Ooh Ah... Just a Little Bit - Cantona by Philipe Auclair

If the deeds of footballers as related via their autobiography are all that survives of our civilisation, the future inhabitants of our planet might wonder why we chose such mediocre (though well toned) gods.  Over the course of my footie watching lifetime, footballers of the top echelon have gradually ascended from mere heroes to gods.  No longer are they perceived as mere mortals, men performing glorious deeds on a field of sporting combat, now, after a process of celebritisation, they're portrayed as distant deities with superhuman skills capable of acts beyond the ken of mere mortals.   They're more remote than they used to be, even mediocre players earning in a week or two what might otherwise be considered a very good yearly wage. They live in mansions rendered remote from the public by the kind of security a spectacular wage can buy.   Most of all, they're no longer someone we could become given the right training and opportunities (no, the best we mere mortals can hope for is Football League or, if you're spectacularly unlucky, you could wind up in Scottish or Welsh football).

Of course, it's easy to ascribe this entirely to the interlinked rise of the Premier League and Sky.  The moving of football from a relatively rarity to a weekly event was underway before Sky bought the Premier League rights, but the current status quo, where football saturates TV schedules even outside major international tournaments, would be almost unimaginable twenty years ago.  Thirty years back? Anyone told that live football would become common, with even foreign league matches routinely broadcast live, would have laughed in your face.  There are other factors involved beyond the excellent timing of Sky and the Premier League - English clubs had returned to European competition after the Heysel ban, England's run to the semi-finals of Italia' 90 had made football cool again (along with one of the few genuinely credible football related songs, EnglandNewOrder's World In Motion) and, post-Hillsborough, grounds were being made safer, encouraging the more timid of the middle class fans who'd been scared off by tales of hooliganism to return to grounds. And make no mistake, there were middle class football fans back then, though perhaps not as many. It was simply that football wasn't a topic of conversation, wasn't the social glue it is now.  The Premier League's great trick was in tapping into the support that saw going to an actual game as too expensive or too much trouble, making England's top league accessible to them week in week out without them having to leave their living room.  And in that situation, tapping into a market previously beyond football, the game's popularity could only grow. Sky built the pedestals for the stars of their new show, most of the footballers happily scrambled on to them.  Who wouldn't wanna be adored?

From the perspective of today, with rich owners and huge TV and commercial income allowing the league to be gilded by some of the finest players in the world, the lack of glamour of twenty years ago is a reminder of reality rather than SkySports rewritten history.  The reigning champions were the functional Arsenal side of George Graham, Graeme Souness was busy replacing the artists of an aging Liverpool side with expensive artisans and the side who'd take the title in 1991-92 was an unmemorable Leeds side, livened by the spark of Strachan and sublime passing of Gary McAllister but largely dependent on long balls and the head of Lee Chapman.  It was a brutal world in which the likes of Vinnie Jones prospered in midfield and the sheer physical presence of the likes of Mick Harford and Dion Dublin made them prized strikers.  An insular, almost agrarian environment where foreigners, particularly the skillful players, were largely distrusted - the likes of Jan Molby were glaring exceptions to the rule.  This was the point at which the eccentric career trajectory of Eric Cantona collided with English football and the seeds of English football becoming entertainment as much as sport were sown.  Cantona, with seemingly more charisma than the rest of the league put together, provided the glamour that SkySports had desperately tried to inject with desperate measures such as the SkyStrikers cheerleaders. 

Philippe Auclair's biography is far from a simple study of Cantona's time in the English game - it's only around halfway through the book that the account of his time in England begins. Neither is it a comprehensive biography which covers his post-football exploits including his acting and beach football (and, lately, management) careers.  Instead it concentrates solely on Cantona as a footballer,and his activities relating to that career.  It ends with his retirement in 1997, only briefly seeking even to contextualise what legacy he may have left in football or what legacy football left to Cantona.  This is the cliche of 'football being my life' being exploited to shape the story, with retirement attempts referred to as 'suicide' and 'death'.  That might sound overly dramatic, but it isn't, it's a conceit which allows Auclair to fully bring home the drama and intensity of his subject.  This is an exploration of how Cantona's style of play and his career in the game were an extension of his personality; as concerned with character as it is with narrative.   At one point Auclair makes the point that the tendency of football biographies to hermetically seal themselves from the real world is preposterous, that the actions of footballers are nothing without the context being given of what they mean to the fans. Not only does Auclair put events in the context of clubs and fans, he's always at pains to see the even wider context, both in terms of football and society.  For normal footballers who often appear oblivious to wider events, it may not matter, but in a biography of Cantona, a man often defined as much by what he was reacting against as what he was in himself, it's a stroke of brilliance.  It immediately negates the tendency of football writers to view events in isolation, the sort of writing which leads to a complete lack of understanding as to why things happen.  Auclair's approach allows the reader to delve behind the headlines of Cantona as a nomadic troublemaker and instead seeks to explain his reasons for moving on in each instance.   Whilst it's clear his sympathies lie more with Cantona than those he kicks against, he's not judgemental, allowing the reader to judge actions for themselves.  It's a proper journalistic approach that echews the tendency of footballing biographies to either sensationalise events or justify them.  Each stage of Cantona's career leads to understanding of why events happened, why he failed to fit in at so many clubs. After this you'll understand (if not necessarily agree with) his actions, from his departure from Auxerre, through to the Selhurst Park incident and his eventual retirement. It's a book length illustration of a character, a portrait in the truest sense.  Even for a Liverpool fan, with the painful story of the rise of United to the top of the English game (where the story told here ends) it's compelling.  Fittingly, for Cantona, it's a very different type of biography for a very different type of footballer.

American Idiots - An Epic Swindle by Brian Reade

If you've paid the slightest bit of attention to English football over the past five years it's liable you'll know about the ownership problems at Liverpool. Sold by David Moores, whose family funded the club's rise under Shankly, to a pair of American businessmen, because he could no longer fund Liverpool's attempts to match the inordinately wealthy likes of implacable foes Manchester United and arriviste upstarts Chelsea. And as the credit crunch struck, those businessmen, whose fortune was built on debt became not only unable to finance Liverpool as Moores had been, but unable to finance them at all, crippling the club to the point that they dived from a perennial top four club who were regulars at the business end of the world's more lucrative competition to seventh place also rans. The club hadn't finished so low since Graeme Souness tried to rebuild an aging side too fast and with entirely the wrong players. The better players had begun to depart already and the quality of players was gradually falling. Fan attitudes declined from a warm welcome, through unease and eventually, into open revolt and protest. A club who'd prided themselves on doing things behind closed doors turned on itself, sinking so low as to hire a PR company to badmouth their own manager.

An Epic Swindle is the story of those four and a half years Liverpool suffered at the hands of Tom Hicks and George Gillett. It's unashamedly partisan, casting Hicks and Gillett as the sort of evil hearted, black hatted bad guys you rarely get outside fantasy film franchises. And speaking as a Liverpool fan I can't say I disagree too much with that - I'd argue for a little fairness in that whatever their original intentions, they were caught out by the credit crunch so had their plans irretrievably disrupted early on. It's their actions subsequent to that which destroy and benefit of doubt though, and those are thoroughly chronicled here. Not only are they shown to be only interested in the money they can make out of the club, they demonstrate an astonishing ignorance which they don't have the wit to correct by hiring people who did know what they're doing. There was a reason they were bottom of a list of American sports owners compiled in 2009. The book's essentially a forensic dissection of their actions during their ownership and repeatedly it finds them wanting against standards set at Liverpool over the previous fifty years, let alone the standards of what ethics might remain in business. Gillett comes out of it marginally better than Hicks, but only by virtue of coming across as bumbling and incompetent where Hicks is tenacious and malicious. Hicks is shown as continually undermining the club in private whilst putting on a down home, doin' mah best for the club image out in public. And in that process he alienates everyone involved with the club not related to him.

Elsewhere Brian Reade writes with a commendably fair attitude. Fans who do their best to oust the owners are obviously praised, but the book really shines when discussing the major figures in the dramas at Anfield. Reade admits to past antipathy with Moore, one that even got the mild mannered former chairman riled enough to yell at him across a packed room, but gives him a fair hearing for his aims and actions after selling the club, though rightfully skewers him for putting Liverpool way behind Manchester United in exploiting commercial opportunities at a crucial time and the lack of research done into Hicks in particular. Rick Parry, former chief executive and a man repeatedly criticised by the writer and fans alike in the past, is another who is given sympathy thanks to the almost impossible workload his post imposed upon him. It does give rise to the one positive point Reade has to make, the bringing in of Ian Ayre to exploit commercial opportunities for the club (which had already begun to pay dividends before the October 2010 court date which forced Hicks and Gillett out). Even Christian Purslow, a man reviled by a large number of fans for his part in undermining Rafa Benitez, bringing in the out of his depth successor Roy Hodgson and buying and selling players without consultation of the manager, isn't condemned outright but has his sins weighted against his role in removing the owners. And finally there's Benitez himself, presented neither as the angel operating against the owners not the incompetent fool of polarised debate on Liverpool messageboards. Instead he comes over a good manager with a weakness for club politics who became too embroiled in the club's dirty business to do his main job to the best of his ability, particularly when the squad was being thinned by Hicks and Gillett's need to bring money in to attempt to pay off their loans.

Really this book should be the account of a footballing tragedy, one of the great institutions of British sport being immolated in an attempt to bridge the gap money was bringing about in the Premier League. But it didn't quite work out like that, like all the best stories it ends with heroes victorious, the villains vanquished with all plans in ruins and the club looking to the future, going from the 19th place in a 20 team league and most embarrassing Anfield defeat in club history to sixth place, new owners making the sort of signings Hicks and Gillett were supposed to make and possibly the only man who could unite the club after all the in-fighting in the manager's chair. What it ends up as is a tale of people power, the tale of Spirit of Shankly . It proves the wisdom of Joe Hill's old song There Is A Power In A Union. And in the words of a more famous song now indelibly associated with Anfield that at the end of the storm, there's a golden sky.

I Had This Perfect Dream - Barca: A People's Passion by Jimmy Burns

I've been a Liverpool fan all my life; my mum's fault entirely. My father's side of the family are Villa fans, by rights I should probably have been one. But no, she chose a team and indoctrinated me. And I've been with them through thick and thin ever since. It's mostly been thick, certainly by most club's standards, and rarely been dull (well, maybe on the pitch at times...). I can't ever see anything sporting surpassing the love of Liverpool, something the media storm that's seemingly erupted after every Liverpool game this season's only confirmed. Still, there are clubs that hold a small place in my heart, family connections to Villa and Ipswich, local non-league heroes Newport County and, like so many round the world, Barcelona.

It's strange - I don't have a concrete or unique story as to why. They're one of the world's hugest clubs after all, a magnificent symbol of a proud region that's always set itself apart from the rest of Spain, particularly under the Franco regime. And although they're a massively rich club, they're not truffle-huntingly disgusting in their pursuit of money - it's drawn mainly from their members and until last season never had a sponsor's name sullying their shirt. And even when they took a name on their shirts it was the charity UNICEF. And they paid to have that name on there. Money lets you afford such gestures, but that's still pure class. They do things their own way, generally more attractively than their traditional desperately big spending rivals in all white. I even made a pilgrimage to the Camp Nou when I was on holiday in Calella in 1997, a suitably awe-inspiring experience to sit in an empty stadium and contemplate it, then take a trip round the club museum. Unfortunately Barca weren't at home whilst I was there, so I couldn't take in a game.

A People's Passion delays before recounting the history of the club, for the important reason of placing it in the context of what it means to the fans, the city and the Catalan region as a whole. This gives the book a flavour that simple dry history couldn't, and draws you into understanding the club and what makes it and those who follow it tick. It's engaging and arresting, and a cut above your usual club biography. That's not to say that the history itself is dull - far from it, it's a history of politics and passion, civil wars and coups, vaulting ambition and above all, a tradition of expressive, flowing football. It's particularly strong on Barca's modern era, ushered in by Johann Cruyff's playing spell and the infamous presidency of Josep Luis Nunez. Burns isn't afraid to cast a critical eye over any of those involved in the club, letting their actions speak for themselves whilst contrasting said actions with words. And those actions and words are exhaustively contextualised, to let the reader make up their minds. A story which involves the assassination of club presidents, suppression of supporters, Di Stefano, Cruyff, Maradona, Helenio Herrera, Cesar Menotti, Juan Antonio Samaranch and Terry Venables would take some cocking up, but enhanced as it is by the telling,

The danger about analysing a passion is that by exploring it thoroughly and understanding it you might kill it. That's not the case here, if anything Burns made my admiration of the club grow even more. It's just a shame that in eleven years this hasn't been updated at all, in many ways those years have been some of the most fascinating in a wonderful history. But then, given that flamboyant history you'd almost be wanting to update it every year.

From the Fields of Anfield Road - Compendium & The Dynasty Companion by Paul Tomkins

If you've got Tomkins' other books this one's inessential but if you're looking for an introduction to one of the smartest football writers around, particularly on the subject of Liverpool, then this is an excellent place to start. As the title might suggest it's a sort of greatest hits and doesn't quite hang together as his other, more focused, books do. As ever though, Tomkins near unique combination, which conveys his passion for his team and the game without clouding his more rational judgement, more than compensates. The final section might prove tough going for those without a head for statistics and I'm uncertain as to whether trying to mathematically prove who were the best and worst signings actually proves anything or tells us anything we didn't know already. Fascinating as ever but probably the least of his books so far, still miles ahead of most other football writers though.