Playmaker: My Autobiography, Glenn Hoddle with Jacob Steinberg (HarperCollins 2021)
(This is a guest review by Dr Mordecai Stimbers)
I’ve idolized Glenn Hoddle – and been a proud and passionate Yid – ever since the long-ago day on which my late father took me to a FA Cup tie at White Hart Lane as a bar-mitzvah treat. But in the beginning it seemed much more of a treat for him than it did for me. I was a chubby, brace-faced and bookish nebbish with a squint and ripening crop of raw red pimples. I didn’t want to go to London and I didn’t want to see a team that was Dad’s passion, not mine. We had to get up very early to travel from Glasgow and I was almost asleep on my feet by the time we reached the ground. But the raw and pungent smells of the fast-food stalls, the even rawer and more pungent London accents that sounded on all sides, the sense of occasion and impending conflict brought me wide awake and I was ready to savour every second of the game by the time the two sides came out onto the pitch to a thunderous roar of acclaim.
And savour those seconds I did. There was a folkloric or even mythic resonance to the setting, as though I’d stepped through some mystagogic portal into a realm of legend. I was at White Hart Lane, after all, a name that seemed straight out of Tolkien or the Brothers Grimm. Everything was primal, elemental, bright and clean and eye-stunning, as though freshly forged in the furnaces of creation. The gold of the sun, the gleaming white shirts of Spurs, the blazing red shirts of their opponents, the perfect globe of the ball whizzing to and fro on the vivid green of the pitch – it all struck at my senses as though I was witnessing not merely a football match but existence itself for the very first time. Even the raucous, profane chants and cajolements from the crowds seemed to acquire a choral or incantational quality, as though a congregation of denim-clad worshippers were hymning a ceremony performed by demi-gods or ranks of bright-eyed Cockney magicians were conjuring the spectacle into existence by sheer force of will and lung-power.
But no, that last bit wasn’t right. The only magician on show was that tall and commanding figure at the centre of everything on the pitch: Glenn Hoddle. He played a blinder from first whistle to last, scoring two goals of his own and setting up two more for lesser luminaries before converting a late penalty to send the crowd into a final delirium of delight. But even better than the goals, in some ways, were the silky skills he laid out in midfield, as though, at some deeper level than mere and mundane reality, he was using the ball to festoon the pitch with ribbons of rare and precious fabric, glittering, gold-specked, semi-transparent. When I closed my eyes on the journey home, I could see him playing still: the twists, the feints, the back-heels and clever little one-twos, the passes he seemed able to deliver with pin-point accuracy over any distance he chose. As I thought at the game and as his later manager Arsène Wenger so rightly said: he was a magician. And his magic won my heart then and for ever. I’d been to a few games in Glasgow, experienced the cauldron of a couple of Old Firm matches, and even toyed with the idea of becoming a Partick Thistle supporter. But all that faded like dew before the golden blast of the rising sun as a proud white cockerel crowed in a new day. Nothing now could compete with the magic of Glenn Hoddle and the glamour of the mighty Spurs.
My Dad was even more pleased with my conversion to the cause of Tottenham Hotspurs than he was with the result of the match. He was a Yid himself, like his father and grandfather before him, and had never allowed his birth and upbringing in far-off Glasgow to diminish his passion for the club. He didn’t get to many matches, but he followed Spurs avidly in every available medium from print to radio to TV. He’d tried to infect me with the white-and-blue virus too, but I’d resisted, not understanding why it mattered, not wanting to maintain a long-distance loyalty to a city I’d never visited and a team I’d never seen in the flesh. My mother was dubious too, uninterested in any kind of sport herself and never letting him take me to a Spurs game until that fateful bar-mitzvah treat. But now I’d been and seen and was converted. I had become the fourth generation of the Stimbers family to have blue-and-white pumping through his veins.
Dad had his own favourite players but he recognised the quality of Hoddle and, like me, sympathised with him instinctively as an outsider. Hoddle was too skilful for the rough-and-ready English game and never properly appreciated by too many both on the terraces and in the footballing hierarchy. In this book he mentions the accusations that he was a “luxury player” and recalls the derisive, explicitly misogynistic and homophobic nickname that some threw at him: Glenda. It was both unfair and untrue. He had to battle for the space to display his talent. The game was much more physical when he was at the peak of his career and his skills were never allowed to shine as brightly as they surely would have done in today’s game, where thuggery can’t snuff out artistry as it once so regularly and so depressingly did.
No-one knows all that better than Hoddle himself, as you’ll discover in this readable but insubstantial autobiography. It would have been easy for him to become bitter and resentful, but his much-mocked interest in spirituality does genuinely seem to have brought him peace of mind and the ability to forgive. Besides which, he wasn’t and isn’t a might-have-been, because he became one of the greats, recognized and acclaimed around the world as one of the most skilful players ever to electrify a crowd. He never won the league title that he and his fellow Yids have coveted for too many decades to contemplate, but he played a central role in two classic FA Cup victories and an early English triumph in the UEFA Cup, then won the French league with Monaco. As a manager, he did well at Swindon, less well at Chelsea and Spurs, but with a little more luck and a little more backing from his chairmen he might have brought silverware to one or both of those London giants. He might have won the World Cup with England too. You won’t find any great insights into his successes and near-misses here, but he does set the record straight on his departure from the England job. He was stitched up by a reporter, but says that he’s glad it happened now, because it taught him about the power of forgiveness.
I think he’s sincere, but if he isn’t, so what? All great men have their flaws and Hoddle is in my eyes – and the eyes of countless other Yids – the greatest player ever to don the famous white shirt of the mighty Spurs. The quality of this ghosted autobiography doesn’t match the quality of his football, but it will bring back some happy memories for Yids d’un certain âge all around the world. Plus, it has a good index. When I first took the book up I looked in that index under “Watford”, hoping to find Hoddle’s description of one of his best-ever goals: an outrageously swift-and-skilful turn-and-sublimely-lofted-chip that left both defenders and goalkeeper helpless. But there was no mention of the goal. In one way that was disappointing, in another it felt just right. Hoddle had talent to burn and lit up too many matches with too many outrageous pieces of skill to recall all of them here. This is Hod’s world – you and me, we’re just living in it.
Dr Mordecai Stimbers is the Manny T. Schwitzowitz Professor of Post-Structural Hermeneutics at the University of West Baltimore
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