Hero in the Shadows

David Tossell

Description

Don Howe is one of English football's great coaches, with an unrivalled record at international and club level. As right-hand man to three England managers, he helped his country to the 1990 World Cup and Euro 96 semi-finals. He helped to steer them through the 1982 World Cup unbeaten and to the quarter-finals four years later. Howe masterminded the 1970/71 double at Arsenal, where two spells as coach also brought European and further FA Cup glory. He was also an integral part of one of the greatest Wembley upsets when he helped Wimbledon's 'Crazy Gang' to victory over the mighty Liverpool in 1988. As a player at West Bromwich Albion, Howe won 24 international caps, but as a manager he failed to achieve the success he craved. Yet over a three-decade period, he won acclaim from many of England's finest players as a genius of the coaching profession. Through interviews with players, colleagues, friends and family, this book examines the triumphs and challenges of Don Howe's career and assesses his contribution to English football.

Sujets

• Inglaterra
• England

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 18 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781801502504
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
David Tossell, 2022
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801500876
eBook ISBN 9781801502504
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CONTENTS
Introduction: The Case for the Defence
1. Gunner at the Albion
2. The Way Ahead and the Way Out
3. Lucky Break
4. Laying the Foundations
5. Double Dealer
6. Man at the Top
7. Losing His Stripes
8. Back in the High Life
9. Your Country Needs You
10. Highbury s Number One
11. The Road to Mexico
12. Crazy After All These Years
13. Sweeping Ahead
14. Back in the Hot Seat
15. Coming Home
16. Don t Look Back in Anger
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Photos
INTRODUCTION
THE CASE FOR THE DEFENCE
Few can have had so much influence in English football for so long and yet be as unheralded as Don Howe.
FourFourTwo , December 2015
TWO PHOTOGRAPHS, taken nine years apart, depict happiness and achievement. They also speak of loyalty, respect and fraternity, professional and personal. One has been taken at the end of the 1979 FA Cup Final, the other at the same great Wembley occasion in 1988.
In the first, a tracksuited Don Howe is having his arm raised towards the fans by the Arsenal manager, Terry Neill, in the manner of a boxing referee presenting the winner to the crowd. After beating Manchester United we were coming down towards the old tunnel and all the Arsenal fans were at that end, Neill recalls. It wasn t premeditated, it was just instinctive. I just grabbed Don s arm and held it up in the air. That moment sums up our relationship. He was the brother I never had. That moment wasn t about me, it wasn t about Don, it was about all of us at the club together; it was about unity. That is one of my most treasured pictures of Don.
The second photograph was taken after one of Wembley s biggest upsets: the victory of a Howe-coached Wimbledon team over one of the finest of all Liverpool s championship-winning sides. Howe is being embraced by a shirt-sleeved, toothily grinning Wimbledon boss Bobby Gould, who has sent the picture to my phone moments after our initial conversation about this book; 1988 and jolly good company, is the accompanying message. From the start of our relationship in 1968, he was like an older brother, Gould explains. That is what he was to me.
There is a contrasting image captured at Wembley in 1971, after Arsenal have beaten Liverpool to complete the Double of FA Cup and Football League title. In that shot, the handshake between Gunners manager Bertie Mee and Howe is indicative of a strictly business partnership - the former Army man Mee might have used the term proper . It is that of boss and employee. The more emotive picture from that day captures full-back Bob McNab leaping into the arms of a partly obscured Howe. Yet even that picture has, historically, failed to illustrate fully the importance the players attached to their coach s contribution in taking Arsenal from also-rans to unimagined achievement. It has been wrongly captioned by its copyright holders as being Mee in the photo and is identified as such whenever it gets pulled out for use.
The point is this. Take a close look at certain English teams over a period of time and Howe is at the heart of their achievements, the constant alchemist at the shoulder of the men in charge. On occasions there were moments in the sun, but mostly his work was conducted away from the spotlight. As one Arsenal-related website, Daily Cannon , referred to him on his death in 2015, he was the hero in the shadows .
It was a similar tale with the national team. Between England losing their title as world champions in Mexico in 1970 and reaching the semi-finals in Russia in 2018, every one of the national team s achievements worth speaking of came with Don Howe as coach. The common denominator in photographs of a proud Ron Greenwood watching his unbeaten team exit the 1982 World Cup finals, or Bobby Robson staring disbelievingly into the night sky in Turin in 1990, or Terry Venables consoling Gareth Southgate after another semi-final penalty shoot-out heartbreak at Wembley six years later is the figure of Howe at the manager s side. We should not forget the contribution of Don Howe, a knowing Robson said after he watched England s Euro 96 campaign. It is impossible to overestimate the contribution that he will have made.
Howe could be said to be the last specialist England team coach. Since he left the role after serving a third boss, the trend has become for the man in charge to lean on someone who has been with him earlier in his career - in the manner of Glenn Hoddle and John Gorman; Kevin Keegan and Derek Fazackerley; Sven-Goran Eriksson and Tord Grip; Sam Allardyce and Sammy Lee, and so on. Howe s friend Roy Hodgson, who had Ray Lewington at his side with England and in many of his club appointments, says, You need someone you can trust and someone who can do the job as well as you can. Someone who can analyse situations and come up with the right ideas about formations and how the team should be playing. You want someone who s got every bit as much quality as you have got yourself because you are dealing with the best players in the country. Don s work ethic, his seriousness, his approach to the game and his desire to make certain that the team had all the information they need to try and win the game and become a better team were very important qualities. On top of that, when you are with people a lot of the time - especially in national team set-ups where you are virtually living in each other s pockets for several weeks - you need someone you like and whose company you enjoy. Don was great company.
It is hard to argue a case for another English coach with a more impressive r sum than Howe s: semi-finals in the World Cup and European Championship; an unbeaten campaign in another World Cup and quarter-finalist in another; a League and Cup Double; two more FA Cups and a European trophy. Not to mention 24 England caps and trips as a player to two World Cup finals.
And there is a legacy of tributes, often from those least likely to possess any great fondness for authority figures. I am not a lover of coaches, says Alan Hudson, one of the great mavericks of English football, but Don was a bit special. Another renowned Arsenal individualist, Paul Merson, said, after hearing of Howe s death in 2015, He was so far ahead of his time it was scary. You talk about the [Ars ne] Wengers and people like that; he was the best coach in the world of football - not just in England - but in the world of football. He was a phenomenal, phenomenal coach.
One website, the All Sports Books blog run by Brendan Crowley, has even identified what it calls Howe s Law; the apparently unbreakable rule that any autobiography by a footballer who played in Britain in the last 40 years has to, at some point, mention how good the late Don Howe was as a coach.
Yet football is never straightforward and Howe s life in the sport throws up contradictions and questions. Why, for example, was he unable to convert the magic he brought to the position of coach into comparable success when given the job of manager, as he was at West Bromwich Albion, Arsenal, Queens Park Rangers and Coventry City? Is it, as former Arsenal and England full-back Viv Anderson contends, Don was a fantastic coach but I don t think he was the best manager. It is a different breed. You are either one or the other and Don, in my view, was always better as a coach.
Or was it more a case of circumstance, as Hodgson argues. To say Don couldn t manage was nonsense. No disrespect to Bertie Mee, but he was basically managing Arsenal. Bertie was looking after the people upstairs and Don was doing all the work with the team. Don might not have put his hand up to deal with the press and the directors rather than being on the field coaching, but that is not to say he couldn t do it.
That s a subject to be revisited in later pages. But there is another issue that deserves to be addressed up front, one highlighted by former Wimbledon player Terry Gibson, who remembers, There were those jokes about how Don liked the team photo because it was the one time everybody was back behind the ball.
Howe, it is universally accepted, was a master in organising a defence. Yet with that came the reputation - expressed in quips such as the above - that he was a defensive coach , one who lacked imagination or was downright boring , as one former England player would write. Even Trevor Brooking, too much of a gentleman to express it in the same terms as Terry Fenwick, said that whereas his two managers at West Ham, Greenwood and John Lyall, had both wanted players to express themselves, Don s priority was to stop the opposition from playing.
Accusations of negativity and one-dimensionalism dogged Howe for decades and wearied him. When we spoke in 2001 about Arsenal s Double team for my book, Seventy-One Guns , he argued, If people wanted to join in the criticism then I looked at it as them not having the knowledge to know what was going on. It is a shame for