Gary

“Riquelme has become less a player than a cipher for an ideology”. This elegant biography in a sentence turns up on page 326 of “Inverting the Pyramid – a history of football tactics“. If you’re even mildly engaged by those twelve words, the 351 pages that surround them will reward you with an extraordinarily rich rollercoaster ride through what is less a history of football tactics, more a history of men thinking about football.

Fortunately our guide, Jonathan Wilson, presents his history in an orthodox chronological structure as we flit from continent to continent, looking on, as the pyramid (the formation in which a team is set up) is not so much inverted as perverted from 2-3-5 to 3-2-2-3 (the classic WM) to 4-1-4-1 and all points in between. Tantalisingly, a possible future of 4-6-0 is mooted – indeed Sir Alex Ferguson’s Champions League winners may well have played this formation without us realising.

But it would be a huge disservice to the writer to give the impression that this is a technical theoretical treatise – like the best popular history, the writer wears his learning lightly without ever talking down to his readers. And, also characteristic of the genre, the narrative is packed with unforgettable portraits of extraordinary men. Wanderers likeJimmy Hogan embedded football thinking in central Europe and Bela Guttmann proselytised his 4-2-4 gospel from continent to continent. Great teams, as well known as Hungary’s 1953 vanquishers of England and as forgotten as Austria’s inter-war Wunderteam, are brought to life as if they were playing last week. Influential players, like the tragic Matthias Sindelar and coaching innovators like Arrigo Sacchi are placed within the wider ebb and flow of football thinking and given due credit for their willingness to theorise, then practise new ways of playing football.

One puts the book down with two overwhelming feelings. Firstly, that the game is so very much richer than is generally perceived in Britain – never mind 6-0-6 callers pleading for a “bit of passion” as the panacea for all English footballers’ shortcomings, how about the sheer blinkeredness of those paid to explain the game, from TV pundits to writers in the Press Box? Secondly, that the game is evolving more rapidly than ever before and that British managers and coaches (one florid-featured Manchester-based pensioner excepted) are as emotionally and psychologically distant they have ever been from such developments. If I live thirty more years, I am more convinced than ever that I will not see England win a World Cup.

Oh, just one last thing. On page 284, Watford didn’t beat Everton 5-4, they lost 4-5. I know – I was there and nothing quite beats that, even if Wilson’s book comes mighty close

It's only towards the end of this book that the thing that's missing, a feeling that's nagged away for some time, becomes evident - this is a rare autobiography (unexpectedly so from this writer) in which the subject is tangential to the narrative. Alexei Sayle has but a walk-on, or walk around (there's a lot of that), part in his own story. I suspect that may be rectified in Volume Two since, as the title suggests, he's a schoolboy pretty much throughout these 300 or so pages.

For all that somewhat empty centre, there's still much to enjoy in what is, essentially, a series of amusing, occasionally funny, often insightful, vignettes. At its heart are the three persons who dominate the narrative - Sayle's mother Molly, his father Joe and the Communist Party.

Molly is a fractious, domineering, Jewish woman who gave up everything to marry Joe and the Communist Party, perhaps not quite in that order. A shrieking mother, a true-believer and panicky wife, she is also charismatic, loving and unforgettable. It would be easy to tag her as a caricature, another of Alexei's flights of surreal fantasy that constitute his comic signature, but women like her exist (or existed) in Liverpool, so there was no stretch required from me.

Joe is also familiar. A quiet, driven man who has a gift for befriending strangers and gives almost all his considerable energy to the National Union of Railwaymen and communism at home and abroad.

There's a lot of abroad in this book, since Joe's rail pass gives free travel around Europe and the Sayles, looking across the road at daytrippers to Rhyl or seven days in Blackpool families, of course do the contrary and bundle a young Alexei on to the expresses to Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria. Such exotic destinations yield one picaresque tale after another, but also open Alexei's eyes to the distance between propaganda at home and reality overseas. That, and an unsuccessful if not unhappy time at grammar school, where he stood out as awkward and gobby (not easy in Liverpool, that) make the boy the iconoclast the man was to become. Though largely agreeing with the Marxists' diagnoses of the ills of society, he fails to subscribe to The Party's cures and is wholly unsuited to its ascetic, joyless culture.

Ten years younger than Sayle, his brief but poignant descriptions of his (and my) home city strike me as perceptive and true, both on the macro-scale of the insensitivity of idealistic town planners and the micro-scale of the uglification of bus logos and railway uniforms. Unlike so many of us, Sayle is not a sentimental Scouser and, like me, was keen to get away to London and not so keen to return. Other than that, and a fairly standard account of only child loneliness and insecurity, we don't learn a whole lot more about his interior life - maybe that's coming next.

Is it funny? It is, but at least as much Peculiar as Ha! Ha! - but, if you want to hear the laughlines, YouTube is only a click away.

The Audible version catches all the familiar ticks and hesitations in the delivery, equivocation underpinning every stance, every attitude - with some exceptions: see below. Even at 84 (when he recorded this version) the demons that have occupied thousands of hours with shrinks, are still there, and so too the comic timing and self-deprecating asides.

What we get is a fairly conventional autobiography, from unhappy schooldays to extraordinarily youthful success writing gags for the cream of American comics and on into television and the movies. It's a huge body of work, his compulsion to write rivalling Alexander Hamilton's, but there's much else in his long life too. Food, sport, family, company and lots and lots of women, with many of whom he appears to be on good terms.

There are few juicy stories, the kind you'd expect to appear on the dust cover. For example, he merely reports that he was at the Cooper-Clay fight in London with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate (!) and discloses little of private conversations with the likes of Henry Miller and Tennessee Williams beyond his (I think) genuine bafflement that "They liked my work!" Almost everyone mentioned is given a postive opinion. Actor after actor is praised for their skills - in a 20th century way, the actresses are usually referred to as beautiful too - and so his many collaborators behind the camera are praised to the skies. He's like a critic who never gives less than four stars.

We hear almost nothing about his films as he doesn't watch them. Not much about where he gets his ideas or how he develops them. Very little about money except an overlong account of being stiffed by a long time friend and backer. He likes the fine things in life - once a user of private flights, always a user of private flights - but he asserts that he didn't work for money, he worked for work.

And there's the elephant in the room. He is assertive in defending himself and cites evidence both substantial and circumstantial - but he would, wouldn't he? - but some facts are irrefutable. He has been married (apparently happily for both parties) for 28 years to Soon Yi, Mia Farrow's daughter. Given what cost comes with that for both of them, it's a remarkablely robust marriage. For what it's worth, I've long held the view that interrogating the internal mechanisms of the love between two people is not just fruitless, it's destructive and, somewhat coloured by living through the tabloids villification of gay people in the 70s and 80s, if it's legal, that's all we can say. As he points out, positions have been taken towards him and his work and nothing at all can change them now. There are strong accusations of definitely illegal acts too of course.

But the art is not the artist. Once you go down that road, there wouldn't be much left. His writing, his stand-up and his films have always made me laugh and they still do. They are also beautifully photographed and exquisitely acted. That's a gift I cherish and if this book is not as funny as the short stories or Sleeper or Take The Money and Run or Manhattan or the Moose joke, well, not much is.

From the moment David Walsh watched Lance Armstrong riding the Tour de France 1999 prologue and thought (no, not thought, knew) something wasn’t right, his life became consumed with an Ahabish obsession to slay the biggest fish in cycling’s, perhaps even sport’s, waters. Seven Deadly Sins is his account of how he played his part in Lance’s eventual evisceration and of why he so doggedly pursued the man who had cut him away from his innocent love of professional cycling – a sport the external terrible beauty of which hid an internal terrible horror.

In the early 80s, Walsh was smitten by the sport and its stars – especially fellow Irishmen, the sprinter-turned-Classics-hardman Sean Kelly, the softly spoken Dubliner Stephen Roche and the kid trying to make it, Paul Kimmage. He was soon travelling with the circus, reporting Le Tour and other big races for the Sunday Times and getting his first glimpse of cycling’s unseen world, with the rattle of the pill box in the back pocket, the contempt with which those that rode on “bread and water” were held by the “committed” and cancerous effect of doping on the souls of those that did not dope (and thus lost) and those that did dope (and thus lied). The love faded and the journalist’s instinct for a story took over. David Walsh was no longer in the cycling game, he was in the doping game and he was going to tell that story, come hell or high water. From 1999, it was not about the bike.

The book captures much of the loneliness of the life Walsh chose. Who wanted this journalist to spit in the soup? Not the cyclists, the vast majority of whom knew what was required, and did what was required, without breaking the omerta. Not his fellow journalists, most of whom were as besotted as Walsh had been before the scales fell from his eyes – anyway, their jobs depended on access to riders and such access could be denied. And not the administrators either, whose monuments tottered on piles of used syringes, too plentiful to deal with – take one too many of those riders’ little helpers away and the whole lot might come crashing down.

Walsh’s moral compass never faltered and he began to find allies, find men and women who would talk, each disgusted in their own way about how cycling had been hollowed out by cynics and charlatans. Men and women as spiky and fearless as Walsh, found a confessor and scribe in the Irishman, a man who would listen and believe and, unlike so many others, act. In turn, Walsh got support from his editor over years when readers’ letters stacked up telling him that the punters didn’t want to know.

And there was good reason for so many who suspected (and the few that knew) to keep their heads down. There wasn’t just the carrot of money, glory and glamour for those who went along with the spectacle, but the stick of banishment for those who associated with “the troll” Walsh. Journalists were sued (Walsh and colleague Pierre Ballester’s book LA Confidentiel is not available in the UK for fear of libel), whistleblowers like Christophe Bassons were forced out of the peloton and many veiled and unveiled threats were issued by men with the power to make good on them.

Slowly Walsh found more like Kimmage – those who had been on the inside and knew what went on behind the closed doors of anonymous hotels at races and training camps. Honest men like Italian coach Sandro Donati led him to Professor Francesco Conconi, a man very interested in the impact of blood composition on athletic performance, and on further to Conconi’s protege, Michele Ferrari, Lance Armstrong’s long-time adviser, and doctor to many successful cyclists – and believer in EPO’s danger being equivalent to that of orange juice. Walsh’s contempt for the medics with their “training programmes”, their lists with the code names, is greater than that he bears towards the cyclists – except Lance.

If contempt runs through the book as the grotesque freakshow’s scale grows and grows, there’s love too. Donati is praised, but that is as nothing compared to Walsh’s platonic love of two women – Betsy Andreu and Emma Reilly. Betsy, wife of ex-Armstrong team-mate and friend Frankie Andreu, was fired by a zealous sense of right and wrong as it affected her and her husband. She would not stand for Frankie doing drugs and she would not lie for Lance – she told Walsh that Lance had admitted to using PEDs in hospital during his cancer treatment. She also lent Walsh some of her indomitable spirit just when he needed it. Emma Reilly was Lance’s soigneur and confidante – she was on the inside and happy to tell anyone who would listen and sod the consequences. (Both women clearly liked Lance – a man who could be monstrous, especially when threatened, but who could be charming, decent and good company in a world where the testosterone didn’t just come in hypodermics).

The feeling that something wasn’t right in 1999 had grown into a case against Lance that resided in that space that eats at the soul of the journalist – strong enough to convince any reasonable editor, but not strong enough to stand up in a court. Walsh’s evidence had been compiled over years, but still Lance could, and did, say that he had never failed a test (at least not one he couldn’t make disappear). And for all the rickety worthlessness of so many of the drug protocols, plenty did fail tests – that, and the fact that Lance only really rode to win on five days of the year, made me believe in the Armstrong cult for too long. Roll in the despicable bullying of those who suggested that cycling’s Emperor had no clothes and it becomes easy to see how this big lie lasted so long and why it took a state-backed agency and Floyd Landis’ ethical crisis and flatly damning confession, to provide the smoking gun and see the seven jerseys lowered at long last.

Seven Deadly Sins shows signs of being a somewhat hurried in its publishing (it really should have an index) and there are occasional stylistic ticks that grate a little – I just can’t abide the one sentence paragraph – but what it loses in polish, it more than compensates in its fiery righteousness. Walsh had the energy of a lover scorned – cycling had done that to him – and he had his small coterie of believers which took on the characteristics of a terrorist cell, plotting and planning to explode truths in a sprawling landscape of deceit. I’ve written of my own feelings about Armstrong here, and, 400+ pages later, little has changed on that score. But I have a newly revived respect for those that dare to stand up for their beliefs, for those that won’t be browbeaten nor warned off, for those who refuse the easy option in full knowledge that the harder option will be very hard indeed. And, not for the first time and not for the last, I am reminded that – even in these media saturated days (perhaps because of these media saturated days) – the best place to hide is in the full glare of the spotlight.

After his first volume of autobiography detailed Alexei's eccentric upbringing and first forays into comedy, his second is a more conventional tale of showbiz ups and downs (but mainly ups).

The older Sayle keeps a lot tantalisingly out of reach - he thinks much about the technique of comedy, but rarely analyses his own magic nor that of others. Big breaks come along - MCing at the Comic Strip, a part in a big budget Hollywood movie, a solo tour - but they just seem to happen, as if to another person altogether. For such an aggressive presence in culture and avowardly uninterested in being liked, he seems reluctant to dish the dirt on his friends and collaborators, perhaps only Rik Mayall attracting the mildest of rebukes.

For all that unexpected vanilla flavouring, he is still a compelling companion, a sharp observer of a changing culture and a man always aware that every sucess came at a price. Maybe the most revealing story in the volume concerns his willingness to stay in touch with his contemporaries from his teenage aand early twenties years, now embittered men expecting the big shot to buy the drinks (which he does). It's a kind of performative "staying in touch with my roots" but you get the feeling that he knows that it's a charade. That he didn't feel the need to go any further into those contradictions is a little frustrating.

But if loyalty (and he is clearly loyal to those to whom he owes a debt for the support they gave him when he needed it most) is a personality flaw, then it just might be that Sayle is just a nice guy despite all that stagey shouting. Or maybe that's why a biography will be more interesting than an autobiography.