Fallen Idle

• 15th Mar 2007 at 3:42:50 pm by Liam Doyle
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Fighting Back from the Booze, Swindles and Drugs That Ripped My Life Apart

I squandered my talent. I pissed most of it up against the wall. I'm the guy who wrote the manual of How Not To Do It.

Football biographies in recent years have tended to fall in two camps. There's the biography as open therapy session as typified by McGrath, Keane, Cascarino and Adams and then there's the 'say nothing in 300 pages, now where's my royalty cheque' as typified by well, most of last year's actually. Peter Marinello's offering most definitely falls within the former category.

It's brutally frank and open to the point of astonishment - Marinello certainly lay on the confessional couch for this. He discusses everything from his failings as a player - only one person was to blame for my failure to settle quickly into the pattern of things(at Arsenal):Peter Marinello - as a man, as a businessman, to his lack of ambition - it simply wasn't ever in my make-up to be that ambitious when it came to the international stuff - through to his wife's illnesses and his son's heroin addiction, all with refreshing candour.

There seems to be little that's off limits. I'm intrigued to know whether Joyce, his wife, was as keen to have her battles with mental illness, her choice of contraceptives or her short lived dalliance with a DJ so openly discussed - but there's an element of the 'long suffering wife' portrait that would suggest that she's well used to his ways by now.

But aside from the confessionals, what to make of Marinello the player? The obvious response is his is a career of unfulfilled talent and that's certainly what he seems to suggest. He acknowledges he didn't didn't make the most of his opportunities through a combination of finding the game too easy and being distracted by off field activites.

Perhaps in retrospect he was handed his big club move too early in his career - although whether he had the personality to deal with such a high profile move at any stage of his career - he was a serial miscreant - is open to debate. Instead a career that strated so brightly went from being part of Arsenal's Fairs Cup and Double Winning squads, albeit that he played limited roles in both, straight to second divsion Portsmouth. From there it's a wanderer's route encapsulating a return to Scotland, stints in Australia, London, America and back to Scotland.

Whilst honest and entertaining in parts, Fallen Idle doesn't get elevated to the exalted heights of Cascarino et al. That's primarily because of the writing style which veers from the awkward - John Murphy went on to join Hibs before me - to the completely superflous - ...we went visiting, either to my Italian grandma with her lovely, long black hair...

It also suffers slightly from falling into the birds, booze and bonding reminiscences where the same patterns of behaviour are rehashed, albeit in new settings with different teammates. Mind you, when you've got to cram in 9 teams (I've excluded the 4 cameo appearances for Scottish juniors Broxburn) and the associated teammates that entails, I suppose that's always a potential hazard.

Throughout the book Marinello comes across as a likeable, if somewhat chaotic, character. You wish for him that he'd made some different choices but at the end of it all, he seems content. The experiences he's had have made him the person he is and he doesn't hark back and try to blame everyone else. Infact he's taking more responsibility now than he did when he was playing - and that sounds like a life lesson that's been learned.

There'll no doubt be better biographies than this during the course of the year, but probably not too many that'll leave you feeling as pleased with the way things turn out.

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