding some contentment in his existential lag.
“A cycle was coming to an end, leaving me empty and lost. I experienced a crisis, a fleeting moment of doubt, uncertainty and dejection, which lead me to inquire into the meaning of my life and my commitment to literature” (pg. 63)
Toussaint’s claim that everything contained within Football will appeal to nobody is somehow appealing and endearing. The terse title may already put off pontificating intellectuals and raging tribalists (who both think they don’t need to be told about football) who may not commonly seek the middle ground with the each other. Toussaint appeals to those who are fed up, overindulged, and out of time with football, and those who recognise that football isa middle ground, sitting in light and shadow, that we merely dip in and out of as one means to live, rather than an end to live.
Yet don’t misunderstand—Football is a work of philosophic literature from Toussaint, an established literary intellectual of the nouveau nouveau roman (‘new new novel’) school that pushes narrative experimentation and fragmentation in prose writing. As such, Football can be analysed for what underlies the words beyond their surface meaning (and there will be times when Toussaint’s flair for expression will prompt you to consult a dictionary). Toussaint’s writing style of parataxis and cumulative build-up befits his melancholic recollection and a harried search for a place in time (a shoutout is due here to Shaun Whiteside for his sublime translation). Yet despite Football’s intellectual bent, a familiarity with literature isn’t needed for us to understand what Toussaint is telling us.
For although the experiential knowledge gained with the privilege of attending one World Cup, let alone three, is beyond the means of most of us, the spiritual journey of falling in and out with the world game as fortune and time dictates, is familiar. It is above literary pretensions. One of the many things that the COVID-19 pandemic taught us is that sport is inextricably linked with culture and society, and acts as an identity-forming crutch for so many who are marginalised and ignored by society at large. The belaying rope snaps hard against our falling out, but we are inevitably pulled back toward the safety of midweek and weekend fixtures in due time. We keenly know the disenfranchisement of being ‘apart from the main’, and existing in that space where the lack of colour means a lack of meaning. Yet when we do return from that emptiness, we are forever trying to chase back the time lost.
“At every hour of the day, whether I am walking on the beach or strolling up the path through the scrubland to the old tower, whether I’m swimming in the sea or reading in the little garden, when I’m sleeping, a tireless process of ripening is still at work.” (pg. 67)
Toussaint offers this ‘passing of time’ in Football, but in 2025 we can recognise not just the passing of time, but the compression of time with jam-packed fixtures and never-ending content instantly vying for our attention, resulting in the acceleration of time making games, moments, and player careers highly perishable and easily forgettable. Would Toussaint consider his struggles with technology quaint in current times, when we continue to pay top dollar for subscriptions and streams that still buffer and lag despite greater bandwidth to deliver gigabytes of content on-demand? Despite the distortion of our time so that we may more readily consume the increasingly inconsequential, we, like Toussaint, fall into that melancholic middle ground where it takes all of our attention and energy to keep up, only to remain perpetually off the pace.
So, along with Toussaint, we drift back to our memories and to that ‘perfect concordance of times’ to give us spiritual relief. A wisp of Toussaint’s concordance lies in the common denominator between Roberto Carlos, Shinji Ono, Carsten Jancker, and Pierluigi Collina. Such subtle renderings of time and place make Football sparkle. We desire our own “perfect concordance of times” again, like the return of a cleansing storm. Football is Toussaint’s connective tissue with the world. In a football context, what could be more relatable?
“Football does not age well, it is a diamond that only shines brightly today.” (pg. 24)
Football as a means to ‘life sketch’ is an acclaimed substratum of writing, the brilliance of which is shown in works such as Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Gary Imlach’s My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes. The rich base of reporting and storytelling constantly broadens and deepens. Toussaint’s Football can be added to this. And when ninety minutes seems such a long time to do anything nowadays, you won’t regret the ninety minutes spent reading Football. So, embrace the lag, throw yourself into shadow, silence, and solitude as Toussaint does, and let the time pass without raging against it.
Note: This Fitzcarraldo Editions print of Football also contains Toussaint’s essay ‘Zidane’s Melancholy’, which is not reviewed in this entry.
STARS: 4.5/5
UNDER 20: A hidden work of football literary brilliance that in warning off the wilfully scornful, warms to discerning and disaffected fans.
FULL-TIME SCORE: When the majority of the crowd have left the stadium to beat the traffic before the closing of an uneventful 0-0 draw, the unknown substitute comes on to provide a dazzling cameo, long remembered by those who stayed behind.
As I’ve written before, many football autobiographies can be categorised as by-the-number rehashes of a player’s career, or cash grabs to capitalise on a player’s contemporaneous popularity. There are few that transcend these categories, and those that do tend to be the choicest cuts that leave you savouring for more. Don’t be fooled—Mark Bright’s My Story is not one of these outliers. Although it does have its moments, it does unfortunately embody the quality of the first category class of autobiography, wherein the echo of banter and stories of yesteryear is keenly smothered by the ghostwriter’s hollow embrace.
In My Story, Mark Bright—with Kevin Brennan—takes us through his life growing up in foster homes, his experiences with racism in the 1970s West Midlands, his glut of goals across seven clubs, and his burgeoning media career. Throughout the narrative, the flavour of changing UK footballing and societal landscapes across the 1980s and 1990s can be sampled. Bright’s experiences with family, and what family means to him, colour his experiences and keeps him humble—and we, in turn, can be empathetic and, at times, inspired.
Family estrangement, finding family, starting a family, teammates as brothers, and mentoring young players—each variation on the family theme runs as an undercurrent to his footballing journey. Although this theme is one of the strengths of My Story in facilitating his footballing journey, it may put off the readers who aren’t able to slog through the first third of the book as we follow Bright from foster home to foster home.
And this gets to my main criticism of My Story—the style. The words are so hemmed and hedged by the even and perfunctory tone of writing that it all seems so detached. Voice and personality are blunted. These criticisms mark the careful footfalls of the ghostwriter. Hence my use of the word slog. There is no searing insight that you can recognise as coming from a strong opinion or a voice of change. In conveying his story through the sideman, Mark Bright—the scorer of over 160 professional league goals across three divisions and a bona fide Crystal Palace and Sheffield Wednesday legend—becomes the strike partner rather than the main man. He becomes the stage and lights for others. He becomes the dull blade in his own stories. He even becomes the butt of jokes in an awkwardly comedic and seemingly hastily-penned foreword by Gary Lineker.
In looking for points of difference and telling what has yet to be told, writers tend to narrow what we look for in football autobiographies. We look for the anecdotes and pub stories. And there are seams of anecdotal gold and silver in My Story. The words neon up whenever Ian Wright is mentioned—such is the testament to his ability to light up any room and in My Story to provide spice to some sparse writing. Bright’s brief jaunt at FC Sion meeting Ronaldinho’s older brother is a great yarn. Yet the best of all is the story of centre back-turned-the most in-form striker in the league, Paul ‘Albert Tatlock’ Warhurst, and his insistence on displacing one of Bright or David Hirst as striker on the eve of the 1993 FA Cup Final. Lessons of humility and perspective from Roy McFarland and Kevin Lisbie bookend Bright’s career. Punters may take or leave everything else, considering that the sentiments within are tempered by the economy of emotion.
This review isn’t intended to be a swipe at ghostwriters. In a genre where ghostwritten works are close to the norm, there are many well-written ones that lend a layer of emotional heft, flourish, and substance to someone’s story. We attribute such quality in writing to the strength of what has been told, and perhaps it is cruel that the ghostwriter gets the tiny by-line below the name we are all familiar with. But when the style of writing leaves the subject and their experiences a certain shade of bland, it all just comes across as disconnected and weightless.
I cannot remember exactly when My Story came into my possession, but it may have been part of an early-pandemic bulk buy from Book Depository before Amazon closed it down. The book had sat on my shelf, unassuming and unread, for a few years. Yet from this unclear provenance comes clear recommendation: Unless you are heavily invested in Crystal Palace’s Coppell years or Wednesday’s Francis years, you can leave this unassuming book similarly unread and untouched near the bottom of your pile until a later date.
HIGHLIGHTED PASSAGE
“I don’t think I’m overstating things by saying that the move to Crystal Palace changed the direction of my life forever. I might not have been aware of it at the time, but I can now see that’s exactly what happened. It changed me in so many positive ways. It broadened my education, I mixed with more black people than I had ever done before, London was so much more multicultural than anything I had ever experienced, and I immediately loved it and felt very much at home. There was always a lot going on and, perhaps most important of all, I grew in confidence as a player and a person.”
Bright on his move to London (pg. 140)
STARS: 2/5
UNDER 20: An uneven slog that blandly colours the narrative and gives no justice to the experiences contained within.
FULL-TIME SCORE: The star player doesn’t come off the bench; without him, his teammates on the pitch look forlorn and stilted in possession as the team goes down 0-2.
RELATED READING:A Life in Football by Ian Wright (2016); Crystal Palace FC: The Coppell Campaigns 1984-1992 by Nigel Sands (1992); One in a Million: Trevor Francis by Trevor Francis (2019)
The Hawker Siddeley HS 748 that crashed after takeoff. Photo: PA Images
Catastrophic airplane crashes darkly colour the history of football through the deaths of our heroes past and present. Torino FC at Superga in 1949, Manchester United at Munich in 1958, and Chapecoense over Colombia in 2016 are recent tragic examples of this sad history. In each instance, we mourn the loss of life and lament the joys the lost players had provided and had yet to provide. The passing of time gilds and lionises their lives. And we remember that air travel to fulfill mid-week and weekend fixtures is a necessary part of a team’s pursuit of success; we may remember this, but we take it for granted, just as we do with our own flying experiences. For with the sophistication of modern-day air travel, statistically speaking we will never personally encounter such in-flight danger ourselves in a lifetime of flying.
When a crash occurs—whether or not it results in death—we tend to take notice. On 30th March 1998, the Leeds United team walked away unscathed from a potentially deadly plane crash shortly after taking off at Stansted Airport. A daring act of heroic piloting ensured the survival of all players, passengers, and crew on board. Yet this crash has remained largely forgotten by the footballing world well into the present day, and raises questions about our general perceptions of empathy and gratitude, and how and when we choose to extend those thoughts to survivors, victims, and our own selves.
* * *
So—what on earth happened? Let’s first look at the basic facts:
On the night of 30th March 1998, following a 0-3 loss to West Ham, the Leeds United team (18 players) and an assortment of team staff, fans, and other passengers (26 altogether, including crew) boarded an Emerald Airways flight at Stansted Airport to return to Leeds Bradford Airport. At just after 11:30pm, the Hawker Siddeley HS 748 turboprop aircraft suffered a catastrophic right engine failure seconds after take-off. With the engine on fire, pilot John Hackett decided to immediately land the plane to avoid an in-flight explosion and certain death. Upon landing, the aircraft slid along the runway and overshot into a grassy field where it came to rest, with its nose heavily planted into the ground. All 44 occupants evacuated the aircraft in less than a minute. No significant injuries were reported, and the engine fire was soon extinguished by airport fire crews.
Next, let’s look at the onboard accounts that give some personal insight on the crash:
When the engine failed, some passengers seated on the right side of the plane alerted the crew about shower of sparks and sheets of flame coming from the wing. Upon learning this, pilot John Hackett decided to ditch the plane. Leeds United goalkeeper Nigel Martyn’s game of hearts across the aisle was interrupted. The issuance of emergency procedures led some to confuse the command of ‘fasten seatbelts’ with ‘unfasten seatbelts’, and duly unfastened them when adopting the brace position. Hackett cut the left engine’s power, and the plane dipped down. Leeds United assistant manager David O’Leary said that the plane “came back down like a rollercoaster, and hit the deck.” Bryn Law, the BBC Radio Leeds commentator, said that the plane “bounced along four or five times, for interminable long seconds,” and his co-commentator and Leeds legend Norman Hunter said that they were all simply “waiting for the impact”. Lee Bowyer said, “It’s just gonna blow up. That’s it, we’re dead.” O’Leary continued that “you didn’t know where you were sliding to, were you going to hit a brick wall, or you were going into a house or what…and all of a sudden we slid, and slid, and slid, and stopped, and then it was time to get out of the plane.” According to Martyn, a deathly silence fell over the cabin until midfielder Lee Bowyer got up from his seat to calmly take out his carry-on bag from the overhead bin. Defender Robert Molenaar, anxious of the still-burning engine beside him and striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, said “Can we hurry up? It’s getting warm here” in an attempt to expedite the evacuation. In the panic, Rod Wallace tried to exit the plane from the right, where the fire was still blazing. O’Leary, seated by the left emergency exit, injured his shoulder by trying to push out the emergency door that would only open when pulled inward. All occupants evacuated the plane; Martyn gave chairman Peter Ridsdale a push when the latter seemed nervous at the prospect of jumping out on to the wing. Martyn walked out of the plane still clutching his hand of hearts. Bryn Law remembers looking back and seeing the plane silhouetted by the orange flames, and bodies dropping down from the emergency exit.
Pilot John Hackett. Photo: Sky Sports
Finally, let’s look at the accident report released by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch in March 2001. The report makes for fascinating reading, and adds a necessary layer of formality to the crash:
The report states that “there was no evidence of any indications, flight deck or otherwise, that could have warned the crew of abnormalities with the engine…There was therefore no reason for the crew to abort the take-off”. An engine failure after take-off would typically involve the pilot to make a ‘go-around’ to account for working through failure check-lists ahead of an emergency landing, but with the devastating fire occurring four seconds after take-off, Hackett feared “for the structural integrity of the aircraft…and aware that a considerable amount of runway remained ahead of the aircraft, he made the decision to re-land…once made, the decision was irrevocable.” Hackett’s decision to ignore protocol and land immediately after the engine failure was vindicated by the report, which stated that “the decision to re-land had to be made rapidly with the information available at that instant. This decision was sensible in the circumstances, as was his decision to take control from the competent but far less experienced First Officer [Gary Lucas]”. Around 27 seconds after take-off, the plane touched down with 448m of runway tarmac remaining ahead of it. The plane slid for another 118m past the end of the tarmac, and finally came to rest on the level grassy field beyond—558m further from where it touched back down. Engine debris was scattered over a distance of 500m, and according to Hackett, there was still 3.5 tonnes of fuel left in the plane, ready to ignite, as passengers evacuated the plane. In the end, Hackett was last off the plane—symbolically putting a cap on the successful emergency that was informed by a quick analysis of danger, swift-decision making, and healthy dose derring-do.
The crash was widely reported upon in the following days and weeks, and eventually became a curious side-note appended to the file of Leeds United’s thrilling rise in the Premier League and Europe in the late 90s and early 2000s, until its devastating fall and eventual relegation in 2003. Yet memory of the incident faded out of the general footballing public’s consciousness over the subsequent 25 years. In 2018, legacy media ran brief stories of acknowledgment of the 1998 crash on its 20th anniversary in 2018. Yet interest in the crash still wasn’t quite piqued until podcasters and online streamers, wanting to take the edge off the pandemic cabin fever, found captivating content by reworking old news for new and fresh angles. Hosts regarded the crash with astonishment and/or novelty, and to enthusiastic questions they received perfunctory answers from ex-Leeds players in interviews. I personally found out about the crash this way whilst listening to an episode of the Let’s Be Having You! The 00s Football Podcastin December 2024. The story immediately intrigued me—I kicked myself for not knowing about it in the first place considering that Leeds was immensely popular in Australia at the turn of the century with its strong contingent of Australian players including Harry Kewell (on board the 1998 flight), Mark Viduka, Jamie McMaster, Jacob Burns, and Shane Cansdell-Sheriff.
The more I read about the crash, the more I wondered how the crash could have been so widely forgotten for so long. I combed through my personal experiences flying for an answer. I’m not a bad flyer. When turbulence hits, or when I feel my stomach drop as the plane passes through an air pocket, I divert the onrushing thoughts of calamity into a warm embrace of rationality. Statistically speaking… I begin to intone. This opening is typically enough for me to dissolve the anxiety that the turbulence, drops, and strange mechanical clunks all induce. The bad thoughts get massaged out. Aspects of the flight that stick in my short-term memory unstick soon after I disembark the plane and pass through immigration and customs at my destination. This cancels out any chance of reflection and learning of what happened. When applied to tens of millions of passengers every day, the cumulative effect of safe air travel lulls us into serene calmness. It makes sense that when there is no threat, there is no remembrance of the conditions that gave rise to that safety and stability. So, we take our safety for granted. It is easy to forget, when we still wake up the next day and continue on.
The collective sense of loss we feel for those killed in disasters from the past (Superga and Munich) and from our living memory (Chapecoense) should behove us to be more empathetic survivors of air crashes, and to be grateful that, despite the utterly overwhelming probability of our in-flight safety, we will arrive at our destination safe and sound. Where we separate from professional footballers in terms of prestige, wealth, and physical prowess, we are one and the same in the act of flying. We ride the same insignificant odds of danger; but if something happens to our heroes in such a space, we know that it can equally happen to us. The ethereal agents of chaos and misfortune are not obliged to bend to our demands and expectations, and when a deadly crash does happen, our emotional proximity to it and its victims gives us a sharp slap to remind us of that reality. Therefore, the act of forgetting is simply denying ourselves the chance to express empathy and gratitude not only to others, but also extending it to ourselves and our own flight experiences.
And so, most of the footballing world at-large forgot about 30th March, 1998.
* * *
Another angle of the crashed plane. Photo: Shutterstock
During my research, I found the Leeds United Crash Memories site. It is a glorious fount of information and visual resources from contemporaneous news reports from 1998 and beyond about the crash, and was created by Carole and Alex Hackett (the daughter and grandson of John Hackett). The site is a commemoration of John Hackett’s and his crew’s actions in ensuring the safety and continued life of the passengers on board. The site has also collected video testimonials from the passengers from that night in 1998. Through these testimonials, the onboard heroics have thankfully been immortalised in football’s historical lore.
Passenger Andy Rafter, in a touching message to Hackett, says that “There ain’t many days that go past and I don’t think about that particular night…after 25 years, it feels like yesterday.” In living his life, Rafter says, “I’ve just tried to be a good person,” and says to Hackett, “You are my hero, a true hero and I wish you good health and happiness for years to come.” I don’t need to recapitulate Hackett’s heroism any longer—the LUACM site does this concisely and expertly. Yet watching the passengers reflect upon the crash, we can see displayed the very human capacity to reflect upon their own mortality and express gratitude for the time given to them.
When we fly, we put our lives in the hands of the pilots and crew. We trust in them to do the proper thing at the right, proper time, and to the right, proper degree. We want every pilot to be a John Hackett, or Sully Sullenberger, or their ilk in experience and wisdom. With this trust in place, we leave the business of flying to the pilots in the cockpit. We are blind to ominous storm clouds ahead, deaf to the squawking of radio chatter, and uncomprehending of an importunately blinking red light. We leave them to their work, much like we leave our surgery to the doctors, and the sausage-making to the butchers. For our comfort, we remain unknowing of what they must know and deal with.
When it comes time to show gratitude for a safe landing, we typically direct a cursory thank you to the cabin crew as we disembark the plane. Our thanks are extended equally to the pilots through the cabin crew. Other shows of gratitude, such as the round of applause that sounds when rubber hits runway tarmac after a bumpy flight is seen by many as old hat, patronising, and obnoxious. Therefore, we limit our own opportunities of reflection. Creating a commemorative website every time a flight touches down safely would of course be hopelessly impracticable. Reserving a space in our mind for more than a moment’s appreciation and gratitude for safe passage across borders and time zones is enough; yet too often our minds are already on to the next thing, the next distraction, in our schedules and lives. This is why the LUACM site is so memorable and striking. The near-tragedy reminds us, but for the grace of God, we may experience such a horrible experience, and if we can extend gratitude and relief that our heroes are safe and can take the field for the next midweek or weekend fixture, surely, we can extend the same emotional courtesy to the wealth of experience and our own personal convictions that brought us back down to terra firma—especially when a brief round of applause is seen as too much.
* * *
Gunnar Halle interviewed the morning after the crash.
After Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink had escaped the plane, he was asked by one of the crew if he was OK. “Am I OK? You call that a fucking takeoff?” he said. And we may well have asked the same question to the other passengers then and now. There isn’t a wealth of interviews with players and passengers in the hours following the crash. Leeds defender Gunnar Halle gave a brief interview after stepping off the coach at Elland Road. “It could have gone a lot worse,” he said. Gary Kelly gave an interview eight days after the crash prior to stepping out on the field against Chelsea. Then, of course, there are the calm and surefooted interviews given by David O’Leary. Amongst the players, there is very little to glean about the players’ emotional state from that time. We only get this from the LUACM video testimonials of players 25 years after the crash. We can, fortunately, defer to the opinions and thoughts of others outside the immediate confines of the Leeds United dressing room.
One of the most interesting perspectives is from Frank Taylor, the sole surviving journalist aboard the 1958 Munich air disaster, in TV interviews following the 1998 crash. He advocated for players to adopt a phlegmatic attitude post-crash, citing his own, and the Man Utd players’ he travelled with, long recovery from life-threatening injuries sustained in the 1958 disaster. That colonial, stiff upper lip disposition is reflected in quoting his then-doctor: “You should remember you had a blackout, and you awoke in a hospital. Your friends had a blackout, and they’ve awoken in eternity. It’s anybody’s guess which is the place to be.” Taylor emphasised the need for players to simply get on with their lives.
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink heads home against Barnsley days after the crash. Photo: Bruce Rollinson
Fortunately, the players and passengers were able to walk away from their crash, forty years after the Munich disaster. They walked back to the Stansted terminal, shaken and stirred, and waited for the coaches to arrive to take them back to Leeds. During the three-hour wait at the terminal, wherein players called family and ate snacks, Peter Ridsdale noted the “strange camaraderie between us all.” Back at Leeds the next morning, players were given the day off to take stock, and to focus on the home matches against Barnsley and Chelsea three and four days later respectively. Apart from Lucas Radebe—who appeared in the Chelsea fixture—the Leeds United players featuring in both matchdays were all aboard the crash. Eight days after the crash, referencing the aforementioned ‘strange camaraderie’, captain Gary Kelly said that the crash “has just brought us all together so much, it’s just unbelievable…we’re rooting for one another now.” On the Chelsea matchday, John Hackett and his flight crew were commemorated on the pitch at Elland Road in front of 37,276 fans, and were given engraved watches and plaques. The James Bond theme even played over the tannoy. “All in a day’s work,” Hackett said in a press conference at the time.
John Hackett, Gary Lucas, Peter Ridsdale, Helen Hammond, and Nicola Lomas being celebrated on the Leeds United v Chelsea matchday, April 1998. Photo: Varley Picture Agency
Everyone got on with their job, phlegmatically so—especially the players. In those eight days following the crash, Leeds United won both their matches. Outwardly, on the pitch, survival seemingly enlivened and galvanised the players. They would continue flying, a necessary part of being a professional footballer—with some taking part in the 1998 World Cup, and from the following season until the end of 2002, Leeds United would fly abroad to play in Europe.
It defies belief that anyone could continue flying so soon after such a traumatic experience. Yet getting back in the air as part of ‘exposure therapy’ is a recommended way to overcome aerophobia and flight anxiety following a crash. Psychotherapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) are also preferable courses of treatment over straight doses of medication. In an NBC article from 2018, one crash survivor highlighted the importance of simply getting back into the air. This seems to reflect the experiences of some of the passengers on the 1998 crash. Stephen Pygott flew again days after the crash—if he hadn’t, he’d never have flown again. Alan Swift, the Leeds United physiotherapist whose brother was injured in an unrelated plane crash, flew three weeks later with the same airline, on the same make of aircraft. Bryn Law took to flying again, but still experiences those sharp pricks of memory from 1998 when doing so. Lee Bowyer still gets nervy when flying, but continues to do so because he still wants to see family and the world. “If you’re nervous of flying,” Bowyer says, “fly with me. ‘Cause it can’t happen twice, surely.” The necessity of air travel for the sake of their livelihood and family perhaps brute-forced a solution for the passengers, and trauma be damned.
Knowing that many people would simply never board a flight again after experiencing such trauma makes the emotional efforts of the Leeds United players to actually do so a herculean one.
* * *
Peter Ridsdale, in an interview after the crash, said that air travel was “something that [the players are] going to have to confront.” Perhaps he was speaking for himself, too. At the time, players would have had to confront the anxiety, burgeoning phobias, and PTSD that could have gone undetected in the days and weeks after the crash. Trauma is bespoke to the individual, and it can be unrelenting in its unfathomably cruel edges and dark depths. Professional footballers live and perform in the limelight, and must develop a supreme mentality and high standard of physical prowess to succeed in football. Signs of their humanity manifest in mistakes on and off the field; these mistakes can be career-killers when passed through the prism of concentrated public attention and judgment, and the 24-hour news cycle. Purcell et al. in 2019 stated that even into the late 2010s, there was “no comprehensive framework or model of care to support and respond to the mental health needs of elite athletes” and urged the development of an adequate framework that, among other elements, focused on early intervention care and support for athletes who experienced stress levels exceeding their ability to cope. The presence of sports psychologists and therapists within club structure may not be enough to stave off what overcomes an athlete’s much-vaunted, so-called ‘supreme’ mentality. In the end, athletes are affected by the same things that affect us. Disaster and trauma are great levellers. Dennis Bergkamp famously suffered from a fear of flying, and Jesús Navas has suffered from extreme homesickness during his career. Yet players must get over it in double-time for the sake of continued on-field results.
An indication of this expectation of players is reflected in the vox pop interviews of two Leeds United fans on the street on the morning after the crash in 1998. One said, “As long as they’re all right, I don’t care”; whilst the other said, “I hope it doesn’t affect the play on Saturday.” Just get on with it. This perhaps dated catchcry and being ‘phlegmatic’ in the face of disaster and trauma are incompatible with a greater focus on acknowledging, recognising, managing, and treating declining mental health across society. To suggest that we simply ‘get on with it’ is antithetical to, and is a repudiation of, good mental health practice and mindfulness. There is nothing wrong in empathising with someone’s emotional pain and trauma without expecting anything back—this is another truth that the LUACM site tells us. It shouldn’t have to take an air crash to practise it.
In a great show of empathy, Leeds United and Aston Villa observed a moment of silence before the kick off of their December 2016 fixture for the victims of LaMia Flight 2933 over Colombia—a crash that basically wiped out the entire barnstorming Brazilian football club Chapecoense in November 2016. However, there have been instances in recent years where Leeds United fans have chanted about the Munich disaster in a tit-for-tat with Man Utd fans chanting about the two Leeds United fans killed in Istanbul in 2000. Where the capacity exists to show genuine empathy, there exists the snubbing of it in the malicious brinksmanship with opposing fans. Bryn Law commented on this in 1998, drawing upon his own experience of the crash, stating that for anyone to experience such trauma and still continue to chant about Munich would make them “subhuman”. This infers that all fans experience empathy and grief for those that they have emotional attachments to—and clearly, if reports of recent hypocritical chanting are true, then the capacity to remember may not always crossover with the capacity to be empathetic.
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I began this write-up shortly before the tragedy of Jeju Air Flight 2216, wherein 179 of the 181 passengers and crew were killed when the plane crashed upon arrival at Muan International Airport, South Korea, on the morning of December 29th, 2024. This tragedy was simply unfathomable to comprehend by an already-grieving Korean nation still recovering from the sudden political instability caused by then-President Yoon Suk-yeol’s declaration of martial law on December 4th. Having lived in Korea now for many years, my wife and I woke up on the 29th to the news dominated by the crash. When news filtered out into the Korean streets on that wintry Sunday, the usual chirrup of the mid-morning stopped. I opened up the window of my fourth-floor apartment, and was struck dumbfounded by the lack of noise outside. The palpable quiet was disquieting. People inside, safe from the cold, watching the news and mourning for countrymen and women in collective grief. The sky was grey outside, being winter after all, but it felt like that sky was falling.
The causes of the crash, still under investigation at the time of writing, strike sharply at my thoughts. Both crashes—from 1998 and 2024—demand my attention. A couple of days after the Muan crash, the two most visible Korean footballers on the world stage in Son Heung-min (손흥민) and Hwang Hee-chan (황희찬) played against each other in the Tottenham v Wolves fixture. Hwang Hee-chan scored the opening goal for Wolves, celebrated, and then bowed his head in remembrance for the perished in the crash days before. Son Heung-min missed a penalty for Spurs. The match ended 2-2 and heaped more pressure on Spurs’ embattled Australian gaffer Ange “Mate” Postecoglou. Advertisements for ‘Squid Game 2’ on Netflix rounded the digital hoardings at Spurs’ Stadium, reminding everyone of the quality and validity of Korean-language content in the age of streaming. The Korean language uses the expression ‘Leeds Day’ (리즈시절, Lee-jeu si-jeol) as an everyday translation for somebody’s ‘heyday’, in reference to comparing Alan Smith’s shining Leeds United career with his injury-plagued time at Man Utd.
All these connections of my identity, spiritual makeup, interests, passions, and home entangled with each other; and more so than being an ode to noting things down contemporaneously, these connections deepened my received grief for the perished aboard the Muan flight, increased my empathy for Hwang Hee-chan and Son Heung-min for their collective loss, and solidified my desire to write something as a way to process my own thoughts on what was going on in my head. The cure to abhorrent and revolting chanting should not be derived from having to endure the trauma first-, second- or third-hand of a plane crash. And with fewer bastions of empathy, gratitude, and genuine self-reflection in public let alone on the internet, a site such as LUACM should be lauded for its aim in conveying a promise of simple and enduring beauty—a promise to remember, and in promising this, celebrating our capacity to empathise with others and ourselves.
* * *
John Hackett is duly remembered as a hero. And in many hero stories, there are often unheralded victims that act heroically. Just as Hackett and his flight crew kept flying, so did the other passengers aboard the flight. They went on with their lives, despite the external and internal turmoils that sought otherwise. Leeds United director and survivor Alec Hudson helped to build 4,000 council homes in Leeds. Gary Kelly has a cancer support centre named after him, and Norman Hunter’s annual charity event raises funds for cancer research. A wealth of managerial talent teaches the next generation of players. According to the LUACM site, 47 children and 41 grandchildren have been born to the passengers of the 1998 crash to date. One of those born was Erling Haaland, son of passenger Alfie Haaland. Less than eight days after the crash, Leeds United captain Gary Kelly became a father to his first son, and was there to see it. No greater immortalisation of averted disaster can be ascribed to John Hackett’s actions than the preserving of the life and time of those on board, and those that were yet to come.
I remember two particular images from my footballing education. The first is of Nigel Clough sitting pensively on the Nottingham Forest bench. The second is of a cross into the box from a Sheffield Wednesday player (Petter Rudi? Niclas Alexandersson?), with the ball rising and falling in a graceful curve. These two uninspiring images are my first memories of English football.
Both images came from the hour-long Premier League highlights packaged program that was beamed to Australian free-to-air TV in the late nineties. My father semi-regularly watched the program, his passion for Newcastle United still existent then. By the time I’d started watching it with him, I’d been too late to make my mark on the game. I’d never been good with the round ball at my feet, and I felt like I’d also been too late to pick up on that innate hum and flow of the game itself. “Kick it to him!”I would say, “Can’t you see him on the right?”I’d missed out on learning the footballing language, and as pithy as it sounds, anything worth doing well is worth starting when you are young.
Better late than never, then. The 1998-99 season kicked it all off. Football was on my brain, and the green shoots rose up to the red sun of Forest and the blue sky of Wednesday. Back then I didn’t know any better. I came to know much better—more than I perhaps should have.
I was a quiet kid who played Theme Hospital and Age of Empires on the computer. I didn’t have the stomach for shooters, or the quick fingers for sports games. Outside of the aforementioned two games, I rarely played games to completion—rather tipping in and out of demos that game from the latest issue of PC Powerplay magazine. In other words, the tender was open to impress upon a 14-year-old student the delights and continually-expanding horizons of the digital gaming world.
The demos were limited plays but forever free. Some of these demos passed muster, while others were forgotten, put in the limbo of the computer desk’s second shelf where nothing came out remembered. Each demo was the crumbs of a pie—just enough to whet the appetite for more. And after I’d scoffed down most of the demo offerings from one particular issue of PC Powerplay, I finally landed on the game that I hadn’t tried out yet, a game with the unimaginative title of Championship Manager 1998-99.
I loaded it up, and immediately saw the strangely kerned typeface laid out in slightly opaque textboxes. A few unsure clicks brought me to the option that millions before me had, and have since, held their breath at as they pondered the possibilities beyond it. An option that struck right to what I wanted at 14 years of age: to ‘Take Control’.
The game made sense to me from the get go. A football simulation devoid of any in-play action outside of the rolling text updates. There were no faces to match the players, and no textures and ripples to hold on to. Yet my imagination turned the unending reams of simulation data into a fully-fleshed out world of my making. The data kneaded my malleable brain. Every click-through of a player profile backfilled the huge gorge that represented everything that came before Nigel Clough and Sheffield Wednesday on the TV. I had no business scoring this knowledge into my memory—yet I simply had a huge appetite for it. To this day, the Tetris pieces of data still fit snugly in grey matter and synapse. It’s all well remembering that:
went up front with:
but perhaps it is a sign of a misspent youth that I can also remember that:
a 16-year old up front for Brentford, once scored against me in one of my early forays in ‘management’. Enamoured with the sifting-through of all this information, I called to my father from the back room to get in on the CM thrill too, and appealed at him to get impressed quick at the impossibly juked stats of someone named Edgar Davids. I said to him, “Look at all those red twenties!” I found grace in the numbers—maybe I’d been wedded to a form guide in a previous life.
I logged countless hours into the demo, and begged my parents to buy me the next iteration of the game, Championship Manager: Season 99/00 for Christmas. That was when computer games came in boxes seemingly made of teak. CM3 had broken me in well. The slicker interface of 99/00 led me to double-down on my addiction. The world within the game spilled into the world outside the game. I challenged my school friends on the players and the teams. They had no interest in football, so how could they have known the answers, let alone understood the answers? When a friend came over to my house one weekend, he saw my CM-style, top-down and hand-written AC Milan team list on A3 paper blu-tacked to my bedroom wall (Ba, I AM R and Ganz, M SC, anyone?). “What the hell is this?” he said. “It’s AC Milan,” I said, “from the game.” ‘What the hell’ indeed. I continued down that path of investigation, exploring the limits of the game and of my management abilities; my friend never did.
Each press of the ‘Continue Game’ button was a micro-shot of dopamine. A return from the grey-limbo of the loading screen added further lashings of unreality to my in-game world. Each new layer of data gave me more time in the time-suck. Virtual years’ worth of transfer activity rolled into the fantastical—avatars of real-life players retired and were regenerated into young tyros with questionable names. Witnessing the random assignation of a digital entity (under the guise of a ‘youth player’ to my team following the pre-season ‘big load’ brought about that warm and fuzzy feeling that this youngster existed in a virtual world that was mine alone. I felt proud.
But at the time, I never knew why I felt like that. In hindsight, I can perhaps say that everyone likes the home-grown player from the small-town club. That player you can empathise with and identify with. An approximation of yourself is put into that player, containing all your expectations. I was proud of my players, yet intensely guarding over their ultimate fates—therefore I couldn’t let up with the game. I had to nurse them into digital retirement.
Yet the time dragged with each load. The numerical values 1-20, the sum of a player, revealed nothing new to me. So, thoughts turned to beyond what I saw on that autopsy table, the values and attributes that couldn’t be seen. Anyone straying into the long grass of CM’s boundaries downloaded the ‘all-seeing eye’ program aptly named CM Scout. The program’s advanced filters allowed users to judge a player’s ability and future potential through normally hidden, pre-determined values. This removed any challenge left in the game. Then there was the last refuge of scoundrels, cheaters, and rage-quitters—the save-game editor that changed player values and came with the warning that it might just swallow up your carefully cultivated in-game world and spit it out in the form of a corrupted save file. Regenerated heroes forever locked into a last formation on the eve of a second-leg cup tie. Yep, I went through all this.
I think this is when my passion for CM started to wane. The veil had been lifted on the show. I knew the magician’s tricks and the shortcuts to jerry-rig a bit of cheeky European success to a Third Division team. The third-party programs, infallible tactics packs, and endless lists of ‘recommended players’ written by the user community made the gaming experience a bit pointless. The editing continued—during one hot Australian summer, I clocked in several weeks’ worth of pre-season editing as I tried to recreate the real-time transfers across major European leagues in advance of my next underdog campaign. Why I didn’t download the update patches is beyond me—maybe I just liked the control. Some days I called in sick at my part-time job to spend the afternoon hunchbacked toward the screen to make sure that, among many other moves, Junichi Inamoto moved virtually on loan to Fulham from Arsenal, and that Paul Ince’s transformation to Wolves midfield general was set in stone.
Yet I grew sick of it all. The hours, days, years of carpal-tunnel and dry-eye inducing game binges had taken its mental toll. I imagined a save game to be like a pack of cigarettes—once it was done, it didn’t take much to open up a new one. But I couldn’t do it anymore. Even then, the break from CM was gradual, and never clean. I envied those that wore their addictions proudly, especially those that would alt-tab from the game to a blank Word document to lay down a grand narrative generated by the generated world. I was too early for the in-game YouTube CM streams and the CM ‘challenges’ laid out by obsessives. I’ve never been an overly analytical person, which perhaps puts me at odds with a typical CM player. In the early versions of CM, I always settled for cookie-cutter players that I could set and let free in attacking formations. I eschewed most of the new features with every new CM iteration. So, what kept me playing the game?
I enjoyed playing the game, of course, but at addiction-level something feeds the desire—perhaps it was the need for control, or a coping mechanism from the bad things in my life. Maybe CM satisfied my need for order where order didn’t exist in my life. Whatever it was, CM massaged my insecurities and let me put off my responsibilities and fears for another hour or two.
Over the last decade I’ve returned to CM a handful of times. I’ve only once strayed outside the ‘classic’ versions from the turn of the century. A brief sortie into Football Manager 13/14 only left me pining for the wholesome CM. I bought 13/14 through Steam, and there it remains to this day on the virtual shelf. 13/14 doesn’t loom large in my memory—it was just too counterintuitive and intensely in-depth for me. The brutal functionality of the CM series had been replaced by the fortune of choice. I finally understood what ‘too much control’ meant. The ersatz manager, with his ersatz team, doling out pinpricks of micromanagement. I didn’t give half that attention to family, friends, girlfriends. Despite this reflexive turn back to CM, every resulting foray in it is one of diminishing returns and diminishing joy. The desire to load up, buy up, move up (in the standings) degraded into an atomic half-life. As such, the addiction has faded like an old tattoo on leathered skin. In other words, it’ll never go away, but remain in bare vestige.
But the game has brought me great joy. Palpable joy. CM bridged the divide between footballing philistine and tragic obsessive. Also, years of playing CM in a closed environment taught me the social value of football. I’ve made many friends through football, but those friendships only deepened through the collective CM consciousness. I’m proud of that—the grind meant something off-screen. Many years ago, in a dive bar in Seoul, I surprised a British expat by invoking the name of Charlie Austin when he asked me, “Have you ever heard of Swindon Town?” The ‘knowledge’ got me a free beer—and even if this was the only tangible, concrete reward I got from the years of retina-scaling late nights on CM, I can still bask in the intangible joys that CM has brought me. CM is all about community and friendship—and, you know a like-minded CM tragic when you come across one.
I downloaded CM3 to write this post, and I spent two nights trying to figure out a workaround to play it on Windows 10. On the second night I found the patch that would allow me to do so—and it took all of five minutes to download and install. Even when I wasn’t in the game, CM3 still found a way to suck the time out of me.
Each in-game click revived the muscle memory. Each screen unrolled a wallpaper of names that seemed to have been bundled away into that old computer desk. But this time, they were coming out remembered. Ivan Tistimetanu at Bristol City! The Georgians at Man City who weren’t Georgi Kinkladze! Marlon Broomes in the England squad! It was like driving past a childhood home—pricks of recollection came thick and fast.
But as I went through the familiar screens, I didn’t feel any pangs of longing. The desire to play is now parched away, desiccated. It was a sad moment to reflect upon all the graft I’d put into CM, only now to leave the game behind me. It was a sad moment but also a proud moment, to actually know that I’d left CM behind. An image of a clean-water river appeared in my mind—a river that had previously been addled, plugged, and dammed with the flotsam kicked up from a storm. Perhaps this is what the kicking of an addiction feels like. Or maybe my addiction is a long sleep, dormant yet primed on a hair trigger.
An old hard drive sits on the top shelf of the spare room in my parent’s house. On that hard drive is my greatest ever save game, from CM00/01. A masterpiece thirty (virtual) years deep. Wolves levitating on the summit of European football. Unassailable. Ask me who plays up-front nowadays in the real world for Man City, Man Utd, or Liverpool week-to-week, and I’ll give you an answer after a skipped breath and a pained recollection; but ask me who played up front for Wolves circa 2030 and I’ll be able to tell you in a single breath– Àngel Hidalgo and Hernan Ruggeri, with tyro Jeff Griffiths off the bench (regens over reals!). Twenty-five goals apiece per season. That game will always stay with me, but on the top shelf. A relic. It’ll probably never be loaded again, and if it is, it will be an echo from my history.
Nigel Clough sitting pensively on the Nottingham Forest bench. A Sheffield Wednesday player crosses into the box. Still shots from the very beginning. Now forever joined by Fabrizio Ravanelli on the pitch for Marseille, Ole Gunnar Solskjær in mid-slide after scoring the winner in the Champions League final, and an empty, unknown stadium under a grey sky—all still shots from the iconic CM background screen. Precious memories, indelibly linked with the game. I am better for having had CM in my life, for it gave me football. I’ve made my peace with CM.
The bulk of football autobiographies can be lumped into two categories: the going-through-the-motions account of a brilliant career; and the money-spinner churned out mid-career to capitalise on a player’s popularity. Not only does Recovering by Richie Sadlier not fit within these typical outlines, but it also seeks to distance itself from them. In doing so, it stands out brilliantly. Recovering is a story about how Sadlier reclaimed his life from football, and how he recovered from the horrible excesses that football urges on its players.
The critically-acclaimed Recovering won the 2019 Irish Sports Book of the Year, and is preceded by other similarly feted football autobiographies that describe the ravages of alcoholism. Paul McGrath’s Back from the Brink and Tony Cascarino’s Full Time: The Secret of Tony Cascarino especially come to mind. Recovering reminds us that alcoholism and drug use are both still horribly inveterate in the modern game.
Sadlier is perhaps better known for his work outside of football than his work on the pitch. He forged a decent career in football with Millwall, and represented the Republic of Ireland at underage level. He very nearly made the 2002 World Cup squad, too. He is, however, popularly known for an unfortunate TV caption during his punditry with RTE that endeared him to the masses; a caption that stated that he once “scored in UEFA European U-18 Third Place Playoff”. This answer to a middling trivia question asking “Who is Richie Sadlier?” sealed his cult hero status years after he’d given up the game. The image of a tall, young Irish striker in baggy shorts scoring a goal here and there at The Den (and maybe in the rain) some twenty years ago might have come to the mind of someone who had never even saw him play.
“Saturday nights were a no-go for boozing, though, as Sunday was when I had my games with Belvedere. Nothing was to interfere with that. I would ring-fence those nights, mark them down and be clear that on Saturday nights I never drank. This was the dedication I felt was needed to become a professional—something which was beginning to seem like a real possibility.”
Sadlier on his early dedication to professionalism (pg. 30)
The above quote refers to Sadlier’s steely teenage determination to become a professional footballer, and perhaps reflects how naïve and thoroughly unprepared Sadlier was for the extracurricular vices that come part-and-parcel with the profession. The once-homesick Sadlier inevitably partakes in the debauchery. The roots of his alcoholism (“I tried [alcohol]. And everything changed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I tried it because, well what else was there to do?” (pg. 28)); his cocaine binges in his party house; the laid-back attitude to his injury recovery and a cancer scare; and the denial of issues that led to his self-destruction, all partly make up his laundry list of misadventure.
And all this while plying his trade at Millwall—a club proud to be apart, and perhaps the club least conducive to a physical, mental, and spiritual healing. Sadlier is hardly effusive with his praise for the club. Of an early incident with Millwall fans, he writes, “What I wanted to say was that they were fucking pricks who didn’t deserve to be called supporters” (pg. 60). There is a shocking tale of Sadlier, after breaking his arm, being turned away from treatment at a hospital because Millwall owed the hospital money. His own poor handling of his injuries seems to contribute to the injury that put paid to any hope he made of making the full Republic of Ireland squad for the 2002 World Cup.
Readers of Recovering will notice that there is little banter about former teammates, or self-deprecating humour. The hardships Sadlier endures breed further ill-feeling, discontent, and deep self-resentment. Tragedy is unfettered and unfiltered. At the family level, Sadlier’s strained and seemingly distant relationship with his father is a further source for his crippling self-doubt. His father, a reformed alcoholic, doles out stoic and frank advice. At the peak of Sadlier’s playing career, when he was on the verge of making the full Republic of Ireland squad for the 2002 World Cup, his father undermines his fragile confidence by saying “the chances of you getting some game time are fairly remote, isn’t that right? It’s an awfully long way to go, too,” (pg. 120).
“We never knew which version of my dad would arrive home. Hungover, drunk or sober, take your pick, you’d know who it was before he said a word. His mood came in the door before him.”
Sadlier on his father’s alcoholism (pg. 10-11)
Saddled with alcoholism, depression, and a career scuppered by injury and self-destruction—if this wasn’t enough for the reader to take in, Sadlier reveals that, at 14 years of age, he was sexually abused by his physiotherapist. This needs no more glossing over here, but it does form a part of Recovering’s extended coda and perhaps the most important and honest part of the book. It is truly necessary reading, and acts as the final moment of catharsis from his playing career and the terrors that came with it.
The sheer emotional heft of Recovering leaves the last chapters that describe his TV work tacked on. Invested readers familiar with Sadlier’s punditry will appreciate these chapters, but reading about the bickering between him and fellow pundits seems unimportant considering the nature of the preceding chapters. The writing is emotionally removed and can easily be glossed over.
There is relatively little about his playing career, and as such, little banter or humorous recollections about former teammates. A very dry wit permeates through the book, but this is derived from the unadorned, unfettered and punchy prose. Indeed, the writing serves to highlight all the cruelty that Sadlier endures. As such, Recovering is not a read for the faint-hearted. His reflections on his life come from a studied eye that has, for a very long time, looked inward.
Being a one-club man, Sadlier was hardly a journeyman footballer. He is, however, a man on a journey. He travels through many stations—professional footballer, alcoholic, club CEO, motivational speaker, TV pundit, psychotherapist. This is by no means an exhaustive list. So perhaps it is fitting that a man who has worn many caps can turn out a study of his life so plainly and honestly—a life put through the wringer every which way by football. Recovering shows an ex-footballer healed, and a man cleansed.
HIGHLIGHTED PASSAGE
“I was just a kid, a powerless kid abused by a powerful man. I turned on myself and continued to do so for years.”
On suffering sexual abuse as a teenager (pg. 240)
STARS: 4.5/5
UNDER 20: A landmark autobiography by Sadlier that shows the end of football as the start of his life.
FULL-TIME SCORE: A down-and-out player finds his own beat to march to, and leads his team to a gritty and inspired 3-0 win against the rabid opposition.
RELATED READING:Full Time: The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino by Tony Cascarino (2000); Back From the Brink by Paul McGrath (2006); Position of Trust by Andy Woodward (2019)
Sir Bobby Robson watches on as England capitulate to West Germany in 1990
The football documentary has of late received a makeover. It was inevitable that the modern-day football documentary would outgrow its gritty, made-for-television docudrama form of the 2000s, to evolve into a more elegant form that melds minimalistic storytelling and raw footage to create a compelling documentary. The masterful F1 documentary Senna has driven this change, and its influence has been seen in recent football documentaries such as Maradona and here with Bobby Robson: More Than A Manager. This documentary outlines Sir Bobby Robson’s various managerial achievements and falls from grace, and crafts a fine portrait of an often cruelly denigrated and misunderstood football man with a worldly bent. Even though Robson passed away from lung cancer in 2009, his legacy positively resounds into the present day. Interviews with figures from Robson’s life showed him to be a caring mentor to his players but a distant father, a successful and daring coach punished for his success, and a man who always looked like he was chasing up ‘unfinished business’.
“When he got on the train at Durham to go to Fulham, and he was looking out the window and he was waving, well, I just broke down to think that, was he going to make the grade? Was he going to be alright?“
Sir Bobby’s father Philip Robson on his son’s start to his playing career
The opening words of Robson, narrated by the man himself, sets the tone of an uncertain adventure already longed played out. “In my early days,” he says, “I always knew what I wanted to do. It was in my blood. I never knew where it would lead me.” Robson continues in a non-linear fashion, beginning with him taking on the Barcelona coaching job nine months after recovering from an operation to remove a malignant melanoma in his head. The mid-to-late 90s is the anchoring point for Robson, and despite the timeline jumping to his salad days as Ipswich manager and to his infamous stint as England manager through the 80s, we always return to his managerial glory days in continental Europe. This period, highlighted by his Barcelona days, acts as the conflict that drives the narrative forward.
Jose Mourinho, Sir Bobby, and Ronaldo taste victory
The magic of Robson inevitably lies with his days as England head coach and as the successor to Johan Cruyff at Barcelona. The touchstone moments within these periods are covered with invaluable raw footage. An irate Robson fronts a press pack disputing Maradona’s first goal in England’s 1986 World Cup quarter final against England (“Maradona handled the ball into the goal, didn’t he? Didn’t he?”). We watch a nervous Robson fold a paper cup from the touchline as he sees England bow out to West Germany in the 1990 World Cup semi-final. We chuckle at his valiant attempts to speak Spanish in press conferences (“Figo, problem, fora. Stoichkov, problem, fora.”), and stand and salute his glorious last stand against the opposing forces within his own club to lead Barca to three trophies in a season before being unceremoniously dumped from his position as manager. No bit of footage is wasted in Robson, and through the lens of hindsight, we learn that Robson, despite his individual brilliance and his legitimate success, was always on a hiding to nothing from internal and external forces in the football world. Like myself, younger football fans will primarily remember Robson from his time as manager of Newcastle United in the early 2000s. Robson’s stint at Newcastle—his last—was a bittersweet one. The toxic situation at the club before Robson’s departure is palpably conveyed through Robson.
“He said it was the hand of God. I said it was the hand of a rascal. And I’m right.”
Sir Bobby on Maradona’s infamous goal in the 1986 World Cup
The interviews carry legitimacy with endorsements of Robson by figures such as Jose Mourinho, Alan Shearer, Ronaldo, Sir Alex Ferguson, Gary Lineker, and Pep Guardiola. Robson clearly had a great influence on Mourinho’s career. Mourinho’s default pose of ‘resting belligerence’ is occasionally broken by misty-eyed recollections (“Without feeling [Robson’s] trust, I couldn’t jump so fast to be working with the best players in the world. Our relationship was phenomenal”). Pep Guardiola recounts how he offered to join Robson at Newcastle United following Robson’s departure from Barcelona (a real sliding-doors moment). Paul Gascoigne, perpetually on the verge of tears, tells of the deep, father-son relationship he had with Robson and how he would receive two calls a week from Robson following Robson’s sacking from Newcastle (“Under Sir Bobby, I knew I was safe. I was safe”; [Robson] could have done anything…to spend most of this time worrying about me was so, so, so unbelievable”). However, Robson’s dedication to his players is reflected with the distance he kept from his family, with his son Mark Robson lamenting that his father spent relatively little time with him. Robson, on a sombre, final note in Robson, seems to acknowledge this.
Paul Gascoigne on Sir Bobby
“They were spot-on when they chose Mr. Robson to be the next one. Spot on.“
Jose Mourinho on Robson’s appointment as Barcelona manager.
Where there is sentimentality, there is also a sense of despondency and feeling of betrayal in the interviews. In regards to Robson’s sacking from Newcastle United, his wife states that “[Robson] was very heartbroken when he was guillotined”, and his son claims that “His world fell apart. We can’t believe it still. Brutal.” Most tellingly was former Newcastle chairman Freddie Shepherd’s assertion that sacking Robson “was like shooting Bambi”. The undercurrent of sadness that flows through Robson is allowed to flow here in its latter parts, especially when Robson, stricken with terminal cancer, shows up to greet the players before the charity match for his foundation, and specifically gives Paul Gascoigne one final word of encouragement.
Devoted disciples to Robson may find the documentary lacking substance in terms of his initial forays into management on the European continent (PSV Eindhoven and Porto) in the 1990s, and a more complete picture of Robson’s life is best served in his autobiographies and biography. Despite this, Robson, as a documentary, almost bursts at its seams with the amount of territory covered. As a lovingly-curated account of Robson’s managerial life, Robson never overstates itself, and as a result is a simple, eminently watchable appraisal of an unforgettable figure in football history. The renaissance of the football documentary is well and truly in swing, and Robson is a prime example of it.
“I remember everything. How long have you got?“
Bobby Robson on his life
Sir Bobby at Newcastle United
STARS: 4.5/5
UNDER 20: A lovingly compiled and elegant recounting of Sir Bobby Robson’s managerial career.
“You don’t have to understand. If I’d wanted you to understand I would have explained it better.” This well-known phrase of Cruyff’s, originally spoken in relation to contract negotiations to become Holland’s national coach before the 1994 World Cup, is often wheeled out to remind everyone how obstinate and single-minded Johan Cruyff was when it came to his principles. This phrase showed Cruyff—the visionary, the sublime tactician, and purveyor of beautiful football—at his indomitable best.
However, this phrase also reflects how intensely private Cruyff was of his personal affairs, and how unwilling he was to offer up a softer side of himself to journalists. Cruyff’s sad passing in 2016 ensured that little was left in the way of an autobiography (aside from the disappointing My Turn published posthumously in 2016), leaving the best accounts of his life’s work to the journalists who followed him closely. The best of these is undoubtedly Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff by Dutch journalists Frits Barend and Henk van Dorp. In this book, the many sides of Cruyff are laid bare in a series of fascinating interviews with the two journalists over a period of 25 years. The end result is not only a compelling, finely layered, and insightful character study, but also a ground-breaking piece of footballing long-form that straddled the line between traditional biography and cultured essay.
“I’ve been called a tactical genius. I’ve trained the first team, the C-team and also the youth teams. And practice has convinced me you don’t need a diploma for that. I only talk about technique and tactics. If Ajax has to train for physical condition, I just don’t join in. When I was young, I also hated running in the woods.” (pg. 35)
Cruyff speaking to ‘Vrij Nederland’ in March 1981 (pg. 35)
The interviews and articles follow Cruyff as player through his salad days at Ajax and Barcelona in the 1970s, and finishes with the end of his coaching stint at Barcelona in the mid-1990s. The content of specific interviews is wide-ranging, and rarely static. The dialogue between Barend, van Dorp, and Cruyff makes for stirring reading, and Cruyff’s Barcelona interviews (as coach) help to pin down many facets of Cruyff’s character. Gold dust lies between the footballing matters—Cruyff is often prompted on family life, religion and philosophy, and he mostly replies candidly. Elsewhere he shows his tempestuousness and exasperation, resulting in stand-offs between him and the journalists. Cruyff truly flows and rages like a river moving through rapids. His answers are often incomprehensible (even to the journalists) and evasive, but herein lies the humour and tension.
Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff is not a typical football biography. In format alone, it demands of the reader a basic knowledge of both Dutch footballing dominance in the 1970s and Cruyff’s footballing and coaching exploits. In the interests of providing context, the translators for this English edition (David Winner and Lex van Dam) include magazine and newspaper articles that did not feature in the Dutch edition. These additions are indispensable in painting a picture of Cruyff in the 1960s and 1970s. The very specific nature of the interviews especially caters to the football fan look wistfully at football in the 1980s and 1990s. As Barcelona coach, Cruyff waxes lyrical on the future of young Dutch tyros Aron Winter and Richard Witschge; he laments at the loss of Ronald Koeman and the laziness of Hristo Stoickhov; and he reflects upon his foreign contingent at Barcelona of Popescu, Kodro, Luis Figo, and Hagi post-Romario. The nostalgia trip is real.
“When you are 4-0 ahead with 10 minutes to go, it’s better to hit the post a couple of times so the crowd can go “oooh” and “aaaah” because if it’s 5-0 nil, it’s only for the score, it doesn’t affect the result.”
Cruyff on ‘Barend and Van Dorp’ in April 1997 on how football should be played beautifully (pg. 218)
Although Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff was first published in 1997, readers will appreciate this portrait of Cruyff more so than his recent autobiography My Turn. The transcripts in Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff show a dedicated family man (“I’m my daughter’s father”) who picks up the children from school; a philosopher who discusses social affairs and the existence of God; a man who sticks by his footballing principles even in the face of greater opportunity (“I could never work for AS Roma. They have a running track around their pitch. That’s the worst thing there is”); a maverick who never admits he is wrong (“If there was [a time I was wrong], I would never talk about it, never. I would put it away. That’s part of my character”); and a retired player-cum-coach who loves to get stuck in on the training pitch (“There are obviously a thousand and one problems a day here. My only distraction is the one and a half hours I’m on the pitch”). Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff is a warts and all depiction of Cruyff—it is far-removed from the self-serving and arrogant language of My Turn.
“Last Friday, Cruyff was given an ultimatum. ‘Why an ultimatum when we’re still in the middle of negotiations?’ Cruyff thought. How was he supposed to react to the combination of faxes from the KNVB lawyer Mr Utermark and from Staatsen, bearing in mind that it’s impossible to insult Cruyff more than by giving him an ultimatum. Cruyff might not be arrogant, but he happens to be the Sinatra of football trainers and it remains very Dutch to say that Cruyff shouldn’t think he is Cruyff. Think about it!”
On Cruyff’s contract negotiations with the KNVB, in ‘Nieuwe Revu’ in December 1993 (pg. 164)
The translation is seemingly faithful to the turn of phrase used by Cruyff and the interviewers. Some readers my find the translation jarring and inaccurate, yet knowing that Cruyff had a very distinctive speaking style (“Cruyff can be enigmatic and elliptical to the point of incomprehensibility”) it seems hardly fair to criticise the translation. As previously stated, the articles are very selective in time frame and context, and some may be disappointed that there is almost zero mention of his career in the United States to claw back his fortune following his disastrous decision to invest in a pig farming venture. This may be due to the journalists’ overt criticism of football in the US (“in the United States, where football or ‘soccer’, never was and never will be anything, Cruyff can walk the streets without being disturbed”). Where Cruyff describes his US experience as a defining time for his career and life in My Turn, Barend and van Dorp completely overlook this in Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff. Cruyff’s experience in the US deserves greater coverage, especially in long form. It is therefore a disappointing omission from an otherwise great book.
There will never be a character in the football world as enigmatic and forward-thinking as Johan Cruyff. Although much is written about his footballing ‘vision’, his tactics, and his immense contribution to the game that still resonates in the present day, there is less written about his life in sum—especially when Cruyff himself famously refused to dwell on his past. Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff is therefore an invaluable treasure for the footballing community. Despite its unorthodox style and it being twenty years since it was first published, this book is still the most objective and rounded impression of this football revolutionary and bona fide legend.
HIGHLIGHTED PASSAGE
“We’ve listened to a lot of tapes of you. There’s a lot of verbal battles, because you always want to talk rubbish and then we say, Johan, be clear. And then you say: Let me talk, let me explain. As seen through out interviews, your life is one big war. You’ve been active for about 35 years in professional football, and for almost 35 years it’s been a war. Why is that?” Cruyff: “War? Arguments!”
Cruyff on his so-called ‘war’, on ‘Barend and Van Dorp’ in April 1997 (pg. 248)
STARS: 4.5/5
UNDER 20: A series of revealing articles and interviews with Johan Cruyff contribute to a stunning character study of the legend.
FULL-TIME SCORE: The indomitable coach adopts his trademark fluid, attacking display to great effect in a fully-fledged team performance resulting in a 4-0 win (with a last-minute shot against the bar to make the crowd go oooh and aaaah).
Dispatches from Row-Z 