Soccer
The churn of sporting memoirs sees multitudes published and just as quickly forgotten, but the 1976 diary of Millwall FC midfielder Eamon Dunphy stands out for its honest insights. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
Beyond the ‘ghosted’ pap: Eamon Dunphy’s classic memoir
I called my agent recently to ask about ghostwriting. For this column, I’d spoken with a few writers who’d ghosted the memoirs of various athletic stars, and I personally knew a few who’d provided the service to musicians or actors. About the business side of things, however, I knew very little.
The conversation reinforced much that I had heard from ghostwriters a few years ago – namely about the indifference many subjects have to the book that will bear their name and profess to tell their life story. There was an anecdote about the retired icon who refused to share any time with the writer, obliging them to produce what we call in the trade a “clip job” – an artless regurgitation of old newspaper pieces.
There was one story about another legend who was so charmless and self-absorbed that a ghostwriter could not be found who was willing to suffer the thorns and thistles of their ego. In the end, their own agent fulfilled the role. There were also several stories of autobiographies produced not at the insistence of their subjects but by their managers, who felt that a thick but empty memoir was the next logical step in ensuring their client’s cultural status. In such a way are forests felled to make books that are rarely read and quickly forgotten.
They are more like billboards than books, and their content matters far less than the simple fact of their existence. It’s what talent managers like to call “brand consolidation” and, each Christmas, stockings are filled with them.
There are some exceptions, though, of wonderful books written about sport by those who played it professionally – or came close. C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (cricket) is one; Jim Bouton’s Ball Four (baseball) is another. But perhaps my favourite is Eamon Dunphy’s Only a Game?
At 28, Eamon Dunphy was already a soccer veteran. Millwall FC’s manager sought his counsel and he called the teenage apprentices “son”. When Dunphy came to write his diary of Millwall’s shambolic 1973-74 season, he had already played more than 250 times for the club and received 23 caps for his country, the Republic of Ireland.
Millwall dwelled in the second division, and Dunphy was a member of the so-called Class of ’71 that missed promotion to the country’s highest league by one point. But as he records in his remarkably lucid and honest diary, this was going to be “our year”.
He could feel it. The team had “character”, he wrote. It’s a word he uses with regrettable frequency, and which for him meant several things: players who assumed responsibility for roles that weren’t theirs; teammates who refused to capitulate to superior teams and could grind out results. Commitment was everything to Dunphy, and in his diaries he frequently expresses contempt for sides possessed of greater skills but flakier attitudes.
“Cowards” were men who, having suffered a humiliation, sought to hide on the pitch; “real men” were those who humiliated themselves and kept risking failure anyway. It wasn’t just a game, he thought: it revealed virtue, and all the talent in the world didn’t mean anything if it wasn’t practised with courage. There is never a moment reading Only a Game? where you sense that Dunphy’s opinions about character and collective spirit are platitudinous – these are things he has thought about deeply and is genuinely committed to.
Before the season begins, the lads travel to Bournemouth for a few days of leisure. There are amusing descriptions of pranks, not least the team’s exploitation of their talented young signing’s supreme gullibility and self-conceit. Gordon Hill would go on to play for England, but at the time he was just a teenaged mark for the older players. One calls the team’s hotel lobby asking for Hill, pretending to be a journalist keen to profile “Millwall’s next star” and have him prepare for an imaginary photo shoot. The hoax continues for weeks, the “journalist” ringing and offering increasingly absurd excuses for delaying the interview and shoot, and poor young Hill never twigs.
Dunphy’s never shy about recording his opinions. Goalkeepers “know nothing” about the game, and he reserves special contempt for fans who apply unforgiving standards upon the team that they themselves would never face, or tolerate, in their own work lives.
It’s not all cavalier grievance. Far from it. Dunphy is intelligent, sincere and unusually shrewd about his club’s politics. He details the increasingly fractious relationship between a weak manager and his insolent captain and anticipates the degradation of morale that follows.
He writes well about the coach’s lack of credibility, his hapless commitment to the latest fashions – drills that alienate players with their unnecessary complexity or seeming irrelevance. Dunphy demands efficiency and relevance from their training sessions and, rarely seeing it, describes with increasing anxiety the boredom and quiet rebellions of his teammates during their sessions. It bodes poorly, he thinks.
After a loss to Preston North End, Dunphy writes that his teammate Gordon Bolland is “a beautiful player when playing well, [but he] has lost his confidence … Confidence is a fragile and delicate commodity, and you cannot answer the ‘Whys?’ [about its loss].”
Dunphy describes talented players who are no longer effortless instruments for their own talent but instead hostages to their insecurity, and as I read these sections I thought of Hemingway’s description of his friend, rival and whipping boy F. Scott Fitzgerald: “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings,” he wrote in A Moveable Feast. “At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.”
This could apply to a few of Dunphy’s teammates that season.
As unusually bright and honest as Dunphy seems, he’s initially less clear-eyed about the prospects of Millwall and the “character” of his side. Having started his diary with lengthy descriptions of his optimism about the club’s promise, the pain of serial losses that start the season is softened by his invoking the team’s “character”.
But when his severe repetition of that word achieves the effect of incantation, one wonders if this is clear-eyed analysis or self-deception. One suspects the latter, a theme he writes well about in these same diaries.
After the players perform their own “inquest” into a loss, Dunphy writes: “A player like Stevie Brown, who is not particularly skilful, is open to scapegoating. You get what amounts to a whispering campaign starting about a player. And the longer the whispering campaign goes on, the more convincing the argument becomes. Even to the point of totally ignoring reality … The truth at Fulham was that it was the fault of Alan Dorney, who is one of our best players, consistently so. But that did not fit in with the theories. ‘Alan is a good player. Brownie is a suspect character. Therefore, it must have been Brownie.’ And this is incredible self-deception, not only on the part of individuals, but by the group as a whole … I don’t think we all realise how often we practise this self-deception.”
Few of us do, and that includes our narrator. Dunphy’s sense that the team is “on the brink of something” is true but not in the way he hopes – Millwall will succumb to its fractiousness, shrinking morale and, eventually, its resignation to failure.
Dunphy will be dropped for two weeks. When he is, he’s stung by how impersonally it happens – he’s handed a reserves kit for a training game – and goes home that night and cries. He’s hurt and furious, but given his pride and intelligence, he also serves as a judge of his own self-pity – he weighs it for irrationality and meagreness.
He quits the club; is persuaded to stay. He barely hears the consolations of teammates – they’re perfunctory expressions and thus mean nothing to him. From the stands, Dunphy – the man for whom commitment means everything – now finds himself secretly wishing for his team’s defeat. In his absence, the team’s loss increases his odds of returning to it. It’s an inescapable but taboo desire, but Dunphy gifts us his honesty about it. Watching the game against Sheffield Wednesday, he writes that “there is this terrible conflict the whole time. And it is the same for everybody who is dropped. You are always pleased when they have been beaten, because it means you are a candidate again. You are sick for the lads, of course, but your predominant emotion is delight.”
Earlier in the book, Dunphy says the ethics of football are conditional – upon you being in the team. He describes entering the changing room after his club’s loss and pretending to share his teammates’ disappointment as they pretend to believe his disappointment is real.
The preseason dream has curdled badly, and by November Dunphy has signed with Charlton Athletic in the third division. It was the beginning of the end, and the last diary entries are laced with bitterness.
Which is good. “Eamon Dunphy’s diary is the best and most authentic memoir by a professional footballer about his sport that I have yet read,” wrote Brian Glanville in the book’s original preface in 1976. “It is infinitely removed from the ‘ghosted’ pap which, with its endless banalities and disingenuousness, has so long been inflicted upon us.”
It’s true – there’s a reason it remains in print almost 50 years after its first publication. In Dunphy there was a wonderful combination of idealism and shrewdness, sympathy and self-regard – features that he had the intelligence and honesty to plainly confess and examine on the page. We’re rarely so lucky.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 17, 2025 as "Truth be told".
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