Book Review

Amid the first COVID-19 lockdown earlier this year, as this infernal virus was sweeping its away across the globe, millions of us suddenly found ourselves with a lot of extra time on our hands. If you entered the spring quarantine with grand plans to fix up your home, learn a new skill or write that book that's been germinating in the grey matter for years on end but ultimately just ended up watching far too much Netflix and eating a lot, you probably weren't alone.

Thankfully for we Evertonians, the Liverpool Echo's Head of Sport, David Prentice, did indeed take the opportunity to write that book he always wanted to and the result is A Grand Old Team To Report: 45 Years Following Everton Football Club, his entertaining memoir of following the Blues in his capacity as supporter and journalist, starting in the 1980s at the Daily Post before he moved over the partition at Old Hall Street to the Echo.

As a slice of Everton history it's a fascinating and frequently humourous account of the transition away from the days when the local Everton reporter was, as a daily visitor, almost part of the furniture at Bellefield to the current era of Finch Farm's gates, the security hut at the end of the driveway and the regimented segregation between the structured, protected lives of modern-day footballers and both the people who support them and those who report on them.

There is a wistful nature to the earlier stories and anecdotes that David shares as he charts his rise from bookish, late-blooming Blue in the days of Gordon Lee, Bob Latchford and Andy King to budding journalist during the halcyon days of the mid-1980s, and then to chief sports writer at the city's most prominent paper against the backdrop of more tumultuous events at Goodison Park in the 90s. As he looks back on his career thus far, he will no doubt feel regret at the intimacy and access lost amid the modern game but he will also surely feel enormously grateful to have been as close to the beating heart of his beloved Everton — from players to managers to chairman — as he was for so many years.

David shares tales of booze-laden escapades with Everton players of the past and eventful pre-season tours embedded with the Blues' squad; of internal bust-ups and inside stories from some of the club's more controversial transfer sagas; and of David Unsworth's role in his proposal to Evertonian royalty itself in the form of his beloved wife Melanie, grand-daughter of one William Ralph Dean. It's hard to imagine now, in these very different times, how a head reporter from the local paper's life could become so intertwined with Everton — to the point that two of its former managers attended were guests at his wedding — without that intimate and sometimes symbiotic relationship that club staff and local reporters once enjoyed.

That's just how it was before the days of mobile phones, emails, the Internet and social media; of millionaire footballers behind high-walled mansions, high-powered agents and the near-constant pressures of Premier League management. You ended up sharing a taxi back to a Tuscan resort with Richard Gough, being driven home with the FA Cup on your lap and ending up on stage in an Everton pantomime with Martin Dobson, Roger Kenyon, John Bailey and George Telfer!

There are more poignant moments, too, of course — not least the passing within a few months of each other of Gary Speed from suicide and David's father, Eric, from cancer, and Dixie Dean himself in the most appropriate of places at Goodison Park. David also touches on the sometimes awkward balancing act of “being a football fan first, reporter second” and those occasions where answering for your stern but well-meaning criticism of the team in print entails going down to the training ground to face the music in a room full of disgruntled players or being ostracised for a year by one club chairman and branded as “that shit from the Echo” by another!

David's lament that, “after two managers in 15 years, Everton then had four in three-and-a-half and I never really established a rapport with any of them,” again cuts to the changed nature of the game from the days when he would share a daily cup of tea with Howard Kendall. As such, the gems of A Grand Old Team To Report lie in the first two decades or so of his career and, for Evertonians of a particular vintage, this will be an entertaining skip down memory lane, while the later chapters are, necessarily, viewed with a more detached lens.

But with some wonderful stories along the way, recounted with the enthusiasm and love of a devoted Blue and the dignity and sensitivity of one of life's gentlemen offering an insight into the way football and Everton used to be, it's a terrific, easy read for any Blue.

A Grand Old Team To Report is published by Reach Sport and is available for purchase now in hardback from the publisher or from Amazon.


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