Ruling the Roost: The Managers of Sheffield Wednesday by Richard Crooks Review

By Karl Hornsey

Richard Crooks has already delved into the rivalry between Sheffields Wednesday and United, and looked back at several decades of the beautiful game in his ‘What Was Football Like in…?’ series of books, so it seems natural for his latest offering to be this comprehensive guide to every manager to have taken the hotseat at his beloved Wednesday. Well, every one until the current season, but keeping up with the changes at the club is no mean feat in the current circumstances.

It’s certainly a timely release, with Wednesday lurching from one crisis to the next in recent years, and only last week being placed into administration after years, some would argue decades, of mismanagement off the field. Crooks cares so passionately about the club and that love shines through in this book, as he offers up his opinions on some of the managers, not just with the benefit of hindsight, but having lived through many of the changes and contributed to the discussions at the time about this manager or that one.

“Historic figures”

Crooks also includes interviews with former goalkeeper and manager Chris Turner, for a fascinating take on his time at the club both on and off the field, along with respected broadcaster and journalist Alan Biggs, whose knowledge of the sport in South Yorkshire is second to none. The most interesting part of the book for me comes in the early chapters, focusing on managers I knew the least about, and ones who set the club off on the right footing and stayed there for the longest reins. To demonstrate the incredible churn of managers in recent decades, which is by no means a phenomenon unique to Wednesday, the first half of the book covers just over 100 years of history, while the second half just the last 25 years or so, as so many men came and then went, failing to make a lasting impression on the club, for one reason or another.

That in itself is a fascinating aspect of the book and highlights one of the problems of the modern game, but it does also mean that the latter chapters feel like déjà vu, with each name coming and going in seemingly less time than the one before, leaving behind a bewildering trail of chaos at the club. It also means that those real giants and historic figures at the club feel a little shortchanged by the number of pages allocated to them, in comparison to those that stayed for the equivalent of five minutes. All in all though, this is a great snapshot of how the club evolved, its highs and lows, and shows how quickly fortunes can change at a club when the wrong – or right – decisions are made.

‘Ruling the Roost: The Managers of Sheffield Wednesday’ by Richard Crooks is published by Pitch Publishing

Karl Hornsey( Writer )

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.
@KarlHornsey, hornskar

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