Simon Hughes - On the Brink: A Journey Through English Footballs North West

ON THE BRINK

A JOURNEY THROUGH ENGLISH
FOOTBALLS NORTH WEST

SIMON HUGHES

EXCLUSIVE PHOTOGRAPHY:
ALEX BAILLIE

ON THE BRINK

A JOURNEY THROUGH ENGLISH
FOOTBALLS NORTH WEST

SIMON HUGHES

EXCLUSIVE PHOTOGRAPHY:
ALEX BAILLIE

First published as a hardback by deCoubertin Books Ltd in 2017.

First edition.

deCoubertin Books, Studio I, Baltic Creative Campus, Liverpool, L1 OAH.
www.decoubertin.co.uk

eISBN: 978-1909245600

Copyright Simon Hughes, 2017.

The right of Simon Hughes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be left liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design and typeset by Leslie Priestley.
Photography: Alex Baillie.
Cover image: Offside/Simon Stacpoole.
Endpapers: Phil Galloway

Printed and bound by Jellyfish.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by the way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the authors prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for photographs used in this book. If we have overlooked you in any way, please get in touch so that we can rectify this in future editions.

In memory of Richard Bunt

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

INTRODUCTION

WHAT HAVE THEY SAID, THEN? COMES THE QUESTION FROM THE desk each Saturday evening around five-thirty just after the managers have filtered out of the football ground press room having either probably, a) delivered anodyne observation if a result was a positive one, appreciating their words are scrutinised so inexorably it is sensible to avoid dishing out superlatives for fear of engendering overstatement, or b) bitterly pointed out a referees shortcoming for getting a decision wrong, appreciating it will generate the headlines that might masquerade personal failing completely or, at least, bury defining and damning details further down the report.

Outstanding reportage still exists, but it sometimes feels that the coverage of football, sport and world affairs generally has been reduced to 140 characters on Twitter or he said/she said type analysis because the profile of the person saying it somehow makes it more newsworthy, resulting in context, the real stories, the wider shifts the ones that require digging and, most importantly, time and investigation being lost amidst the noise.

It is not necessarily the managers fault that football in particular has gone this way. Sean Dyche told me during the writing of this book that managers are now really spokesmen for the clubs they represent because they are obliged by rules to talk before and after matches, while players or the faceless accountants answerable to the interests of American groups, Russian oligarchs or Middle Eastern emirs that actually run many clubs are not.

This in turn brings enormous pressure and in some way explains why nearly half of the managers across Englands 92 clubs had been sacked by late April during the 2016/17 season. If it seemed like they were on the brink of insanity, answering questions relating to their own future, it was assumed they were.

I had wanted to write this book fundamentally because I figured it would take serious study to understand the depth of the feelings involved in the game, how it has changed and where it is heading. Some interviewees, like Dyche, told me they were happier to speak truthfully about the challenges they face because a book allowed room for the necessary context.

The reason many of us become journalists or writers is to understand nuances, to build relationships and break them if necessary, to seek truths, and to disclose what would otherwise remain hidden. It is not to sit at a work station for seven hours a day while being watched, trawling through social media platforms, writing clickbait headlines to catch ridiculous online audience targets. Behind the din, I think of this project as a pause button. Hopefully it reflects what football is like in 2017; what it really does to people at the very top, at the very bottom and everywhere in between.

I started my journalistic career covering non-league football and felt it was under-represented in the media then. By the time I left the Crosby Herald the local football team, Marine, had at least three pages of coverage in the paper each week. Regularly, there was eight pages of sport, with cricket, rugby and bowls all given the space they needed to breathe.

The narrative around what happened next usually starts with the readers, who apparently stopped buying newspapers, prompting advertisers to withdraw. This underplays the significance of basic circulation figures, which though reasonably healthy were ultimately determined not to be healthy enough to satisfy the demands of avaricious shareholders at the organisation that printed the papers.

By the time the Herald closed in 2015, sport had frequently been reduced to just two pages in total. When the cuts began newsrooms shrank, cover prices increased, wages were frozen, offices shut, editorial teams merged. Seasoned journalists with years of experience and bulging contacts books were replaced by keen but inexperienced university graduates or not at all. Meanwhile, council meetings, court hearings and matters of genuine public interest were not scrutinised as they used to be. It now feels as though social media has replaced the unappreciated art of chatting to the shopper as the primary form of news gathering; the shopper who pops into the office willing to tell you what you need to hear to do your job because the said office is located conveniently and they trust the reporter due to face to face access.

This is not a story exclusive to Crosby and it is one repeated across the country and elsewhere in the world. It has not only meant non-league and lower-league clubs from sizeable towns are not receiving the coverage they need for supporters to be informed nor floating fans to feel urged to get involved and enrich the sport themselves, it explains why people in these areas felt as though they had no one fighting their corner in the media. It felt like to become a story, your team had to be either at the top or the bottom, ignoring the idea there might be much to be told about the clubs, the people, whose struggle is the same season after season to stay afloat. They manage this through a lot of hard work but for how long? These clubs and people represent a majority rather than a minority.

Of the twelve teams that contested the first season of the Football League, which ran from autumn 1888 to spring 1889, six of them were from the northwest. Jack Gordon of Preston North End is regarded as scoring the first goal of the new competition although this is disputed in some quarters due to claims that Prestons game kicked off 45 minutes later than others that day. What is not disputed is the fact that Preston went on to lift the first Football League Championship without losing a game, and won the FA Cup without conceding a goal.