It's All Rover Now!

Considering that I have been an avid football watcher since the age of ten and an avid reader for even longer, it is remarkable how few books about the game that I have read. Of those I have, very few stand up to much scrutiny. There is The Glory Game by Hunter Davies of course, which was groundbreaking in its depiction of Tottenham Hotspur in 1972. Davies was allowed unprecedented access to the players and staff and to show how times have changed, incurred the wrath of then manager Bill Nicholson by revealing the ages of the Spurs players. With the intense scrutiny of footballers today it is quaint that such an apparently trivial matter should have caused any grief, but it did. The Glory Game remains probably the finest book written about football.

Quite possibly the best book ever written about the game.

The Miracle Of Castel Di Sangro by American journalist Joe McGinniss is another classic, following as it does the trials and tribulations of small town Italian side Castel di Sangro, who improbably reached Serie B, the second tier of Italian football. It is certainly a world apart from the well trodden path to the stadia and histories of the Manchester United's and Barcelona's of this world.

Photo: Dario Riccio

Footballer's autobiographies are, by and large, fairly anodyne, bland offerings documenting the player's rise to fame and fortune and concluding with him selecting his World XI. Eamon Dunphy's Only A Game? is an exception. Perhaps the antidote to football biographies, Brian Glanville described it as "The best and most authentic memoir by a professional footballer."

Recently, however I have made an exception and read a footballer's autobiography, because while every generation spawns its own footballing hero, from Matthews and Finney to Charlton and Moore, there is one player who spans several generations, a man who scored 481 goals in a career that covered nearly four decades. This man won ten league titles, lifted the FA Cup no less than eleven times and won the European Cup on three occasions. He was kidnapped nine times,  survived an assassination  attempt by a disgruntled soap opera star and his career was only ended by a helicopter crash. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I give you Roy Race. The life and career of Roy Race, born 21st October 1938 and now living in Upper Cobdon near Melchester, has been documented in his autobiography, Roy: My Life. The Official Autobiography of Roy Of The Rovers, and what a truly remarkable book it is too!

Prior to reading this book I was no expert on Roy Race's career  but a little investigation  reveals  one or two inconsistencies in Roy's account of his life in the game. The number of times Roy led his Melchester team to FA Cup glory varies between eleven and eight, and the number of kidnappings he endured swings from nine to five. The Mel Park earthquake, according to Roy's book, occurred in 1965 while other sources  place it in the 1988-89 season.  Mel Park supposedly had a capacity of some 56,000 yet in describing a friendly against Austrian side Flaudermitz, Roy confidently asserts that the crowd was 213,455 and this with the West Stand out of action following a fire.

Roy Race in typical action

Perhaps this is the effect of having such an eventful career, with several similar events inevitably blurring into one, together with the passage of time. Some of Roy's early family life is marked by naivety and a complete lack of self awareness in his observations. For instance his father's war service was apparently cut short by the same groin strain that curtailed his career in football. Roy's father eloped in 1967 with Bethany, the eldest daughter of the Race's next door neighbour, Mr Sexton who subsequently took it upon himself to keep Roy's mum company.  Roy seems  to have accepted these events without question, as he did Mr Sexton's apparent fascination with young Roy's bath times.

Another groin strain, this time suffered by Roy himself, was to keep him out of the 1970 World Cup squad. In fact for a player of such repute, his international career was patchy, being disrupted by a number of seemingly minor injuries including an ingrown toenail and a sprained wrist.

Nonetheless Roy Race is one of the few players for whom a phenomenon has been named; "It's Roy of The Rovers stuff!" is something commentators have been bellowing into microphones for decades, usually to describe a last minute winner achieved in a thrilling comeback. Indeed, for a team as apparently all conquering as Melchester Rovers it is remarkable how many time Roy had to come up with a last minute winner, after which the referee didn't  even have time to restart play, without which the Mel Park boys would have been heading for defeat.

With all of the controversy surrounding FIFA's decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar it is unsurprising that Roy was at the centre of a similar experience with the oil rich Middle Eastern state of Basran. He was offered a job coaching the national team by Sheikh Ibn Hassan, who harboured a dream of his country hosting the tournament. When Roy expressed concern over the 40 degree heat encountered in Basran during the summer, the Sheikh countered that air conditioned stadiums would resolve the problem. As the Sheikh said, "With money, anything is possible." Of course it was in Basran that eight of Roy's Melchester team mates were killed in a car bombing, just one of a number of tragedies that attended the life of the great man, including the death of his wife Penny in a car crash and the helicopter accident that cost him his famous left foot and prematurely ended his glorious career.

Of the Rovers other famous players I was startled to learn that Tubby Morton, who I had always considered to be a goalkeeper, was in fact a centre-half when Roy made his Rovers debut. Tubby's spiralling weight (at one time he tipped the scales at 34 stone) meant that he lost a yard or two of pace, but Roy spotted that his bulk could be turned into an asset and at his suggestion Tubby became Rovers regular goalie in place of Len Dolland who was appeased by his demotion thanks to Roy's brainwave of putting him in charge of the team's Tuesday evening bingo sessions.

Roy's depiction of his  relationship with his best friend and team mate Blackie Grey has been criticised by some reviewers and certainly Roy's depiction of his boyhood chum is of a gifted player but not an especially bright fellow perpetually in the shadow of the great Roy Race. The fact that Grey is now in a nursing home and has relatively few lucid moments probably means that his version of events will never be known, which is a pity.

In fairness I can't describe Roy: My Life as a great book, the somewhat one dimensional characterisation and internal inconsistencies see to that, but if nothing else I did learn that apart from being the genius on the pitch that he undoubtedly was, he was an accomplished plumber and plasterer and I don't ever recall that being mentioned before!