Plymouth Vital
A fascinating and revealing book detailing Peter Shilton's reign as manager of Plymouth Argyle has just been published.
England legend Shilton assembled an Argyle team regarded by many fans as the best footballing team seen at Home Park for many years, a far cry from the football served up by previous manager David Kemp.
However, Shilton's Dream Team missed out on automatic promotion by a whisker and then hit the self-destruct button in the second-leg play-off match against Burnley.
The book, Peter Shilton's Nearly Men, written by Argyle fan Paul Roberts, lifts the lid on the discontent in the dressing room in the early stages of Shilton's time at Home Park, including revealing interviews with several players from that era.
Many Argyle personalities involved at Home Park during that time remark on Shilton's single-minded approach to management and also his naivety, including his lack of attention to defensive detail, a mistake that several players believe cost Argyle promotion.
The book also charts Shilton's volatile relationship with Chairman Dan McCauley and Roberts' includes a poignant chapter on Alan Nicholls, the bright young Argyle keeper whose short life ended in tragedy.
Roberts' tells the story of Argyle being so close to promotion but ending in dramatic failure and then relegation just one season later, a real riches to rags tale.
While Shilton himself declined to be interviewed for the book, there are still plenty of contributions from David Kemp, John McGovern, Dan McCauley, Steve Castle, Steve McCall and Peter Swan and seventy other players, directors and journalists. All reveal the inside story of Shilton's ill-fated three years in charge of Argyle, a period that ended with the Devon club reduced to a laughing stock on a national scale.
The text is easy on the eye and Roberts' style is informative and entertaining, a must for all Argyle fans.
John Lloyd, Pasalb
In recent years, Argyle fans have been well served by a number of books on their team, mostly inspired by Argyle's resurgence over the last decade.
In "Peter Shilton's Nearly Men", Paul Roberts has turned the clock back to a different era, when the former England goalkeeper led Argyle to the brink of promotion back to the second tier, having played arguably the best football seen at Home Park in generations. But all too soon, it was to crumble to dust, with Shilton, his chairman Dan McCauley and the Devon club splashed across the front and back pages of the national press as his managerial reign ended in acrimonious circumstances. It's an incredible story that hasn't been fully told - until now.
Roberts has filled that gap and then some, in compiling one of the most meticulously researched books on Argyle to date, filled to bursting with colourful and revealing interviews with most of the major personalities of the time - Shilton himself being one notable exception. But Shilton's refusal to co-operate with the project is no bar to it being an outstandingly entertaining and involving read.
Right from the opening chapters, in which Roberts paints a painful picture of the terrible malaise at Home Park in the early 1990's, the reader is swept back in time to the days of Dave Kemp and his honest artisans, struggling against crushing financial realities to retain their Second Division status. Kemp is awarded a fair assessment of his valiant attempt to turn the tide, but the story soon moves on to reveal the widespread shock and astonishment that greeted his replacement, the most capped player in English soccer, Peter Shilton.
The human element is never far away in the text. The firsthand witness statements from players, coaches, pressmen, directors and other Argyle personalities give the narrative a raw emotional edge at times. The perplexed reaction of some Argyle players to the somewhat naive managerial approach that Shilton displayed in his early days, for example, is set out in full. What also comes across in glaring fashion is how so much in football is dependent on personal relationships - between players and their managers and coaches; between managers and their chairmen and directors; and between the club and the pressmen tasked to report on them. Egos abounded at Home Park in those days, with Shilton and McCauley in a never-ending battle for supremacy, married to a fractious relationship between Shilton and the local media. Roberts has it all and it is eye-popping stuff.
Results were poor at first, but as the squad was rebuilt with significant financial support from McCauley, a team of genuine class and ability emerged, despite the off-field factions and in-fighting, The cracks were papered over as the goals flew in, but when the promotion charge expired in play-off misery against Burnley, the deck of cards quickly fell down. It's in this section that Roberts has really excelled - the final days of the Shilton era are exposed in terrible detail.
Roberts uses an entertaining structure for the book as well. Whilst it mostly follows a linear chronology, the narrative occasionally diverts in order to devote individual chapters to some of the totemic players of the time - the mercurial Dwight Marshall, the flawed genius of Alan Nicholls and the "Ugly Duckling", Peter Swan. Marshall has already secured his place in the Argyle pantheon as one of the club's favourite servants, which is further strengthened by his chapter, but the segment that pays tribute to Nicholls is genuinely moving, especially when Roberts visits the grave of the doomed tyro. Swan, easily the most disastrous signing of the time, is colourfully described by his contemporaries and it's made abundantly clear that his recruitment signalled the beginning of the end of the Shilton era.
A book ostensibly devoted to failure, glorious or not, shouldn't be this engrossing and rewarding, but Roberts has pulled off a great victory in making the Shilton era as entertaining to read about as it was to watch.
