Saturday, 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football

The international break sees many Premier League fans taking the chance to watch some real football. A literary accompaniment to your grass roots game might come from Saturday, 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football by Daniel Gray. It’s a great read and what Gray gets over is that for all the crass commercialisation of modern football, there are still many pleasures that remain eternal.

His list of fifty football delights include the pleasures of seeing floodlights illuminating a ground in a strange town on a winter’s night, of talking to an old man about football and watching his eyes glaze over as he becomes young again remembering some icon of the 1950s, and of striking up a football conversation at some cousin’s ill-timed wedding.

Gray relishes the quirky side of football, seeing a ground from the train; how hitting the bar seems to bring so much promise to a performance; how crowds love to jeer a pass that goes straight out of play; stubby physiotherapists racing each other on to the pitch to treat their injured stars after a crunching block tackle; seeing a team bus on the motorway and listening to the results in the car. Gray muses about the characters that inhabit catering vans and watching disparate fans gather at a junction station where hope and dread mingle.

He particularly enjoys scorelines in brackets. If a side has scored 7 (seven) it elicits a strange sympathy for the humiliated opposition: “We enjoy the horror, but we also try to put ourselves in the shoes of the bracketed supporters. Are they pig-sick distraught or giddy at the gallows? Throwing scarves in service station bins or sinking delirious pints somewhere warm? Convinced of relegation, or starting to imagine a tight back-to-basics one-nil win next Saturday?”

Daniel Gray can wheel away in triumph, to use one of his favourite bits of footballese. Saturday, 3pm is a beautifully-written book and a worthy addition to your pre-match routine.

Should we have a transfer window for managers?

Aitor Karanka's sacking by by Middlesbrough proves that with ten games to go, just about any club in Premier Lague trouble will now sack their boss in a desperate and the hope ofsome kind of 'new manager bounce'. Even Claudio Ranieri wasn't isolated from the tin-tack. Which just indicates what a dysfunctional industry football is. 

There's a case for having a transfer window (or sacking window?)  for managers. If gaffers could only be sacked in the summer or in January that would surely be better for the long-term future of the game, Under my system they would be allowed to resign at any time they wanted, but that would be a matter for the manager to judge. If the players and fans knew they were stuck with the same boss for the rest of the season then they would have to get behind the man or woman in the dugout.

SACKED IN THE MORNING 
In their book Why England Lose & Other Curious Football Phenomenon Explained (later re-published as Soccernomics) authors Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski look at the panic-driven nature of most managerial appointments. "The new manager is hired in a mad rush," they write. He is interviewed cursorily and is often under-qualified and appointed because he is available and has achieved good results in the recent past. Above all, "He is chosen not for his managerial skills but because his name, appearance and skills at public relations are expected to impress the club's fans, players and media."

YOU'RE NOT SPECIAL ANYMORE
Craig Shakespeare has certainly done well in his first three games as Leicester's manager. He's been appointed for the rest of the season, but it's fair to say the Leicester board have stumbled on a solution rather than having a considered process for Ranieri's succession. Middlesbrough have opted for a similar stop-gap solution, appointing assistant Steve Agnew as caretaker manager.

Sacking a manager late in the season fails just as often as it succeeds. Leicester and Boro have sacked the managers who won the Premier League (Ranieri) and promotion (Karanka) in the previous season, in favour of caretakers who are untried at both management and working the transfer market. There has to be a better way to run an industry. 

Above Head Height scores with tales of faded replica shirts and ten-yard piledrivers

For those of us who have spent much of our lives playing five-a-side while pretending to be our childhood heroes, there’s much to enjoy in Above Head Height, James Brown’s memoir of the not-so beautiful game.

The former Loaded and GQ editor neatly captures the world of smelly socks, bags behind goals, people who run like cartoon characters and middle-aged men in faded replica shirts scrambling over fences and up netting to retrieve lost balls. Brown realises that he’s spent 30-odd years playing five-a-side with men whom he knows very little about beyond their on-pitch personas. It’s a world of characters called Old Geoff, Big Ben, Little John, Sunderland Graham, Charlton Dave and Derby Dave’s brother Andy.

The book contains the odd celebrity anecdote but not too many, such as playing football with the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones in California. There’s a personal story too — the game has certainly helped James following the excesses of the 1990s and he’s now given up alcohol and drugs, instead relying on a fix of tarmac, AstroTurf and wooden gym floors at his Spitalfields of glory.

A lot of this stuff seems familiar; the realisation of a middle-aged man that he’s now got an upturned wok stuffed down his jumper, the desperate attempts to play through injury and his pride at playing with his son. He’s also very good on the seemingly endless street games of childhood headers and volleys while growing up in Leeds and the unsung characters who organise games for decades, keeping payment records and tattered books of phone numbers while always trying to get the numbers even.

Above Head Height should appeal to anyone who's gone home on the tube in a football kit. It’s a book that celebrates the joy of socks and scores after a one-two off the boards. Click on the link for details.