Category: Sport

As a child I was always really into football but I was brought up in a non-sporting family in the middle of a non-football county (Somerset) and so my football-related activity was limited to reading loads and loads of football magazines, covering the walls of my bedroom with pictures of footballers, obsessively keeping records of results and scorers and playing endless Subbuteo football tournaments against myself. Then, when I moved away from home to go to university I ended up in places where football wasn’t a big deal. It was only when I pitched up in Plymouth in July 1992 that I was finally in a place where there was a proper football team.

I remember that not long after we moved to Plymouth my wife and I were walking in Central Park when a bunch of guys in training kit came running towards us. Out in front of them was the manager and as they passed us my wife looked at me and said with a tone os surprise “That’s Peter Shilton” (who if you don’t know was a very famous England goalkeeper). Shilton had fairly recently taken up his first, and only, appointment as a club manager.

Anyway, after a few months I finally got myself to Home Park to see Plymouth Argyle play (they lost to Huddersfield) and from that point onwards I was hooked (I’ve hardly missed a home game since 1993 which means that I will have been to something like 300-350 games). At one time I actually used to write the match reports for the official club website and even helped out with online commentary (usually my role was to be the side-kick to the main commentator although I did also get the odd stint doing the full commentary). My first full season as an Argyle fan was 1993/94 and this was rather a momentous season for Argyle as Shilton built a team that played attractive passing football and scored absolutely shed-loads of goals. They reached the play-off semi-finals only to fall to a depressing defeat (at Home Park) in the second leg to Burnley. That season Argyle played great football but they also let in too many goals and missed out on what should have been a straightforward promotion.

The following season (1994/95) everything went badly wrong. Players got injured, the squad fractured (thanks Peter Swan) and Shilton was eventually sacked following disagreements and highly-public fallings-out with the Chairman. It was a horrible season and ended in relegation.

“Peter Shilton’s Nearly Men” is a new book written by Argyle fan Paul Roberts that describes this whole period at the club, from just before we moved to Plymouth to the relegation that followed Shilton’s departure. It’s a great read for any Argyle fan who recalls that era, being based on lots of research including extensive interviews with the players and other figures at the club at that time. It took me right back to that era – one that in some ways is still fresh in my mind but in other ways seems like ancient history. It was good to be taken back to that periods, not only to remember the football but also to recall the other memories that I have of my first couple of years in Plymouth.

David Peace’s novel “The Damned United” is quite a controversial book. It charts the story of the 44 day stay of Brian Clough as manager of Leeds United at the start of the 1974/75 football season. The book is critically acclaimed but it has also been slammed as not being representative of Clough and of what really happened at the time. Having read it I can see that writing a novel about something so recent and about someone so well known is really dangerous territory.

I picked up The Damned United to read towards the end of July but when I noticed that the book is written with a chapter for each day and that (in real history) the period covered started on July 31st I decided to start reading on that day and to read one chapter each day so that I allowed the story to unfold in real time. In some ways this was a bit frustrating because I often found myself wanting to read ahead but it was also interesting to pace the story out correctly as this helped me to get inside the head of the (fictional) Clough. The 44th, and last, day of the story was September 12th (so I finished reading the book a couple of days ago). One thing I will say is that if you don’t like swearing don’t read this book…

Anyway, there are two key things that the book gave me. First, it gave me a real insight into just how desperate it must be to manage a football team that isn’t winning (something which chimes well with the form of my own team – Plymouth Argyle – at the moment). There’s simply no escape from the failure and it’s hard to see how it would be possible to get any sleep whatsoever in this situation (in the book alcohol helps). Secondly, as I read the book it was impossible not to read it as if it was factually correct and so I am now left with a very clear impression of what Brian Clough was like at this time (I only remember him myself from slightly later in his career) but this is an impression that is actually fictional and so I do not know which parts are reasonable and which are not. I’m not sure this is fair on the reader and most certainly on the real individual involved. Tricky

Having found myself needing to start reading a new book a few days before the start of the first Ashes Test Match, it seemed appropriate to pick up Lawrence Booth’s “Cricket, Lovely Cricket?”. Booth is a cricket write for The Guardian newspaper and Wisden Cricket Monthly and so well placed to write a series of chapters exploring various aspects of the game of cricket, including the personalities of the different cricket nations, the role of fans in the game, the England v Australia rivalry. I enjoyed the book – it satisfied the requirement of getting me into a cricket mood for the summer without being too obsessive and it left me intrigued about some of the stories told. It’s just a pity that as I write this, on the last day of the First Test, Australia are pummelling England towards defeat as usual…