Sweet
FA, by Graham Kelly with Bob Harris (1999)
"A FASCINATING insight into football's corridors of power" is promised on the front cover of this book.
This all depends, really, on how interested you are in the insider wranglings and alleged dodgy dealings of the Football Association, the Football League and the Premiership. Graham Kelly was at the heart of most of it, and so he has as good a right as anybody to lift the lid on it all; and the first question most people will have is: is he as boring on paper as he is in real life?
Surprisingly, no - although the book starts very densely indeed (with a defence of the dealing with the Welsh FA that led to his sacking), it is, on the whole, quite readable. Once you get over the name-dropping (it can get quite hard to remember just who is chief executive or secretary or director of the many organisations Kelly discusses), you get quite a sense of Kelly's personality, which is quite astonishing really, given the man's total lack of charisma on screen.
But he was well aware of this, and also points out that "every time I was wheeled before the cameras, it would be because of a grave event". Being the person with whom the buck always had to stop didn't leave much time to groom a TV persona for himself, Kelly argues, and he also criticises David Davies for not giving him enough advice on how to present himself on television.
Kelly is quite forthright about the many figures in football, not least about the former Sports Minister Tony Banks, who he wanted to "shut up" about the crazy idea of having one Britain team in the World Cup; and he singles out David Davies as one of the main architects of Glenn Hoddle's downfall. But conversely, Kelly sometimes does not reveal as much emotion as the reader would like. There is one instance where, after the Hillsborough disaster, Kelly recounts a woman who was so upset she slapped his face on television; Kelly does not comment on how this made him feel, and he does not show a great deal of sympathy for why she did it, but he partly redeems this by ending the Hillsborough chapter with a heartfelt plea for people to think about those who died before they call for terracing to be re-introduced. Kelly does not aim to debate the issue; he merely states his honest opinion here.
And that reflects the nature of the book; Kelly makes no apology for his opnions, and thus the style of writing is often uneven and littered with exclamation marks. The book is also a little too long and some of the boardroom backstabbing is a bit hard to get through, though it is at its best when you are allowed to see more well-documented events (such as Hillsborough and the sacking of Hoddle) from a completely different angle.