Book review - Deano - from Gipsyville to the Premiership - Dean Windass

My lasting memory of Dean Windass, something he recalls in his autobiography 'Deano', is him standing in front of the London Road End having just nodded home a last minute consolation goal at the end of a 1-7 thrashing by Birmingham City. He’s standing with mock braggadocio – mindful of the utter spanking we’d just received - with his hands cupped around his ears in that ‘who are you?’ pose which has become popular.

This memory is supported by the fact it’s this that forms the basis of my only (exaggerated) Dean Windass humorous anecdote, which loses quite a lot when written down. In short, this involves me saying that Windass stuns the frenzied crowd into silence the moment he makes emphasis of his prodigious lugs.

I told you that it loses a lot, perhaps everything, in translation, or perhaps it was no good in the first place. That. Probably that.

Windass is a member of a club who attained something akin to legend status within Oxford United without actually making a material contribution to the club’s progress; for this read: Tommy Mooney and, perhaps over time, Michael Duberry.

None of this trio would consider their time at Oxford as anything other than an overnight stop on their way to somewhere else. They played the game, on and, and more importantly, off the field. They had media connections, a decent line in 'bantz'.  There's even an element of us feeling privileged that they chose us. A privilege slightly dampened by the fact that they also chose 10 other clubs in their career with the same impact. Windass didn’t even last a season us, the deal that brought him to the club being as absurd as the man himself.

Dean Windass was the ultimate folly of an Oxford United in deep crisis. It seems that with the club on its knees, prospective investors in the club seemed willing to underwrite the purchase of Windass from Aberdeen on a £400,000 deal, a club record, which involves almost no exchange of cash at all. When Aberdeen came asking for their first payment, and the promised investment failed to materialise, it became clear the club couldn’t afford the player. He was, within a year of arriving, shipped off to the nouveau riche Bradford City in a near million pound deal. Any profit that was gained was ploughed into the club’s spiralling debts. This sent Windass on a path back to Hull (via a couple of other clubs) where he gained prominence by larruping in the goal that took The Tigers to their first season in the Premier League in 2008. After this Windass was gently pensioned off to fulfil a career as a fractionally less bonkers, but similarly fragile, Paul Gascoigne.

For me, there was no real urgency in reading Windass’ autobiography, partly because of the unsavoury connotations of the subtitle. But in fact, Gipsyville is not a generic, and racist, term for a bad place, it was the actual name of his early junior team. In addition, his time at Oxford was probably worthy of about 3 pages of text. Not only that, the whole thing suggested that it would aim to contribute to the ever growing game of one-upmanship amongst minor football celebrities into who had the maddest, craziest, most tiresome drinking stories.

The early part of the book is like a skimming stone dancing across a mill pond, it bounces along at some pace, but never gets into any real depth. It dances through his first spell at Hull, and his time at Aberdeen and Oxford at breakneck speed only slowing down once he reaches the Premier League with Bradford. There's a momentary mention with an apparently long term drink and violence problem.

He is also unbelievably candid with Windass admitting that he had no pubic hair until he was 17, he pee'ed on Ian Ormanroyd's leg in the shower during his time at Hull and that Stan Collymore shaved his testicles in the communal showers.

His time at Oxford is treated at pace, which is no real shock. However, as Windass has absolutely no edit function, it is surprisingly revealing of that period at the club. His initiation involved being threatened with a shotgun by someone called 'Terry', apparently a Malcolm 'Mally' Shotton authorised ritual which was only stopped when Paul Tait broke Terry's arm with a golf bag in a pique of terror.

Whether that's true or not is another question, he also claims to have lived in 'Bicester village' - which means he either lived in a village near Bicester, or that Hull is such a metropolis Bicester is village-like by comparison or he actually lived in a retail park amongst the Helly Hansen end of line bargains.

Windass' true moment in the sun with Oxford was the cup game against Chelsea in which he scored and we conceded in the last minute to a dubious penalty. The book reveals that Windass is the only person in history, even with the benefit of video replays, who still thinks that Kevin Francis fouled Gianluca Vialli. A fact made more remarkable when reviewing the YouTube clip of the incident;   Windass was about 3 feet away at the time.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is the extent of the 'Oxford mafia' that spread across English football during the 90s. Sir Alex Ferguson is the Don, of course, and Jim Smith is one of his acolytes. Smith nurtured Shotton, and Steve McLaren, who both bought Windass to their clubs, and Brian Horton who initially worked under Maurice Evans. Windass is one of many who bounced around that network of managers and coaches including; John Dreyer, Chris Hargreaves and Billy Whitehirst, who is barely mentioned in the first 240-odd pages but contributes a whole chapter at the end of the book.

It's safe to say that Oxford's influence over football is no longer as potent as it once was; but it is curious to see the echo of our mid-eighties success resonating into the a decade along the line.

...And if you thought Crewe was depressing

There was a predictable wash of simpering good will from Oxford fans on Sunday when it was revealed that jug-eared goalscoring funster, and (perhaps) the last Manor legend, Dean Windass, has been suffering from depression leading him to twice try and take his life.

Depression in sport is particularly on-trend nowadays. Gary Speed’s suicide, despite his apparent balance, talent, good looks and happy-go-lucky demeanour – none of which are signs of depression or otherwise - jolted everyone.

Now they’re all at it, last week Andrew Flintoff presented a documentary on it involving some of the decade’s most celebrated sporting names. In the process he recognised that some of his own misdemeanours were a demonstration of some kind of depressive tendency.

You suspect that when The People, having spent weeks camped outside the Sporting Chance Clinic in the hope of spotting a big star through the tinted glass of some over-sized, pimped up four-wheel-drive, found out that Windass was prepared to come out, they were secretly punching the air in triumph. OK, it wasn’t a real star, but it was good enough.

The Windass story is a convenient one for a tabloid audience, but it is ultimately unhelpful. His is the standard narrative of a man who had it all, then without the structure and lustre of professional football lost his way. It involves; fast cars, loose women, money and booze. But he’s not the first to stare into an abyss after retiring from a profession offering such rewards.

I’m not suggesting that Windass is faking or just suffering from being a bit down. But it doesn’t help the wider message if people think you become depressed as the result of no longer being able to buy top of the range cars. Sadly, you can’t write a story that basically says ‘Everything was normal, nothing much happened and then I had the overwhelming urge to kill myself’.

When Neil Lennon and Stan Collymore both came out as suffering from depression years ago nobody took much notice. Both players were, in their own way, outsiders, and therefore, ‘typical’ of people with mental health issues. Lennon was a gnarly pitbull, maginalised by sectarianism, whose success was down to graft more than talent. Collymore had talent, but managed to throw Ulrika Jonsson across a bar in a depressive stupor. I mean, how can he be depressed? Mate, she’s gorgeous and therefore, you're an idiot.

Now apparently 'normal' people, like Speed, and happy people, like Windass have got it. Accordingly, we react appropriately with a knowing sympathetic nod towards football’s last taboo (apart from the gay thing, obviously).

Hours before The People story broke, Oxford fans were lining up to lambast the team for its sloppy defeat to Crewe. Days after he was being begged to stay, James Constable was being pressed to leave because he’s 'not up to this level'. Similarly, Chris Wilder should recognise his limited competence and step aside, after we lost our first in seven, conceding our second goal in 6,300 minutes.

Single events don’t, in themselves, cause depression but they can trigger depressive episodes in people who are prone to its grip. The best thing you can do for a depressive is create a healthy and stable environment in which they can function and manage their condition. They need to exercise, eat well, sleep and generally ensure that life remains devoid of extremes.

Football excels in creating an environment of extreme reactions to episodic success and failure. This is conveniently labelled ‘passion’ - the lifeblood of the sport which the media and marketers are happy to play up. Most people who actively attend football were brought up in, or are the product of, the football culture of the 1970s and 80s when football evolved from being a diversion from the working week to being overtly tribal, confrontational and aggressive.

It wasn't always like this. There’s an old joke about Sheffield FC – the oldest club in the country – if they were the first club, then who did they play? Well, the members of the club formed teams and played each other. It was club for people who enjoyed football. It wasn't concieved as a way of defining a town or region to the detriment of other towns or regions. In 1939 Southampton fans celebrated Portsmouth’s FA Cup win, now they tear each others’ throats out.

It makes me think of the difference between a patriot and a nationalist. A patriot loves his country; a nationalist hates every other country. I’m an Oxford United patriot and a football patriot, but increasingly we seem to be becoming football nationalists. We don't love our team so much as hate everyone elses'.

Now, on the terraces, abuse is the norm, online it's more venomous, on the pitch people kiss badges and rip their shirts off as a primal act of celebration following a goal, on the bench people get fired for losing a single match and referees are branded as the mentally retarded enemy of the game. And that’s not a description of the bad old days of the 1980s; it's a manifestation of a culture that exists today. What's more, it is wholly acceptable; a rebranded and remodelled version of the hooligan era. At least hooliganism was overtly bad.

Amidst this maelstrom, is the stricture of being a footballer. A cabal bound by common behaviours. Lee Steele’s homophobic tweet that lead to his dismissal from Oxford City last week was the illustration of the environment footballers are brought up in. To a man, it's reported that Lee Steele is a decent bloke, and Mike Ford, despite firing him, was prepared to go on record to support him and say he isn’t a homophobe. It seems that Lee Steele's principle crime is that he was engaging with a deeply learnt behaviour amongst footballers - banter. In the changing room this works because the rules are understood, it's a mechanism for sifting out those who are in the football fraternity and those who aren't. In any other environment, it's deeply offensive. He just seems to have to forgetten where he was.

This enclosed environment, full of its extremes, isn’t a healthy one for anyone to be involved in, let alone those prone to depression. And yet, despite its current profile within sport and the apparent meaningful sympathy we have towards its sufferers (well, the famous sufferers, at least) we are quite happy to fuel that unhealthy environment by destroying and worshiping its protagonists with all the extreme passion we can muster.

Statistically speaking, in a squad of 20, 5 will suffer some form of anxiety or depression. James Constable and Chris Wilder, like Windass, Speed, Collymore and Lennon, could be among that number at Oxford. Or maybe Alfie Potter. Or Peter Leven. Or, well, anyone. They may not even know that themselves, but it could be lurking, waiting for something to trigger it. We would do well to recognise this and create a healthier environment than the one we are currently in. Not wait for one of our own to put a noose around his neck before reacting.