By Myles Palmer
Robert Pires Footballeur (Yellow Jersey Press, £12)
Tom Bower Broken Dreams ; Vanity , Greed and the Souring of British Football (Simon & Schuster £17.99)
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THE PIRES paperback is a bit like the player : slim, fluent,likable and expensive. It’s only 176 pages .
Some good stuff about playing for Saint-Ann; for Reims, his hometown; the skills he learned in the Metz academy ; his uncle Jose Fernandez, a talented footballer who didn’t work on his game ; his Spanish mum, who was always on his case.
Robert was well chuffed at 17 to show mum his first pay slip for £70. He is still very close to mum, who expects him to phone her before every game. So he does.Otherwise she frets.
He had a turbulent, worrying time at Marseilles, a troubled club, so he adores the serenity at the Arsenal training ground. At Highbury, he says, “I’ve never heard us booed.”
Robert says Arsene works on each player’s strengths, not his weaknesses. Robert says, “For example, Thierry Henry works a lot on his pace and I’ll concentrate on my ball skills.”
A couple of years ago I misunderstood one of Arsene’s comments when he said, “I tried to sign him when he was at Metz.”
Pires played for Metz for six years and I thought the manager meant that he tried to sign him from Metz to Arsenal.
Pires says here that he had an offer to go to Monaco but didn’t join them because they had a left winger, Thierry Henry, that he wasn’t sure he could displace.Then he came to Arsenal where the manager found a way of playing them both.
The Tom Bower book is a compendium of bung stories which have mostly been published elsewhere.
I was urged to get it by a friend who said I must read about what Ken Bates did in the British Virgin Islands and in Dublin with the Irish Trust Bank.
Well, it’s nice to have so many bungs all together in one book. Bower is an indefatigable collector of key facts, but not a prose stylist. And he makes his points clearly about Bates, Venables, Ashby, Sugar, Graham, Rune Hauge,Clough, Redknapp and Dennis Roach.
He starts Chapter 2 : “Lying is common among the football fraternity and Terry Venables was a flawless practitioner of the art.”
I had read 40 pages before finding out something I didn’t know: Hoddle’s father played with Dennis Roach at Barnet.
The line is a bit imprecise, but he seems to say that Hoddle senior and Roach played for Barnet at the same time.
There are some good lines. One from Jim Smith is, “Roach wanted £250,000 for sending a fax.”
I had almost forgotten about the bung to Cloughie which secured Teddy Sheringham. McLintock and Teddy met Clough’s assistant Ronnie Fenton in a motorway hotel near Luton and gave him £58,750.
Somebody at Spurs forgot that you don’t pay VAT on a bung. There something very English-incompetent about trying to make a secret, illegal cash payment that includes VAT. It was a bung. It was a secret, illegal cash payment.
You don’t pay VAT on a bung. I should have thought that was obvious to anyone. It makes me smile even now.
On Arsenal, Bower does shed some light on what happened when the club failed to sign Jerzy Dudek and signed Richard Wright instead.
My favourite line in the book comes on Page 299 when Bower says, “Venables’s appearance as the expert on British television reflected the football community’s usual nonchalance towards dishonesty.”
But I know all this stuff and am bored with it now. When I saw the first Panorama on Venables I was delighted. They had interviewed people I had talked to three or four months previously. I thought, “Marvellous! Tel will never work again in England.”
How wrong I was. Many journalists admire rogues, I knew that, but I still thought Tel was finished.
One thing nobody has picked up on : Bower quotes 23 times from an unpublished book by Eddie Ashby called Bungs,Bribes and Sweet FA (Blake Publishing Ltd). So Bower has a copy of the book that Ashby wrote after he went to prison and split with Tel.
Clearly, readers new to this material will read these pages with dismay, shock and disgust.
Unfortunately, the game has always attracted villains and it will never be cleaned up because it does not want be cleaned up. And because, as Bower makes clear, Tony Blair lacks the bottle to put in a regulator.
Bower has written investigative books on Richard Branson, Al-Fayed, Robert Maxwell and Geoffrey Robinson. He obviously loathes crooks, thieves and con-men.
So do I. So, I hope, do you.
2nd March 2003.