State of Play... Under the Skin of the Modern Game

BOOK REVIEW

State of Play, by Michael Calvin

Penguin Books

Out this week.

Mike Calvin does not so much hit the back of the net with his pile-driving, conscience-stabbing study of football, State of Play - as take the goalkeeper with it, too, the ball still clutched to his midriff.

After three award-winning books, focusing on different aspects surrounding football at all levels, he clearly has another winner on his hands with this multi-threaded appraisal of the world’s game.

It is in many ways his homage to Arthur Hopcraft, whose 1968 classic snapshot of the game, The Football Man, clearly inspired Mike and countless others among his contemporaries, grasping just why and how football gets into the blood and the soul and why we so readily forgive its shortcomings and failings.

State of Play strips away football’s often over-hyped glamour and the gloss and expands on those t-shirt messages we see revealed when players score a goal - peeling back the outer layer to expose players and the game’s outriders as they truly are - human, with all their inherent frailties.

In No Hunger in Paradise, Mike exposed the brutal reality of a nigh-on impossible dream - that of becoming a professional footballer. He describes a venal world in which even success can come at a huge price - and failure a much bigger one.

A glimmer of humanity comes from those tireless, selfless souls Mike highlights, who try to help youngsters who see football as a break from troubled home lives and an escape from even more troubled housing estates and circumstances.

He showed in often quite harrowing detail how the real Football Factory - not the Danny Dyer-esque thuggish fans version - constantly lures young people along the pathway to fame and glory knowing full well that for the majority it will amount in blood, sweat and, most definitely for all but a chosen few, tears.

And he exposed how the game is callously at fault in its shocking lack of after-care, leaving many teenage souls run aground with the flotsam on the beach of life, their world shattered; often beyond repair.

Some lose their way entirely after being released at what is still a very formative age, and fall into a downward spiral of failed relationships, fractured home life, petty crime, drug use - and then possibly even prison, like David Manton, who we meet in State of Play. Thankfully, Mike says, Manton is now out of the big house - with a measure of renewed optimism and “no longer has to stare at the wall and beat himself into submission”.

Others suffer mental health issues. I still recall how in early 2013 a young man killed himself after suffering years of mental ill-health following his release by a Premier League club’s academy at 16. The coroner gave the sternest of warnings about the potential dangers of English football’s youth development system. Precious little has since been done to avoid repeats.

Drewe Broughton, whose 22 clubs included four games and three goals on loan at my hometown team, Stevenage, attests to this collateral damage - and describes how he has tried to pick up players at their lowest ebb and inject a sense of the spiritual in them as he helps them become repaired human beings. He implores them to find peace, to “be still”.

As a student of biomechanics, too, Broughton, football’s ultimate journeyman who admits he was known for leaving opponents his calling card, contradicts the common view that Wayne Rooney was not the same player after his famed metatarsal injury because he had lost a physical edge. He said it was more a case of his “child-like spontaneity being lost”.

Mike agrees that players are conditioned to suppress their true selves.

No Hunger was made into a BT Sport special - this volume reads like a screenplay for a series.

If it were to be made, it would get off to an intensely emotional, hard-hitting start, as Mike talks at length to the daughter of Jeff Astle, whose image is today borne proudly on wrought-iron gates at West Brom’s Hawthorns ground.

Dawn talks almost despairingly about how dementia from repeatedly heading a football (scientists say 1,800 times is enough to impart long-term damage) ended her dad’s life prematurely at just 59.

She describes in gut-wrenching detail how - like some of the more than 400 other ex-players she is aware of who now suffer dementia - from her campaign to make football safer, Jeff Astle reached his latter days completely unaware that he had ever been a professional footballer. He forgot how his body was supposed to function.

The family struggled against the tide to connect with Jeff in his latter days. They had his medals, England caps, and photos of his FA Cup winning exploits and World Cup appearances dotted around him as memory triggers.

Astle’s was a life lived to the full, compared to many of us, but cut short in the cruellest way.

Dawn talks of repeatedly trying to prick the conscience of football’s authorities - including the FA and even the players’ union - but to little avail. A decent start, she says, would be to ban heading in junior football.

Mike rightly allows Dawn to amplify a hugely important health issue that football is stubbornly refusing to take on; just as the NFL did for so many years.

The book tackles many other pertinent subjects - this has been an attempt to project a flavour of them; fan ownership, oligarchs and even women’s football - a subject much more in my sights now my son-in-law is manager at Barnsley Ladies.

Football should not just sit up and take notice of Mike’s messages - delivered in a way that makes you frequently step away to ingest the full meaning of the message. The game could do worse than to employ his wise counsel - perhaps for the odd inquiry into prescient issues.

And I still think the TV series would be great. Are you watching, Amazon Prime?...

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