Swindon Town’s Journey to the Premier League by David Wallis – Review
By Karl Hornsey
The early days of the Premier League saw several clubs have their moment in the spotlight, before the more recent trend for the same clubs to be involved, give or take the odd revelation.
The relative predictability of the top flight is one of the many scourges of the modern game, but David Wallis has looked back to the early 1990s to tell the story of how unfashionable Swindon Town took their place, albeit briefly, at the top table. Sadly, Swindon are possibly better known for how they didn’t gain promotion, rather than how they did, which makes for a fascinating tale that Wallis tells excellently.
This is a story told in chronological fashion over a period of five seasons, starting at the end of the 1980s, and is also the tale of four managers who will largely be looked back upon with great fondness. Lou Macari, Ossie Ardiles and Glenn Hoddle were the men at the helm who helped Swindon into the top flight, with John Gorman then being the man in charge during their one and only season in the Premier League.
“Huge highs”
No disrespect to the club, but all three moved onto bigger outfits, while Gorman was left in charge of a squad arguably weaker than the ones that preceded it. Wallis also adds a chapter in which he interviews five of the key players from that time – Fraser Digby, Duncan Shearer, Steve White, Shaun Taylor and Paul Bodin – which, as a Swindon supporter for more than 50 years, must have been a wonderful and surreal experience. Their honesty about events around that time really adds something extra to the book, and is fascinating to read.
Wallis achieves something that’s always quite difficult when a fan turns author, and that’s to be objective about events on and off the field at his beloved club, especially when there are so many extremes to deal with during this short period in Swindon’s history.
The huge highs of promotion (twice) are told with pride but in a matter of fact way, while it can’t have been easy, even at this distance, to write about the various financial issues and challenges that marred some of the finest times in the club’s history. Having access to so many people involved through these times makes for a great inside access to events, and Wallis deserves credit for putting together a story that serves as a reminder that, with the stars aligning, any club can still have its day in the spotlight in the ‘greatest league in the world’.
‘Swindon Town’s Journey to the Premier League’ by David Wallis is published by Pitch Publishing
Karl’s love of writing was piqued at the age of eight, when he won a Blue Peter badge in an essay-writing competition. The location of said badge might be a mystery now, but the memory never fades. Hours spent writing about sport as a teenager, in pre-internet years when you had to make your entertainment, honed his skills, and Karl has worked in TV and radio listings at PA Media for 28 years, and the age of hybrid working means 50% of that can be at home listening to Classic FM and thinking about his next visit to his beloved Yorkshire Dales.
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