"Football is not a matter of life and death, it is more important than that."
An endangered Species
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David Gower, London, Simon and Schuster, 2013. ISBN 978-1-47110-237-0
A great read for anyone (like me) who is old enough to remember Gower the player or for anyone who knows him just as a TV presenter.
While the book is written with a ghost writer, I felt throughout that I could hear Gower saying what I read. The book gives a great summary of his career: “As England captain I experienced all available combinations of personal and collective success and failure”. He is one of the rare breed of Ashes-winning captains and at the same time lost his place in the team on a few occasions.
He does not hesitate to express opinions on those he played with or under or indeed works with at Sky. On occasions he comments that he and a certain person had a different approach but that if they met now, there would be no hard feelings. That, surely, is how sport should be.
I was surprised to read of some of the exploits he recounts – drinking excessively before games, losing a hire-car (and almost his life) on a frozen lake which was less frozen than he thought! There was of course the famous Tiger Mothflight during a test match!
There is an honest insight into the life of the professional sportsman and the difficulty of maintaining relationships. He said of the break-up with his long-term girl-friend: “The relationship was under severe strain from the nature of what I did, the long absences and temptations that came my way”.
Gower played in the era of apartheid when players were offered big money to go on rebel tours. His insight is fascinating: “As a young sportsman you do have an insulated view of the world. I can’t think of any English cricketer whose first reaction would have been, 'You must be joking. It’s an abhorrent regime'”. He follows that with a criticism of Ian Botham for saying he wasn’t going to South Africa for reasons of principle when Gower suggests it was out of financial motivation.
As this web specializes in the relationship between sport and faith, we noted with interest that after the incident on the ice with the hire car in Switzerland that “in a moment of religious fervour, we went to church to give thanks for what had been a lucky escape”. We were less sure about Gower’s thoughts on how to avoid Sunday league cricket for which he had no enthusiam: “Would it be worth becoming a Seventh-Day Adventist, I mused?” Surely, it is Saturday not Sunday which Seventh-Day Adventists keep special?
Gower’s assessment of Kevin Pietersen’s texts to South African players and the subsequent fall-out is very interesting, with comparisions to his own Tiger Moth incident. Of his own time he writes “I felt with the Gooch Stewart regime that they wanted to apply a one-size-fits-all template that made no allowances for people being different”.
An excellent and thought-provoking book.