The Manager

This is Tales From the Boot Camps or Left Foot Forward from a manager's point of view. It's every bit as entertaining, irreverent and readable as Steve Claridge's volume. Fairclough and his ghost (Adrian Clark, ex-Arsenal and Stevenage Borough) have created a fantastically readable account of life behind the scenes and the ups and (mostly) downs of a League season: following a triumphant promotion from the Nationwide Conference and opening to the new campaign, Barnet slowly slide down the table. Goals are in scarce supply, there is no cash for new blood, but plenty of personality clashes, players in court, players with drink problems, players with attitude problems, players who are just crap. And then there are the agents ...Wrestling with it all, in his first League job, is the put-upon manager, Paul Fairclough, who has the front and quick-wittedness of a kind of lower-league Terry Venables, albeit one more in touch with his sensitive side -- he has a psychologist for a mentor, is mates with Arsene Wenger and always tries to treat players as individuals. Except the dressing room at Underhill isn't necessarily the natural habitat for such progressive thinking ...