Book Review – Too Good to be Forgotten: Three Wise Men from Football’s Golden Era by Ben Dobson

Lets’ start with a question.

When and who was the last English manager to win the top flight title in England?

Well you have to go back to Howard Wilkinson in the 1991/92 season when he managed Leeds United to the old First Division title (the last before the advent of the Premier League). And when you look at the leading managers in the Premier League currently that stat isn’t about to change anytime soon.

As this review is being written in November 2024 just 3 of the 20 Premier League managers are English – a mere 15%. Back in 1975 (the starting point for this book) 18 of the 22 First Division Managers were English – some 82%. The reality is that nearly 50 years on the game has changed in so many ways not least due to the introduction of the Premier League, the associated global television and social media explosion and the ever changing formats of the UEFA European competitions. Change over such a time frame in the name of progress is inevitable, but at what price?

Too Good to be Forgotten: Three Wise Men from Football’s Golden Era by Ben Dobson is a book dedicated to that period before what the author describes as, “the financially rich but morally bankrupt construct that is the Premier League.” For Dobson, a Southampton supporter, the book focuses on his formative years watching the game between 1975 and 1985 and looking at three particular managers from that era, Brian Clough, Lawrie McMenemy and Bobby Robson, at Nottingham Forest, Southampton and Ipswich Town respectively.

The book begins with a Prologue, which sets the scene and outlines a key game in each of the managers past in which fate or luck depending on your viewpoint, provided the catalyst for the beginning of their periods of success. An Introduction follows when Dobson details reasons for why the three managers where chosen outlining some of the similarities and some of the differences of Clough, McMenemy and Robson. Amongst the things that linked them all were their North East working-class roots, their belief in developing decent youth policies and the fact that they took provincial clubs to triumphs that in the modern era seem simply fanciful.

However as the author reflects, “ultimately, their levels of success measured in trophies wouldn’t be identical. Their methods shared many traits bit occasionally diverged to reflect the individuality of each man and his personality. But each in their own way would leave a special and lasting legacy. They were going on to achieve similarly and differently incredible things.” Indeed as the seasons from 1975 to 1985 are followed in the main body of the book, the message that the story tells is as much about what each of them achieved rather than the actual trophies they won.

The book is a fitting tribute to the greats that were Clough, McMenemy and Robson. But it is a book also about loss. A loss of a period of the English game before Dobson’s “Frankenstein’s monster” that is the Premier League. Additionally, but also sadly his relationship with his club, with Dobson not visiting the Saints home at St Mary’s since the Premier League induced move, “changed my club and my relationship with it…perhaps my staying away is part of a desire, conscious or otherwise, to preserve memories of The Dell.”

So as detailed earlier in this review, change over such a time frame in the name of progress is inevitable, but at what price?

(Publisher: Pitch Publishing. February 2024. Hardback: 256 pages)

 

Buy the book here.