Author: Frank Gamble
ISBN No:
Review date: 05/12/2025
No of pages: 0
Publisher: SportsBooks
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
Frank Gamble has given us a rarity: an original football memoir. ‘The idea for this book,’ he says on page 134, ‘was to try and express what it was like crossing the threshold of just being a fan, no matter how fervent, to depending on that commitment for your livelihood.’ In the 1980s, he worked for Liverpool Football Club as the lottery sales manager.
Liverpool FC taxed and insured his beige, nearly-new 1300cc Ford Escort estate. ’How cool was that?’ Frank writes. ‘Had somebody offered me a swap for a Ferrari there and then I would have politely declined.’ Besides an inside view of Anfield, we get a chunk of northern social history. As someone who has only been to Anfield once (Liverpool 2, Crystal Palace 1, 1991), I learned a lot and could relate to so much of it. Most famously, the boot-room staff and Bob Paisley in particular. ‘The first thing I noticed about these revered gentlemen was how down to earth they all were but how focused and committed they were too,’ Gamble reports. The boot-room staff had attention to detail, and made time for a bit of fun, ‘something the ordinary fans didn’t get to see’. Admittedly Gamble is hardly the first to tell us of the likes of Souness, Grobelaar, and Joe Fagan, Gamble’s favourite: ‘Many’s the time I was sent to pick up tins of emulsion for him from Crown paint’s depot off Cherry Lane and drive the short journey to Joe’s house to drop it off.’ Joe used to enjoy decorating , you see. Gamble appeals because he is like us if we were in his shoes; dumbstruck, but delighting in his job, squeezing money out of the 150-odd retail outlets selling the lottery tickets. In those simpler times, scratch cards were novel (top prize: £1000!), the players’ lounge had a pay-phone, and Liverpool on the field had a backbone of Scots, as from the club’s birth (and as told in the book Team of All the Macs, reviewed WSC 297). Just before 3pm kick-off ‘the Golden Goal lads would dash in and unload their numbered khaki canvas sacks onto the counter, rapidly cash up and then pick up their reward of a match ticket and a few quid’. Liverpool you recall were pioneers by having a shirt sponsor, but Gamble reveals how Manchester United ‘were light years ahead’ commercially even in 1983, when a meal at Old Trafford came with a bottle of red wine with a black devil on the label. Gamble’s honesty avoids nostalgia. He can admit he was a ‘right cocky sod’ and that he left the club as his job soured. Heysel has the longest and most agonised chapter. Besides the rioting fans, Gamble blames UEFA and the Belgian cup final stadium organisers. Anyone with an interest in modern Merseyside will enjoy this book, written in a warm and easy style that lets Gamble relate funny (and filthy) stories; his Scouse pride; and his sadness after Heysel and Hillsborough. He can even end with hope: success comes in cycles and Liverpool will win another title. ‘I was just lucky to be around when it was last our turn and made a living out of it too.’
II
So much of what Gamble says, the fan can relate to. At the very start, though living in Everton and the son of an Everton fan, he goes in April 1961 (at the age of six years and seven months) to see Liverpool reserves draw 2-2 with Huddersfield reserves, and he is hooked. As he writes: ‘In places like Liverpool where football is as important as air and water, but there is more than one team, your choice of allegiance is the first major decision you will probably take in life. Once made, rarely does it change, your character becomes questionable if you become a turncoat.’ So it is in politics, he might have added. I would only quibble that he uses some unnecessary clichés early on, and when he writes about actual games of football it’s not outstanding; here, as elsewhere, he writes like the fan he is. He is wise enough to know that it is not Frank Gamble we want to read about, but the likes of Sam Lee and Ronnie Moran, who (strictly speaking) he worked with; and he is able enough not to falter. The story never has chance to flag, whether telling of booze (plenty of it, in the workplace and after work), or days out to Wembley – Liverpool seemed to have so many, then! Frank Gamble does not falter even when Tony Hateley, ‘former one-season wonder and centre-forward carthorse’, having become Frank’s counterpart at Everton, sniffs around Anfield to try to take Frank’s job. How many of us could resist such a threat?!
