After reading and reviewing Simon’s previous book; Red Machine, I was really looking forward to getting stuck into Men in White Suits and it didn’t disappoint.
In my mind, the 90’s will always be remembered as the point where Liverpool fell from the top of the mountain to a team scratching and clawing to get back up again and I was really looking forward to seeing why the players thought things didn’t go well. I wasn’t let down.
A number of reasons were given, most of which I’ll leave for you to find out when you read the book, but one that seemed to reoccur was a lack of modernisation.
Liverpool had been the Kings of England and Europe for almost two decades and there seemed to be an ideology all through the club that was based around a model of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However, football was undergoing a huge transformation. TV money and commercialism meant there was more money than ever flying around and that was being used by teams like Manchester United to close the gap. Liverpool needed to keep up with the times, and I get the feeling that, looking back, ex-players and managers wish that they had done that.
There’ll be people reading this review who live in Liverpool, but there’ll be plenty who don’t as well so sorry if it seems like I’m teaching people to suck eggs here. For those who don’t know the city too well, Liverpool is a city where rumours can become accepted facts in what seems like a matter of hours. If you think social media is bad for ‘ITKs’, you should take a taxi ride or speak to fellas at bars. People speak of these ‘facts’ with such conviction that you’d think they had flies on the wall at Melwood and Anfield. It’s been like that as long I can remember.
In the 90s, these ‘facts’ spread through the city like wildfire, and most were very uncomplimentary of Liverpool’s ‘Spice Boys’. Tales of drinking and drugs were accepted as if they were made under oath so I was fascinated to read the replies when Simon asked some of the players labelled as ‘Spice Boys’ about their thoughts on this tag, and also the notion that it was a wild social life that was to blame for Liverpool’s lack of success in the 90s.
From the limited encounters I’ve had with footballers (current or former) thanks to being involved with Fresh Press Media, I always get the sense when I meet them that they’re very protective of themselves. Like most people, they tend to want to talk more about successes than failure but Simon has done a great job getting people to open up about times where they failed.
I did get the feeling at times that some of the players wanted to blame everyone but themselves for why it didn’t work out for them, but that gave me an indication of what they must’ve been thinking in the dressing room. That’s not to say the players disliked each other, that doesn’t come across at all, but the message I got was that the managers of the time were so different that it’s only natural that players preferred some to others.
It’s been a while since I sat down and read a book as quickly as I did with Men in White Suits, and it’s something that I highly recommend you do too. If nothing else, you’ll see that Nicky Tanner considered himself a ‘top shagger’. That, plus a few other quotes, make it worth the money anyway.
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