Leo McKinstry
SIR ALF
A major reappraisal of the life and times of England’s greatest football manager
528pp. HarperSport. £18.99.
0 00 719378 5

Richard Williams
THE PERFECT 10
Football’s dreamers, schemers, playmakers and playboys
256pp. Faber. £14.99.
0 571 21635 8

D. J. Taylor
ON THE CORINTHIAN SPIRIT
131pp. Yellow Jersey. £10.
0 224 07585 3

Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, editors
THE THINKING FAN’S GUIDE TO THE WORLD CUP
400pp. Abacus. Paperback, £9.99.
0 349 11986 4
 
Horses have in their time been appointed consul and killed an Empress (if some accounts are to be believed), yet it still comes as a surprise that a pedestrian bridge leading to the building site which may one day become Wembley stadium should be called White Horse Bridge. “With all due respect to this creature”, writes Leo McKinstry in the introduction to his biography of Alf Ramsey, “it is something of an absurdity that the winning manager of the World Cup should have to trail in behind a horse.” The creature was Billie, the police horse that kept enormous crowds from straying on to the pitch before the 1923 FA Cup final. This achievement took him to the top of a national bridge-naming poll. McKinstry sees in this undignified result evidence of continuing disdain towards Ramsey’s achievements. His book duly sets out to reappraise a man and manager often uncomprehended in his lifetime and ill-treated by an ungrateful posterity.

McKinstry does not, however, say that, although beaten by Billie, Sir Alf finished a very commendable second place in the poll, ahead of Bobby Charlton and Bobby Moore, not to mention Live Aid and Dietmar Hamann, the last player to score in an international match at Wembley. Billie’s triumph would then seem to testify less to the particular neglect of Sir Alf than to the English love of animals, and especially horses, and especially white horses. This particular horse and jockey, even if in the colours of Bolton Wanderers, the Cup winners that day, had the virtue of transcending the tribal allegiances which, running deep through English football, can render even national heroes like Moore or Charlton a little uncongenial to fans of the clubs they did not play for.

Unlike these heroes, Ramsey contrived never to stay quite long enough with a glamorous club to earn the idolatrous affections of fans, but he did remain long enough as England manager for the reputation he had earned in 1966 to be darkened by elimination from the World Cup in 1970 and then eclipsed by failure to qualify in 1973. The vicissitudes of this career seem chiefly responsible for such neglect as McKinstry identifies. Nevertheless, in an account sensitive not only to the life and career, but the “times” of Ramsey, McKinstry also argues that Sir Alf’s character and class and, as importantly, rumours about these, were fundamental. The dark-haired, poor boy from Dagenham, whose family were suspiciously fond of the dog track, was widely thought to be a gypsy. He is also supposed later to have taken elocution lessons to disguise his past. McKinstry, who throughout is admirably restrained in avoiding speculation or dramatization, does not ultimately substantiate these rumours, but he does show that, however seemingly trivial now, they compounded the insecurities of a man often ill at ease, generally boring and always laconic. Ramsey certainly did not provide soundbites, and the media turned instead to Kenneth Wolstenholme’s commentary for what has become the unwieldy catchphrase which commemorates the England World Cup victory and, again, as in the case of Billie, the threat of crowd trouble (“some people are on the pitch” etc). Yet Ramsey’s gruff unfriendliness to the media and his contentment at home with his wife recommend him as an interesting foil to the modern, media-savvy manager and the world of Footballers’ Wive$, though even now “Managers’ Wive$” does not sound like a particularly raunchy sequel.

McKinstry has conducted innumerable interviews with a range of former players and acquaintances. Large, regular verbatim quotations from them provide an authenticating voice at the cost of disrupting the narrative. He has also done his research – we learn that Alf’s first flight was on a forty-four-seat DC-4 Skymaster – but somehow, for all this, we never get close to the man. McKinstry will probably not make us like him, nor does he necessarily want to, but, ultimately, the reader is likely to join him in feeling a certain gratification that Ipswich Town, who have a white horse of their own on the club badge, found room for a statue of the man.

While McKinstry sighs a little for the old-fashioned reticence suggested by Sir Alf’s clipped tones and clipped hair, Richard Williams sees in Ramsey the archetypal modernizing, pragmatic manager, whose “realism” risked bringing about the end of romance, and endangering the flair of which the players who have worn the number 10 shirt have been the particular exponents. Ramsey was one of the hapless defenders on the England side undone by the brilliant Hungarians; and their number 10, Ferenc Puskàs, is the first of Williams’s selection of players who have worn the number, or played as if they did. Indeed, Englishmen generally appear in The Perfect 10 as the adversaries of flair. Williams’s avowedly subjective line-up which, if you permit the football phrase, includes the likes of Pelé, Platini, Baggio (Roberto) and Francescoli, does not contain one Briton. This is certainly a testimonial to Williams’s ability to appreciate on their own terms and in their national contexts a wide range of talents. It nevertheless seems characteristically harsh that he should be reluctant to credit another British martinet, Bruce Rioch, as the manager who signed Dennis Bergkamp before Arsène Wenger came to Arsenal. In an opening chapter entitled “numerology”, Williams discusses, with gentle irony, some magical properties assigned to the number 10 (he talks about Pythagoras rather than Downing Street), but it would have been interesting to know what he makes of the introduction of names on shirts with their accompanying squad numbers. This innovation was a terrible blow to those of us who loved the simple beauty of the numerical patterns at the back of a football programme and are anyway too short-sighted to make out a name on a player’s back. But it also means that numbers have now floated from signifying positions to designating players, to the extent that numbers may now themselves be “retired” in honour of star players when they exit a club or this life. Eventually, there may be no number 10 shirts left.

Williams’s essays are informed and enthusiastic, the tone varied to suit his subject. Above all, his capacity to appreciate and describe the particular talent incarnated by individual players, irrespective of their team, is rare, especially post-Fever Pitch. D. J. Taylor’s On the Corinthian Spirit is, however, drawn to a bygone era when individual brilliance was supposedly effaced in the interests of the team. Taylor wonders how and why the words “professional” and “amateur” should have each mutated into something like the opposite of their original meanings. The famous cricketing distinctions between gentlemen and players necessarily surface here, but it is largely football that interests Taylor. Always nuanced, he neither utterly regrets nor unequivocally deplores those moustachioed aristocrats who did not need to work. And he can see a residual amateur even in the modern professional footballer. In their autobiographies, Taylor points out, players tend to present themselves still as essentially loyal, dutiful people not seriously propelled by the money their talent has earned them. Perhaps they deserve to be taken at their word.

Taylor’s morphology of the “professional” takes him on to territory beyond the football pitch; the last chapter is devoted to a discussion of the professionalization of English studies. His readers will by then have sensed that in this little book Taylor’s writing, gliding between leisurely recollections of his own and historical accounts, itself embodies a lingering allegiance to the spirit he elegizes. His effortless, sinuous style, the sometimes wry, companionable charm of the writing and even the modest proportions of the volume not only assist his arguments. They guarantee their attractiveness and cogency.

By contrast, The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, thanks to its title, seems rather too ingratiating as it beckons prospective readers to a privileged vantage point, a sort of intellectual executive box from which we can expect to observe the game, comfortable in the presence of connoisseurs. Some of the essays (like John Lanchester’s on Brazil, which rises splendidly to the challenge of talking about such celebrated overdogs) do offer civilized company and food for thought. But substantial sections of the book are statistical, so the guide turns out to be little more than the Rothmans Football Yearbook after elocution lessons. Except that Rothmans is dependably accurate. Alas, if only Olaf Thon had played in defence and Lothar Matthäus in attack, as alleged here, England might have overcome the Germans in 1990. A sympathetic devotee of total football might forgive these slips, but not even a Scot could be excused for thinking it was England that played the Faroe Islands. As it happens, these lapses seem attributable to an American viewpoint in the book. England fans, and perhaps even thinking fans, may find that reading American accounts of football matches is like drinking tea out of a Coca-Cola bottle. It feels odd, even if you recognize what is happening. But English readers will be pleased to see that the details of Ramsey’s World Cup achievement in 1966 are all spot on, while some will be relieved to find that there is not a single mention of a white horse.