Michael Calvin - Family: Life, Death and Football: A Year on the Frontline with a Proper Club

Twice Winner of the British Sports Book Award

No one likes Millwall. They dont care. But what does it really take to be a part of this team, or to be a supporter? Award-winning sports writer Michael Calvins Family provides a unique glimpse into the soul of a real football club. Calvin follows Millwall through an emotional promotion season. There for the first day of training, he was on the substitutes bench at Wembley, 333 days later. He vividly portrays players and management as family men, close to their roots. In captain Paul Robinsons words: Were playing for the people who hate their jobs, whod love our lives. Forget the glitz of the Premier League this is the beautiful game in all its raucous glory. Intimate and compelling, Calvins unforgettable picture of lower-league English football is essential reading for anyone for whom football is far more than just a game.

This updated edition of the classic book includes a new introduction from Mike Calvin, providing insight into the 2016-2017 Millwall season.

Michael Calvin, one of the UKs most accomplished sportswriters, has worked in more than eighty countries, covering every major sporting event, including seven summer Olympic Games and six World Cup finals. He was named Sports Writer of the Year for his despatches as a crew member in a round-the-world yacht race and has twice been named Sports Reporter of the Year.

He is a bestselling author, whose book The Nowhere Men won the Times Sports Book of the Year prize in 2014. He became the first author to receive the award in successive years, when Proud, his collaboration with former Wales and British Lions rugby captain Gareth Thomas, was named Sports Book of the Year in 2015.

In the same year the second book of his football trilogy, Living On The Volcano, was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize. No Nonsense, his collaboration with Joey Barton, was nominated for the award in 2016.

Also available by Michael Calvin

Lifes a Pitch

Only Wind and Water

The Nowhere Men

Proud: My Autobiography (with Gareth Thomas)

Living On The Volcano

No Nonsense: The Autobiography (with Joey Barton)

No Hunger in Paradise

For : My Family.
Thanks for yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Some moments in football are frozen in time, preserved in the aspic of personal memory and public record. So it was, at precisely 4.44pm on 20 May 2017, on the touchline at Wembley, that Neil Harris came to embody the deceptive serenity of a manager on the verge of substantial achievement.

A screengrab from the Sky Sports coverage captured him checking his watch, consulting his assistant, Dave Livermore, and calling coach Adam Barrett from the substitutes bench. The background scenes, a blur of humanity in various stages of rapture, offered a clue about the context.

Steve Morison, the player who had replaced him as the emotional leader of a dressing room with historically defined values, had just scored the goal that promised to secure Millwalls promotion to the Championship at the expense of Bradford City. Four minutes of normal time remained. Another five minutes would be added.

Are these the calmest men in football? asked a supporter, who posted the image on social media. Three months on, Harris laughs mordantly at the illusion he inadvertently created, before delivering a stream of consciousness that encapsulates the chaos that ensues when ambition is hauntingly close to fulfilment.

There was so much made of how calm we looked, how the gameplan worked like clockwork after the goal. I was actually saying to Livers at the time, What are we doing? What are we doing? Hes going, I dont know, what do we do? What do we say? We get Adam down there: What do we say? And Adam goes, I dont know. Youre so in the moment its carnage.

I go, Jed [Wallace] off, Fred [Onyedinma] on. Pace, legs, reliability. Yeah, great. OK, theyve got five up front, lets get [Jake] Cooper on. Coops, get changed. Hang on, what if they score? Were going to want to go back to 4-4-2. What about the five centre halves? Oh shit. Were going to have to play 3-5-2. But we havent played 3-5-2 all season. Coops, sit down. Butch [Calum Butcher], on you go.

Subs are made, and you cant do anything. Youre standing there, hands in pockets, watching, thinking, not shouting. I knew I couldnt physically affect the game. I learned that when we lost in the play-off final the year before. Id warned the senior players they wouldnt hear me shouting, because they wouldnt be listening anyway.

Thats not because they dont respect me. Its Wembley, and theres too much going on. Having played there myself, I know you look at your manager, see hes shouting, and go gotcha, gotcha when you havent got a clue what hes said. Thats because of the atmosphere, the noise, the intensity of the game.

So after the final whistle, emotion pours out. It went as we took a goal kick. [Bradford manager] Stuart McCall was right next to me, and I shook his hand first, then the hands of his staff, because thats the decent thing. Then you want everyone around you to embrace the moment.

The players are off, screaming, doing what they want to do. I want my staff to be close. Ive got to be honest the overriding feeling is one of sheer relief. That was not about 90-odd minutes, not even a season. That was two seasons work, not for me, for Livers, or the players, but for the club, for the recruitment team, the two CEOs Ive worked under, for the chairman and the board.

It was for the fans who had stayed with us through the disappointment of relegation and a difficult couple of years, to a rollercoaster of a season which ended in promotion. So much is rolled into that moment. It was about peoples livelihoods. It was the difference between a really enjoyable summer, and one where I cant keep five or six of my players.

In a small, strangely personal respect, it represented closure. I was transported back seven years almost to the day, when Millwall had also won promotion to the Championship by a single, unanswered goal at Wembley. Then I was on the substitutes bench, recording the victory over Swindon Town for the first edition of this book.

Now, like Paul Robinson, scorer of the only goal in 2010, I was watching from an executive box. He was at AFC Wimbledon, reinforcing the leadership skills that earmark him as managerial material. It had taken him 45 minutes to negotiate Wembley Way before the match Millwall fans do not forget one of their own.

This is brilliant, because Im in amongst it instead of being whisked in and out on the coach, but the symmetry of it is weird, he said. Winning 10, going up at the second attempt again. Its history repeating itself. He had remained close to Harris, socially, and recognised the strength of his authority amongst his peers.

Tony Craig, who celebrated that 2010 victory on crutches, after being injured just before half time, emulated Robinson as captain, and led his team up to the Royal Box, where he lifted that ersatz trophy above his head in a state of bliss: I had goose bumps. Talk about a boyhood dream coming true. It was the proudest moment of my life.

He sought out his family, gave his daughter his winners medal. The private dread of being deemed unworthy of a first-team place, so familiar to any senior pro, receded, temporarily at least: This is something to share. The years are ticking by. Im going to enjoy it as long as it lasts, as long as my body tells me, On you go, son,