IT’S BIN A LONG TIME

JON LIVESEY looks back at the career of legendary Everton goalkeeper Neville Southall and reviews his book, The Binman Chronicles.

ONLY a handful of footballers are truly worthy of legend status. Neville Southall is definitely one of them. Between 1981 and 1998, the Llandudno-born goalkeeper played for Everton 578 times in the league alone and kept a record-breaking 269 clean sheets in all competitions. And it took just £150,000 to secure his services from Bury.

With Everton, he won the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1985, the First Division title in 1985 and 1987, the FA Cup in 1984 and 1995 and the League Cup in 1984, making him the club’s most decorated player.

After leaving Goodison in 1998, he turned out for a string of other clubs, including Stoke, Torquay and Shrewsbury, and has managed Dover Athletic, Hastings United and Margate. Now 54, he works with disengaged youths in the south of England as part of a scheme he helped set up. In his long-awaited book, The Binman Chronicles, he describes his remarkable journey from hod-carrying in North Wales to playing in the Premier League.

ANY footballer whose glory years were in the 80s is bound to have countless tales of drinking, gambling, fighting and getting laid, just moments before playing in front of thousands…right?

Well, no, actually. For starters, Neville Southall found his first sip of lager so nasty that not so much as a drop of alcohol has passed his lips since. And save for the odd bonding session at a Chinese restaurant in Liverpool, he was never really one to socialise with his team-mates.

So if you want to know which of Big Nev’s Everton colleagues could down a pint of Guinness in seven seconds flat, who’d last 12 rounds with Mike Tyson or whose bedpost had the most notches, The Binman Chronicles probably isn’t for you (try Pat Van Den Hauwe’s Psycho Pat instead).

As far as sportsmen’s autobiographies go, it’s pretty grown-up -possibly a bit too grown-up.

Southall has been painted as a surly scruff-bag who, despite being one of the greatest goalkeepers in living memory, remains both miserable and odd in equal measure. With that in mind then, it’s no surprise that he cites an intention to show there is in fact much more to his complex personality.

Through his book, he stresses that he wants to show he’s more misunderstood than unfriendly.

And right from the outset, he proves himself to be someone who is just a bit different. If it wasn’t already blatantly obvious that Southall wasn’t your average footballer, The Binman Chronicles hammers the point home repeatedly, not just through its content, but also its style.

In recent years, it’s been the fashion for sportsmen to begin their autobiographies with their moment of crowning glory or lowest ebb, the one snippet that truly defines them, before flashing back to their birth and outlining every little detail that makes them so unique.

But true to his maverick style, Southall resists the temptation to follow suit, choosing instead to begin in the present day, with an anecdote about a disengaged youth calling him a “fat prick”.

The story that follows has everything you might expect: growing up in Llandudno, playing non-league football while working on the bins and building sites, making his professional debut for Bury, becoming the best goalkeeper in the world at Everton and then, later, a nomad of the lower leagues.

And Southall does show that he’s more than the cantankerous grump we all thought he was.

If we assume his account is accurate, he’s also incredibly loyal and dedicated to the point of obsessive. In fact, if his insistence that he “just wanted to play football” as much as possible is true, then he’s actually a pretty straightforward bloke, whose biggest pleasure is also his biggest vice.

He can be funny too. The pages of the book that are devoted to the utterly shambolic Welsh FA and the organisation’s tin pot committee will have you laughing out loud, as will Southall’s insightful observations on the calamitous management duo of Mike Walker and Dave Williams.

Without a doubt, you’ll know a lot more about Southall after reading The Binman Chronicles, and you might even get a flavour of what life was like at Everton in the 80s and 90s.

But for all its insight and pathos, it lacks a bit of scandal. It could just be me, but telling us that he found Gary Lineker to be a “nice fellow” as well as a top-class goalscorer is verging on boring.

The trouble is, I quite enjoy the odd tale about orgies that involved half of the first 11 or juvenile pranks that comprised players defecating in each other’s kitbags. Don’t get me wrong, The Binman Chronicles perfectly captures the essence of one of the most enigmatic characters British football has seen in the last half century.

I just wish Southall had wanted to do a bit more than “just play football”. If he had, his story might have had enough salaciousness for the more puerile among us.

BIG NEV ON…Howard Kendall 

(during his first spell as Everton manager) 

“Right away I was impressed by Howard Kendall, who was clearly a decent fellow and a real bundle of energy. His first words to me were, ‘Do you want a drink?’ When I told him I was a teetotaller he looked at me as if I’d landed from another planet.”

Howard Kendall 

(during his second spell as Everton manager)

“He hadn’t changed at all, but then people don’t over a few years, do they? As a person he was probably slightly less tolerant; or expected better. When he didn’t get it he was a bit more sarcastic this time than he was the first time round. But otherwise, he was just the same old Howard. For me it was good because it meant that I could keep doing things my way.”

Howard Kendall 

(during his third spell as Everton manager) 

“The following week we travelled to Leeds. I’d gone expecting to play, but at the hotel on the morning of the match the goalkeeping coach, Mervyn Day, told me that Howard wanted to speak to me in his room.

“‘You do know I love you,’ he said when I came in. He looked awful, like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“To be honest, this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Howard Kendall stood in his dressing gown with his bollocks hanging out and telling you he loves you is not a good sight.”

Big Nev in ’97

Colin Harvey 

“Colin was a different type of person to Howard; probably a little bit more stern. I always found Colin great, a man in tune with the way I saw the game. Howard knew how to handle me, but Colin understood my obsessiveness and relentless desire to be the best. As I’ve said before, he embodied Everton’s Nil Satis Nisi Optimum motto and so did I. We were like peas in a pod.”

Mike Walker

 “It became clear on the pre-season tour of Scandinavia that Mike Walker wasn’t right for a club like Everton. It was a complete shambles. We went over to Sweden pre-season and it was absolutely roasting. We trained in the hottest part of the day, eleven o’clock till one o’clock, in blistering heat (so that he’d get a tan, we thought). We used to just mess around. One day Jimmy Martin the kit man was late getting our gear out and I had my boots on, but I didn’t have a top or shorts. I got fed up of waiting so walked out with just my gloves and boots on. There was all these people watching us, but to be fair to Mike he never batted an eyelid. I just wandered round like that stark bollock naked, until Jimmy came running out with my kit.”

Joe Royle 

“At the time I thought I had a decent relationship with Joe, but it’s since transpired that we didn’t share those sentiments. In his 2005 autobiography, Joe devoted an entire chapter to me, entitled ‘The Southall Factor’. In it he said my agility was ‘waning’, I’d put on weight, that he identified me as a ‘potential weak link’ when he first joined the club. He also rubbished my managerial aspirations, saying that I lacked the ‘indefinable quality of being able to treat players as people’, whatever that means. I don’t think I did too badly for him, all these things considered.”

The Welsh FA

 “You’ve got to realise what the Welsh FA were like. They were butchers, bakers, candlestick makers; they weren’t professional people at all. They all had their own shops, their own businesses, and what right that gave them to choose a manager is beyond me. I always thought they should have an ex-player on the board, and still do. They’re all nice people, but their football knowledge you could write on the heel of my shoe, because they haven’t got a clue. I’m not being nasty, it’s just because they’ve never worked in football. Even though they’re in that environment every game, no one gets into the dressing room, or knows how players think. “

Scousers

 “It’s hard to describe Scousers, but all the way back to my childhood in Llandudno I’ve always felt great affinity to the people and their city and believe them to be a breed apart. They’re a bit special. They’ve all got really good hearts. They’re quite aggressive, because it’s a hard city and you have to fight for what you want and sometimes just to earn a living. They’re determined. They have a great humour, but a bit of class to go with it too.”

His infamous half-time 

sit down

 “On the opening day of the 1990-91 season we played newly promoted Leeds United at Goodison. It was shit. We were shit. By half-time we were 2-0 down and conceded a third not long after. At half-time I needed to get out of the dressing room and get my head together, so I left and went and sat down in the goalmouth. People went on about it and said it was a protest, but it wasn’t at all. At worst it was badly timed, coming around the same time as my transfer request. I certainly wasn’t protesting against Colin, who didn’t even know about it until that evening.”

The Binman Chronicles is published by De Coubertin Books, RRP £18.99.