This isn’t a bad game of Championship Manager.
This is what was happening to West Ham United Football Club just over a year ago.
This book tries to make sense of how the impossible graduated to the improbable and then, simply happened.
As Glenn Roeder awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a Nationwide League football manager.
There is every chance that it happened like this in May 2003, in a Whitechapel hospital bed, but for the writer the revelation really came with the news on Thursday 19th June 2003 that on Sunday May 9th 2004 West Ham would be completing their 85th season in the Football League with an away fixture against Wigan Athletic. Wigan Athletic. What went wrong?
Our Days Are Few picks up at the end of the West Ham’s calamitous 2002-03 season. It is the story of just what happened to the first really famous football club in the twenty-first century to suffer the ignominy of relegation from the Football Premiership, the top football league in the world. It examines why things can never be the same again for London’s Premier East End footballing side. But it’s more than the story of a fallen football team; it’s a tale of an epic failure of human loyalty, of a subsequent financial freefall and of the sudden strange and obscene importance of money in sport. It’s a book that looks back thirty years for clues as to how all of this could have happened.
Our Days Are Few focuses broadly on West Ham United’s 2003-04 season. It looks at how a team who had only had nine managers in their one hundred year history up until August 2003 suddenly had three different ones in the same season – first the nervous and reticent Glenn Roeder, then football’s ‘Ambassador’ Sir Trevor Brooking, and finally Alan Pardew, who a court ruled wouldn’t be allowed to take up his post for a month after his appointment. The book also examines how English football graduated from being a simple working class pastime to a middle class media obsession, with all the power and influence normally exerted by the Catholic church. Has Rupert Murdoch become its modern day Holy Father?
The title of the book is a paraphrase of a line from the full version of West Ham’s adopted ‘Bubbles’ theme, the lyric of which explores the way bubbles themselves lead a life not unlike that of a ‘sweet butterfly’ – success is as ephemeral in football as in life.
Martin Godleman has been a fan, writer, commentator and video producer for the club since August 1991. He has watched the club’s decline with increasing fascination and disbelief, writing a book that should appeal to anyone who has an interest in football, particularly those who don’t follow the Manchester United and Arsenals of this world.
