Please tell me you won’t even consider buying any of them. Can I convince you of what a waste of money they are? I will be honest, I haven’t read one of them, but in my defence (get it) I will enlist the help of people who have partially squirmed through them… the journalists who review them.
Normally it makes my blood boil that even the crappiest book gets a full page review in all the top dailies if it is written by one of our so called superstars. We’ve already seen the half dozen Beckham offerings, a while ago there was McManaman’s tome and Fowler’s. But recently I have actually been pleased to see them reviewed… and slated.
Let me quote from Rod Liddle in the Times who looked at the first five I mentioned. “Football literature” is an oxymoron he begins with. Clearly he hasn’t read one of mine, but we’ll forgive him for that. Rod summarises the latest crop.
“There are the excruciating ghost-written autobiographies of famous players, wherein some poor hack has been forced to wring some semblance of sentience from a ponced-up 21 year old with a block of concrete between the ears and a bunch of dangerous driving convictions, for 200 pages or so. And then there are the vainglorious reminiscences from pensioned-off, thick as mince terrace thugs for whom maiming someone on the way back from Bristol in 1982 was the highlight of their dismal existence. Thought of any kind, almost never intrudes into your average football book; still less wit and insight. That’s the way it has always been give or take the odd exception...
…so we are used to rubbish and perhaps should not complain too much. But still faced with the revelation that Rio Ferdinand has “written” a book, we must still, surely, baulk. Now I must admit I haven’t read his book. If I’m absolutely honest, I’d rather read my own death certificate…
… It seems to me that (these books) may actually act like a sort of literary black hole and suck out from the reader’s brain any last vestiges of intellect and even motor capacity, thus requiring the unlucky reader to lead the rest of his life as a drooling vegetable.”
Perhaps Rod Liddle is a bit too sympathetic towards the “poor hacks” who are “forced to wring a semblance of sentience” from these drivel laden pages. Nobody forces these journalists to accept the sums they earn from ghosting these books. Take my hero Hunter Davies… and he really is my hero. He was the first big writer to encourage me with the copyright permission he gave me to use one of this chapters in No Nay Never. I still have his postcard hand written in spidery writing pinned up above my desk. So Hunter is OK. But… it was Hunter who ghost-did Rooney’s book, and was more than handsomely paid. I’ll ‘ave some o’ that I thought when I read of the sum he had been paid, and is contracted to write FOUR more. Hunter also did Gazza’s tortured books but I loved the quote he gave when he explained that he wrote Rooney’s book in such a way that it would reflect Rooney’s lack of education and articulacy. He meant it in a kindly way, in no way was he being critical of Rooney, just saying that if he had written sentences coming out of Wayne’s mouth that resembled Shakespeare, “but stop awhile, methinks I woth thorely wronged by the man without father in the garments the colour of the night,” the game would have been up, so to speak. Doesn’t our hero write about his gambling habits; “I wasn’t putting on huge amounts, just a thousand now and again?” I read that line over and over again and laughed myself off the chair… or was it cried myself to sleep… no that’s Ashley Cole’s ghastly book.
John Aizlewood sums up Ferdinand’s book: “The moving tale of a duck-faced urchin who rose from the mean streets of Peckham to the leafy Cheshire suburbs, all the while retaining his innate decency, despite the odd sex scandal, the missed drugs test (hey who hasn’t forgotten to take a mandatory drugs test?) and those oh-so-tragic lapses of concentration. Literary merit: considerable… for those with reading difficulties.”
His summary of literary merit echoes that of the chap in the Telegraph who dismissed its value in a sentence, but did add that it had some excellent coloured pictures.
And thus we move to the publishing sensation of the decade, the Ashley Cole blockbuster. Aizlewood sums it up: “The moving story of a young multi-millionaire full-back who is treated with such contempt by his evil, unscrupulous, tightwad employers that they offer this brave soldier only £55k a week instead of the £60k he so obviously deserves…”
John Aizlewood is by the way the chap who wrote the excellent account of the end of season Burney v Plymouth game that you can find in No Nay Never.
I loved Des Kelly in the Daily Mail writing about Cole. The page features that never-to-be-forgotten “Hello” (sorry I think it was OK, but who the hell can tell the difference) style picture of Ash the cash and wife Cheryl dressed all in dazzling white, the pair of them, with Ash the flash draped in bling, frilly white shirt, just one button fastened, revealing a lot of navel at the lower end and a lot of chest at the top. “Like a Bacofoil turkey,” said Kelly. “Like a prat,” said Mrs T. It looks like they are both leaning against a flash convertible as well. Got to say though, Cheryl is quite fetching. Ash the dash was of course the lucky winner of David Beckham’s sooper-dooper, soup-bowl sized watch in the big auction at the Beckham annual charity gala do at Beckingham Palace. You must have seen it; it was on Sky… unmissable. Posh does a pretty good intimate candlelight supper for 500.
Anyway Des Kelly lets rip: “The title of the book is My Defence but if one thing is rendered patently clear throughout every snivelling word of this extraordinarily ill-advised work, it is that Ashley Cole doesn’t have one.”
“The book is peppered with so many inane sentences, so many passages of lame justification and downright awful moments of brattish, misplaced egotism that I could fill the entire sports section dismantling it. Please, I urge you not to buy this book. Do not part with your cash labouring under the misconception that it is full of ‘controversy’. It is not. It is full of carping nonsense. If you shun it in droves, as you have with the first instalment of Wayne Rooney’s dross, and Lampard’s Totally Frank, then there is a chance that publishers will soon abandon their obsession with fast-buck football books and spare some valuable trees.”
Patrick Collins in the Mail on Sunday did not spare the rod. “He (Cole) earned the derisive contempt of half the nation… contempt provoked by the memoir in which our Ashley confirmed the popular impression of Premiership footballers as arrogant, stupid, grasping, petulant, paranoid and self-serving.”
The bottom line of all this criticism; what sticks in the craw, whether it is yours, mine, or any journalist’s, is Cole’s assertion that Arsenal were so mean in denying him the extra £5k to make his wage £60k a week, and that their failure to do so was an insult. “My love for Arsenal was soured by what I see as neglect and resentment.” Have you ever read or heard such garbage? It’s us who are insulted. We all struggle to survive on £55k a week don’t we? Well I bloody do, it’s a pain I can tell you.
So folks, wotcha gonna do? Tell you what. Help out a poor struggling northern writer and if you are Christmas book shopping get a copy of Willie Irvine Together Again or Harry Potts Margaret’s Story.
And, do me a favour. E mail Des Kelly at
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and demand that he does a big review of either of these books. Tell him they are real stories, of real people, people who achieved something and who made real contributions in an age when there was no big money in football, when they played on mud bath pitches and came off the field battered black and blue. Tell him it’s time books were featured in reviews that look at an age gone by and when players like the appalling Cole would have been booted into Row Z by the likes of John Angus and Gordon Harris, and players like Rooney were ten a penny. We had them at Burnley and sold them all… McIlroy, Thomas, Coates, Morgan, James et al. What would Harry Potts have made of the likes of Ferdinand, Fowler, Collymore (didn’t he write a book as well).
