The Audit of Football

Born to Manage

Terry Venables with Alex Montgomery

Simon & Schuster 2014  ISBN 9781471129919

Let's go Dutch, but don't spill the beans, with London FC MD Terry Venables. Born to Manage is a decently and mildly written overview of a life and career from Dagenham to Chelsea, Spurs, QPR, Palace, QPR, Barcelona, Spurs, England, Australia, and some others that didn't quite work out so well. It's interesting (and it seemed to pick up as the memoir got closer to the present – perhaps because of fresher memory, perhaps because of painfuller drama) but could have been more so with more grit and less gloss, though of course it's easier to want that as a reader than it might be to provide that as a memoirist. And more detail: I'm sure I have an ancient copy of World Soccer knocking about somewhere where El Tel has a lot of interesting things to say about tactics, but you won't find much at all of that here, at least not in the wonky depth I know many of us enjoy. One thing I did really like was Venables' positive take on people with personalities out of the ordinary. He seems to have had an affinity for interesting characters, in and out of football. Fans of the footballer-cum-writer (not to mention cum-singer) will have their fill.  

Some tidbits of interest include sprint training learned from Ron Jones – flat-out 220 yard sprints against the clock, tough but effective, the key to the TV fitness programme in fact (needless to say, if you're going to try sprints, build up to it); Rachid Harkouk's adventures with Prison XI; Steve Archibald pioneering the footballer's earring; an allusion to conspiracy theories (some odd things happen in football sometimes, some of which are exposed after the fact, likely many more not). Gary Lineker receives praise for keeping it simple and hitting the target, although of one famous occasion he didn't, Venables muses: "I never asked him to be clever." These days, following football can feel like a battle of the spreadsheets; as Venables puts it: "The majority of people who turn up to football matches couldn't care less about the owners." Football men can be prone to distraction: Terry Venables David Beckham "had extensive (and I would have thought tiring) interests outside football." Steve McClaren made some questionable decisions: "I was nonplussed when I saw him with the umbrella." Future England Manager (as of 2014)? Gareth Southgate has "the drive to make the breakthrough." 

What of England? TV points out, as many others have done, the paucity of coaching per capita compared to nations such as Germany. Maybe in the intervening years, some of that deficit has been remedied; one can't help but think of Correlli Barnett. 

© Bryn Roberts 2023

Published 15 July 2023