I KNEW I wasn’t going to get on terribly well with a former girlfriend’s brother when I saw Nigel Mansell’s autobiography on his bedside table. I noticed there was a book marker three-quarters of the way through. He was actually reading it, then.
I imagined what it must be like. “I drove round and round the track, really fast. Round and round and round and round. Then we stopped, and I’d come second. A month later I drove round and round another track, really fast. Round and round...”
You get the picture. Autobiographies by sporting stars are rarely revelatory; indeed books about sport, in general, are frequently grim, devoid of nuance and insight. There are exceptions, of course. This Sporting Life, by David Storey — who I believe is our best post-war novelist — is a wonderful account of a floundering rugby league player, Arthur Machin. Eamon Dunphy’s bitter and hilarious Only A Game is still widely read more than 40 years after it was published — and not just by Millwall supporters. And David Peace’s fictionalised account of Bill Shankley’s life, Red or Dead, is a stunning piece of literature and an extraordinary achievement. To those we might add the even more experimental Peter Handke novella The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety At The Penalty Kick: bleedin’ existentialist, that was — back of the net!
So there is some good stuff out there. But, for the most part, we are left with the ghosted ruminations of has- beens or never-weres or half-wits. Would you buy Once A Blue Always A Blue by Manchester City’s former stalwart, Richard Edghill, unless you were his mum, or maybe my ex-girlfriend’s brother? Or Ledley King’s autobiography – a numbing account of his bad knees stretched over an excruciating 288 pages? Or anything, ever, by Wayne Rooney? The problem is that the autobiographies of footballers who are still playing never tell you anything you really want to know, they never give you the lowdown and the dirt — because they don’t want to annoy their colleagues. The best we get is the revelation that Steven Gerrard thought El Hadji Diouf might not have been the most clubbable of individuals, all things considered. No, really, Stevie? And here we were assuming the bloke was a truly loveable little squirrel, affable and charming, immensely likeable. How kind of you to offer an alternative view.
We also learnt, from Gerrard’s autobiography, that he’s not terribly keen on Stuart Pearce. But that’s only because Psycho didn’t make him captain for an England game. It went no deeper than that – or if it did, Stevie was not prepared to expand.
Advertisement
However, unlikely though it might seem, Sam Allardyce’s autobiography might just buck the trend. The former West Ham and Bolton and now Sunderland manager’s tome — called, of course, Big Sam — is not a work of great literature, by any stretch of the imagination, but it has the occasional interesting anecdote in it and one or two sharply observed judgments. I particularly liked the story of Ian Marshall, who played under Allardyce at Bolton.
The veteran Marshall was allowed to train at his home in Leicester instead of with the rest of the team – but he was still required to wear a heart monitor to check his fitness levels, just like all the other players. But the monitor gave out quite the most bizarre readings, which puzzled the doctors and the physios. As Allardyce puts it: “Marshy confessed he had been putting the monitor on his dog while it ran around, in the hope that we’d think he’d been training when he was actually flat out on the sofa watching TV.”
Marshall now runs a training academy in Canada. Good luck, you canucks. Small beer, but entertaining at least. Allardyce is pungent, too, on the double dealing which saw him evicted from the managerial role at Newcastle United by Mike Ashley. Sam rang Harry Redknapp because he’d heard talk that he was being lined up for the Newcastle job: Redknapp apparently assured his friend that this was rubbish. But it was almost certainly a fib, according to Allardyce, and the only thing that stopped Redknapp from accepting the offer is that Newcastle was a few hundred too many miles north of Dorset.
“I never had a chance once Ashley took over,” Allardyce laments. “He just listened to the more vocal fans who demanded change.” And there, in a nutshell, you have Newcastle’s whole problem of the past 15 years; both Alan Pardew, and before him Big Sam, were doing fine with the Magpies. But never quite as good as the Newcastle fans expected — and so both of them had to go, given a pliant and suggestible owner. He is sharp, too, on the troublesome players he encountered. Ravel Morrison – lazy and uninterested, should have been worth £50m but he’s “blown his career”.
And the pugilistic Andy Todd, who once got so angry he put Sam’s number two, Phil Brown, in hospital (broken cheekbone, smashed jaw) for some slight made against his dad, Colin. That was at a team-bonding session. All good stuff.
Advertisement