With City back in the Premiership today, our soccer scribes correspondent Phil Ascough looks at the moonlighting gig of a previous top flight manager.
He led Hull City to two Premier League promotions, the FA Cup Final and a brief campaign in European competition. He also managed a dozen other clubs and his son recently took on his first manager role. As a player he made more than 700 appearances including more than 300 for Manchester United. But throughout a professional career which began in 1979 at Gillingham he never – as far as we know – had to deal with the murder of a colleague. Not even for missing a penalty or notching an own goal.
That’s what sets Steve Bruce apart from Steve Barnes, manager and coach of Leddersford Town.
Barnes was the character created by Bruce as the hero in all three of his detective novels. The titles – “Striker!”, “Sweeper!”, and “Defender!” – are, thankfully, not the full extent of the creator’s imagination. Typically self-deprecating, Bruce once told an interviewer from Eurosport that you could probably pick up a copy of any of the titles for 99p. In fact they’re pretty hard to come by. I think I paid about a tenner for my copy of Striker! and we read excerpts from it during a football literature event at the Humber Mouth Festival in 2013.
More recently I’ve seen it available online for more than £150 and, after recent events, the cover alone could make it worth a punt. The artwork shows a player, unluckily wearing the number 13, lying face down on a football pitch in a pool of blood, the smear on his blue and white striped shirt indicating he’s been stabbed in the back. A bloodstained knife, presumably the murder weapon, has been dropped inches from the victim’s body. Yet the fans in the stand are just sitting there, the stewards and ballboys are unmoved, and the assistant referee is waiting at the halfway line, flag just hanging down from his wrist, having not seen anything untoward. You could be forgiven for thinking someone finally snapped after watching the antics of Argentina’s World Cup bad boys, went too far, and everyone in the stadium turned a blind eye.
It’s an easy read in that you can get through it in maybe two hours, so about the same duration as watching a match with half time and a bit of added time. And maybe something a little stronger than water during the hydration breaks to get more in tune with Bruce’s flights of fantasy. But it’s also a challenge as the first three lines undermine the picture and confuse the reader about the crime scene:
“Bright red blood on the knife blade.”
“The knife is in my hand.”
“Duffy’s dead body stretched out on the locker room floor.”
Barnes is the manager, an undisguised Steve Bruce writing in the first person about the pressures of managing an unfashionable football club with a shot of getting into the Premier League. Duffy is the new signing and top striker. Barnes suspects his assistant of having committed the deadly deed and the flimsy scenario descends into a shambles of shoot-out, kidnapping, and Barnes swimming the length of a reservoir to escape gangsters – or possibly terrorists. References drawn from Bruce’s playing career – he only moved into management a year before Striker! was published – demonstrate his passion for fitness, a strong moral code, Jaguar cars and painful cliches.
You can’t judge the book by its cover but some of the reviews are worth a read. A one-star review of Sweeper! Makes the assumption that Bruce has attempted parody: “The cover, the title, everything about this sounds like a send up surely?” Tongue is no doubt firmly in cheek for this assessment of Defender!: “Absolutely genius. The plot twists are phenomenal and the imagery that Steve conjures up of Brazil and food is on a par with Shakespeare. A must read, 5 out of 5.” As for Striker!, the consensus seems to be “so bad it’s good”: “There is something about this book that makes it absolutely brilliant… even though it’s, err, awful! I read it in one sitting (it’s only 128 pages long) which took me a couple of hours. Hours that I will never have again, but I’m glad that I spent them reading this.”
And then there’s Bruce’s own honest opinion. He told the Eurosport interviewer: “It was a long time ago, and I’m not sure I want to be reminded of how bad they were. Just because I got a GCSE in English, I thought I was going to be the next Dick Francis. It didn’t make any contribution at all to anyone’s income. It became a laughing stock, to be honest. I think they’re probably still on the shelves somewhere.”
And when a Sky Sports reporter asked Bruce if he would be “dusting off his typewriter” he replied: “No. Have you read them? Go and read them and you’ll understand why.”