Sincere Thanks to Bert Wright for the following book review:A Football Life.
Most soccer biographies are a complete waste of time. Superficial,sensationalised and self-serving they add more to the so-called superstars bank balance than they do to the store of knowledge of the beautiful game. Because it is the opposite of all these things, Johnny Giles' biography, A Football Man, is a book to savour, a frank and understated account of what it was like to be a professional footballer in the days before the tsunami of TV money washed in and began to erode the values embraced by Giles and his contemporaries.
Johnny Giles was and remains Ireland's greatest football man. As a player, national team manager and pundit, his work has been distinguished by a tough uncompromising honesty that has in recent years earned him the status of national treasure. But it wasn't always this way. Opponents who had their shins corrugated by Giles in his Leeds United heyday might have seen it differently and one of the interesting aspects of the book is Giles' anxiety to defend Revie's Leeds from the always partial complaint that they were a dirty team. Predictably,Giles pitches in his tuppence on David Peace's novel The Damned United which, he protests,played fast and loose with the facts. Still, wouldn't you loved to be a fly on the wall when Cloughie first confronted the Wild Bunch?
Giles was part of a generation of young post-war footballers who came up the hard way,learned their skills on the streets,left home as little more than children, and ended up living in digs in grimy Northern English towns. In the mornings they trained hard and cleaned the senior pros' boots. Because they were paid buttons,their leisure time rarely featured activities any more racy than coffee bars and snooker halls but you get the impression Giles accounts himself luckier than today's ego maniacal millionaires.
As RTE pundit Giles constant theme is commitment, hard work and honest endeavour;even if a player has limited talent,that's the very least a player owes his employers and his fans. As on TV, so in the book and fans will be fascinated by the exacting standards Giles sets for the "great players"; x qualifies but y doesn't because he squandered his talent. He is equally frank in his assessment of icons of the game such as Busby and Shankly who, though great men in their achievements,were far from flawless(Busby was tight with money and Shankly regarded player injuries as a form of betrayal).
Football has been good to Johnny Giles and his gratitude for enjoying the enormous stroke of good fortune his talent bestowed on him is written in every page of this terrific sports-read.
ENJOY
Bert Wright
Curator Mountains to Sea
Curator Irish Book Awards
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