Through Gritted Teeth #36: Craig Bellamy

by Ian King

The scene was Molineux, Wolverhampton, on the 5th of January 2003. The Third Round of the FA Cup was reaching its conclusion, and the television cameras were focussing their unyielding gaze upon the match between Wolverhampton Wanderers and Newcastle United. It was a match that was ripe for an upset of some description. The atmosphere at Molineux – even though, with its open corners and one stand twenty or so yards from the pitch, it is hardly designed for it – can be fearsome for such matches. At the time, it had been getting close to twenty years since Wolves had last played in the top division of English football and every match against higher opposition was an opportunity for the club to prove its credentials, having spent much of the previous decade labouring under the “sleeping giant” label applied to it by the press after Jack Hayward, the “Golden Tit”, first pointed his udders in the direction of a place in the Premier League.

Through Gritted Teeth #20: Roy Keane

by Alex Hess

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset: I hated Roy Keane while he was a player. Hated him. He was a genuinely detestable human being. He was the snarling, fouling, talismanic captain of the club I despised, and perfectly encapsulated all the reasons I loathed them: the relentless, ludicrous dedication to winning, the play-by-my-own-rules attitude, the scorn and disdain for anything and everything non-United. He relentlessly abused referees, he deliberately injured opponents. And yet, in retrospect, I can’t help but respect him. Even worse — as sacrilegious as it may be for a Liverpool fan — I find myself quite admiring Keane The Player. Of course, it’s far easier to take up such a position a good few years after his retirement, with sufficient time elapsed for my traumatic childhood memories of United’s Keane-driven treble-winning side to have somewhat faded, but there nonetheless exists in my mind a genuine, grudging, approval for his efforts in United red.

The Football Men, by Simon Kuper

This isn’t really a book about football. Football is all around it, providing means, motive and opportunity, but this is a book about a group of very strange people. It is an investigation undertaken with a lot of affection, a dose of hostility, and above all an incessant curiosity into their strangeness. What makes them men apart?

With one notable exception, about which more later, the book comprises short profiles — sketches, really, some more detailed than others — of forty-five footballers, fourteen managers, and six other “football men”, one of whom barely qualifies as such. None exceeds ten pages; the shortest barely fill three. Some come from one-to-one interviews, others from press conferences, others are simply descriptions conjured from Kuper’s contacts, knowledge, and critical eye. They were written across thirteen years, from September 1997 to October 2010, and have mostly appeared, in one form or another, in the Financial Times or other organs, though a few have been written specifically with the book in mind.

Who by brave assent

Bravery is one of the great intangibles of football. It is a quality demanded by fans and craved by managers; it oozes from some players, it is gapingly and shockingly absent from others. You know it when you see it, and you feel it when you don’t. It has been held up as the quality that separates the good from the great; the inspirational from the inconsequential; and, if you’ll forgive a brief lapse into lumpen cliché, the men from the boys.

Rooney’s broom

What is a football club?

Let’s first adopt a strictly material attitude and suggest that a football club is the sum of all its parts: players, staff, stadia, training facilities, badge, whatever. So Manchester United is Sir Alex Ferguson plus Wayne Rooney plus Ryan Giggs plus Paul Scholes … plus red shirts, white knickerbockers, and an eye-watering soul-sapping maelstrom of debt. Or, in abstract terms, any football club F consists of p1, p2, p3 … pn, where p is a component part of F and n is the total number of distinct component parts. Such a solution is satisfying in one regard, in that it makes a certain intuitive sense to suggest that a thing is made up of its make-up. It has a coldly ontological appeal. And it can apply just as simply to the more abstract concepts we often ascribe to a football club as well; the character of a club is just the interplay of the characters of all those component parts.