Never Stop: How Ange Postecoglou Brought the Fire Back to Celtic by Hamish Carton (Pitch Publishing 2023)

 

Unsurprisingly, the most infamous case of sheer Postecoglou ignorance was found on talkSPORT. The radio station specialises in bold ill-informed claims that tempt listeners into phoning up or sharing their clips on social media. In the days after Postecoglou’s name was first mentioned, a clip showed footballer turned broadcaster Alan Brazil mocking his credentials. At the time, there had been reports of the Aussie not having the required licence to manage in Europe.

Is this a wind-up? Breaking news from Scotland as Celtic have applied for an exemption with UEFA for Yokohama Marinos boss Postacoogloo [sic] to manage in Europe. He does not hold the required UEFA Pro Licence. Oh, this has got to be a wind-up. Dear oh dear. He’ll be a great manager. Where do they come up with these guys from?

(talkSPORT)

The former Scotland international had played against Postecoglou’s South Melbourne years earlier, not that he’d be likely to recall. As with virtually everyone in this chapter, he was found apologising at some stage over the following 12 months. A similar story of reprieve occurred with another former footballer who enjoyed his heyday in the 1980s – Charlie Nicholas:

There’s nothing wrong with having a plan B – but this is not plan B. This is desperation. I will give Postecoglou a chance because I’m a supporter but is the former Australia boss really the height of the club’s ambitions? It has nothing to do with his lack of knowledge of the Scottish game or me looking down on football in the southern hemisphere. It scares me just how unambitious the club has become, going from a position of strength to where they find themselves now. Luring Postecoglou from Yokohama F. Marinos is not quite the same as when Arsène Wenger left Japanese football to join Arsenal in 1996.

(Daily Express)

Nicholas was at it again in late September. Celtic had just been held to a 1-1 draw at home by Dundee United and had three league wins from seven matches. The knives were out for Postecoglou, with many reaching some wild conclusions:

Ange Postecoglou looks to me to be the new Ronny Deila. I am not sure Postecoglou has realised how big Celtic really are before he came in. I believe he has missed a pitch. I think Ange thought he would just come in here, and his playing style would get him over the line, no problem. But it is not about style. It is about winning.

(Daily Express)

Nicholas and Postecoglou would meet by chance in Glasgow months later. By that stage the Aussie had won the former Celtic striker over. Just as well:

We had a wee five-minute conversation where I thanked him for the job he is doing and what he is building at Celtic.

(Daily Express)

Fierce Genius: Cruyff’s Year at Feyenoord by Andy Bollen (Pitch Publishing 2021))

 

Cruyff was a product of his time. Sophisticated, controversial, stylish, opinionated, he embodied each decade, from flower power to revolution, to glam rock, to social unrest, to punk, to new wave, then even more social struggle and revolution. Here was someone who had not only played but starred, over three decades, at the highest level. He was like the Beatles and the Stones, the Sex Pistols and the Clash, the Human League and Joy Division and had transcended every aspect of culture in its broadest manifestation; art, film, theatre. From peace and love to post-industrial landscapes, glam rock to punk, to the 1980s of miners’ strikes and football hooliganism. But always there, always playing, always instigating, always smiling and always complaining, he remained one step ahead. By the time you’d thought it, he’d done it. Now, here he was, in front of me. In the flesh.

1982 Brazil: The Glorious Failure by Stuart Horsfield (Pitch Publishing 2020))

 

So, imagine you are looking down on a large patch of grass, roughly equivalent to the size of eight football pitches. Along the top of the square is a boundary made up of a variety of garden fences, of which number 158 sat approximately two-thirds along to the right. Top-right corner was the St George’s main building and a small, fenced-off playground. The bottom-left corner was occupied by Overdale County Primary School with three additional prefabricated classrooms. The playground sat in the centre of a two-storey U-shaped building and extended out from the school straight up towards the houses. The entire left-hand side of the square was a similar collection of back garden fences which belonged to Hawthorn Avenue (part of that epic sprint home). The rest was pure grass; an emerald canvas upon which I spent more time growing up than I ever did inside the four walls of number 158. To us it was just the back field.

I have two more final landmarks to note before we leave this overhead scene. There were three football pitches marked out on the remaining grass. Two of them were adjacent to each other and ran from top to bottom of the square. One belonged to St George’s and one belonged to Overdale. The final pitch was at the bottom of the square, running from left to right, into the bottom-right corner. The pitch that belonged to St George’s was about 20 yards from our back garden fence. If you stepped out of the back door, you put your foot on the drive. Turn left and walk straight into the back garden, past the shed, over the fence, which was the original wood and wire structure that was put up with the house. Climb over it and there you were in what seemed like acres of grass and between the white wooden goalposts.

The goalposts were essentially three long planks, nailed together and cemented into the ground. No nets, but those three white pieces of wood afforded me more joy, exhilaration, fun, memories and friendships than any other place on Earth. It is worth noting here that in my mind I would have put a football through those white sticks tens of thousands of times over the years, playing under the assumed identity of whichever player had crossed my conscous at the time. Kevin Keegan scored a few, Kenny Dalglish was prolific for a short period of time, as was Glenn Hoddle. I would even go so far as to say Paul Mariner got a couple. I can say for certain that Zico scored an awful lot of goals in the early-to-mid-1980s on the back field.

Darts Greatest Games: Fifty Finest Matches from the World of Darts by Matt Bozeat (Pitch Publishing 2017)

 

Sid Waddell told the armchair enthusiasts that Deller was “not just an underdog, he’s an underpuppy” and asked: “Can Deller do the unthinkable and beat Bristow in the world final?”

For Deller, who threw spring-loaded darts designed to avoid bounce-outs, reaching the final, a fine achievement for a qualifier, wasn’t enough.

He was there to win the World Championship and predicted a 6-3 victory.

He blew six darts at a double to make it happen…

Earlier, the match had swung this way – Deller led 3-1 – then the other – Bristow levelled at 3-3 – then back again.

Deller won the seventh and eighth sets, taking him into a 5-3 lead and just one set away from the World Championship.

In the ninth set, Deller was 64 points away, then 18, then eight, then four…

Six darts at a match-winning double were missed and Deller spent the next two sets “shaking my head. I should have been world champion.”

Ever the opportunist, Bristow showed why commentator Dave Lanning described him as “a burglar” on the oche.

In his youth, Bristow had burgled houses and the North London ne’er-do-well-turned-king-of-darts brought his street cunning to darts. Knowing Deller was vulnerable, his mind elsewhere, Bristow smoothly upped his average by a few points and plundered five legs without reply while Deller chewed over those missed match-winning chances.

When he claimed the opening leg of the 11th and deciding set, Bristow led for the first time in the match and that realisation, the possibility of defeat, snapped Deller out of his ruminations. Either he started throwing his best darts again or he would lose – and he hadn’t come here to lose.

The spell broken, he rediscovered his fluency to break back immediately with a 121 checkout, then hold his throw to leave Bristow needing to do the same to save the match.

Bristow got to a finish first in that fourth leg.

He took aim at 121 with Deller also on a three-dart finish, 138.

Bristow threw 17, then treble 18 and with 50 left, everyone zoomed in on the bull’s-eye. Everyone apart from Bristow, that is. Rather than go for the bull’s-eye to win the leg, Bristow was so sure Deller wouldn’t take out 138 for the match, he threw 18 to leave his favourite double 16.

This wasn’t hubris. Bristow had thought it all through. He reckoned Deller’s mental mastication – “He could have beaten me earlier, he had his chance” – and the awkwardness of the 138 finish – “it was all over the place” – guaranteed he would come back to the oche and have three darts at his favourite double.

Years later, he would think otherwise, saying the pressure would have been greater on Deller had he been faced with a smaller finish. “If he had 58 left he would have been standing behind me thinking: ‘I’ve got two more darts for the title,’” he said, but still, nobody, not just Bristow, really expected Deller to take out 138.

“He’s banking on Deller not doing this!” cried Waddell excitedly and when Deller’s first dart landed in treble 20, there was a chance Bristow had got it wrong.

Deller had taken out big finishes in the earlier rounds of the championship and knew what he was doing. “I didn’t stop,” he said. “There was no way I was going to think about it.”

Had he thought about the importance of the darts he was throwing, his arm would surely have twitched, so Deller ignored the crowd’s growing excitement when he nailed treble 18 and coolly switched across the board to fire his final dart into double 12.

“I have never seen anything like it in my life,” said Waddell while Deller shook his fists above his head in sheer joy.

“It was perhaps the next best thing that could happen to me,” Deller would tell Darts World, “… next to playing for Ipswich Town.”

A Tournament Frozen in Time: The Wonderful Randomness of the European Cup Winners Cup by Steven Scragg (Pitch Publishing 2019)

 

Dinamo Tbilisi will mean nothing to an entire generation of football watchers, yet to my generation they will elicit an enigmatic smile and maybe even a moistening of the eye. It might sound strange to the uninitiated, but you’d be amazed just how many British football supporters go misty-eyed with joy at the memory of seeing their team of choice being knocked out of European competition by what would colloquially be referred to as a ‘crack eastern European outfit’.

Of those great unknown sides to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain, Dinamo Tbilisi were one of the most clinical and unremitting. Fast and precise, they hit you on the break and they hit you hard. For those who saw them, they were unforgettable.

In the quarter-finals, at the beginning of March 1981, West Ham United were systematically dismantled by Dinamo Tbilisi at Upton Park.

Slicing straight through the West Ham midfield and defence time and time again, they enabled Aleksandre Chivadze, Vladimir Gutsaev and Ramaz Shengelia to score goals that were as beautiful as they were devastating. Ray Stewart, the West Ham right-back and penalty-taker extraordinaire was particularly tormented by the Dinamo Tbilisi offensive. He was caught in precarious possession of the ball for the second goal, when ludicrously left to man the West Ham defence all on his own.

What made the situation so ludicrous was that Stewart’s team-mates had piled forward, as if chasing a last-minute equaliser, when instead, the first leg of the game was only 31 minutes old. Everything was still to play for. 

West Ham had fallen a goal behind a mere seven minutes earlier and even by the standards of March 1981 this was an admirably gung-ho approach from John Lyall and his players.

One botched corner, a lofted Dinamo Tbilisi clearance, an ill-advised header from Stewart and a flash of the white-shirted Gutsaev later, and the ball was once again in the back of Phil Parkes’s net. It was as shocking as it was swift.

Out of the Shadows: The Story of the 1982 England World Cup Team by Gary Jordan (Pitch Publishing 2017)

A few short minutes later, Keegan’s moment came. Mariner moved the ball quickly inside the box, Robson was forced a little wide on the left but a clever touch gave him space and, when he looked up, he couldn’t believe his luck. There was Keegan unmarked, ten yards out and racing towards goal. Robson chipped a perfectly weighted ball that was right into the substitute’s path. Keegan was eight yards from goal. Arconada had misjudged Robson’s cross and was in no man’s land. Keegan had to score. He didn’t. Maybe he tried to be too precise and direct the ball with his head rather than just run through and power it in. Whatever the reason, the ball skewed off his head and went a yard or so wide of the gaping, empty net. Sinking to his knees, his face contorted in the pain his miss caused. Mariner was the first to him and tried to half console him/half get him up off the ground. Keegan shrugged the attention away.