Manchester United Ruined My Life

Colin Shindler

First of all, don't get sidetracked by the rather snappy title. This book isn't really about Manchester United, nor is it even primarily a football book. Colin Shindler, the back cover tells us, is a very minor mover and shaker in film and TV and this is his life story. It's the story of a rather unhappy and very Jewish upbringing in Manchester in the fifties and three only slightly happier years at Cambridge in the sixties.

In between the real tragedies such as losing his mother at age 14 and the adolescent tragedies of being dumped by his first girlfriend, Shindler tells the story of the sporting rise and fall of his beloved Manchester City. Mostly it's a gloomy story. In Shindler's time, it seems, City were the same disaster-prone side they still are today. And all the time overshadowed by the bigger and more successful United. Even City's brief triumphant spell as League Champions at the end of the sixties was trumped by United winning the European Cup.

Shindler tells some excellent stories, some funny, some poignant. Hearing in 1968 that Bobby Kennedy had been shot, Shindler spent the day in a daze wondering who on earth would want to kill Bobby Kennedy the Manchester City midfielder.

As a member of the first generation of European Jews born after WWII, Shindler must have felt the war loomed large in his consciousness. Still, he excelled at German lessons in school. But when travelling across Europe as a teenager in the school holidays, his companion halts at the Swiss-German border, under orders from his Jewish family not to enter Germany.

But there are two things wrong with the book, though only one of them is Shindler's fault. Firstly, the sporting side of the story belongs very much to an era well before my time. The stories of football matches routinely finishing 8-1, 6-3, 7-2 and cricketers being divided into "gentlemen" and "players" might as well be from 140 years ago as 40 for all it means to me. Not that this is Shindler's fault and I'm sure the book would resonate with anyone of his generation. But perhaps in the hands of a better writer some of the long gone cricketers and footballers who populate the early part of the book would have come to life a bit more for this reader who grew up with 1980s football.

The book's second failing is that Shindler is no Nick Hornby. Hornby takes a very ordinary childhood in Fever Pitch and turns it into a very good book through clever writing. Shindler has much the better life story to tell but his book is in every way inferior. Shindler is as big a fan as Hornby, there's no doubting that, but whereas Hornby showed the reader what made him a fan Shindler merely documents his obsession. Leaving me, at least, feeling rather on the outside.