Product Description

When Paul Le Guen was appointed the new manager of Rangers in May 2006, the news stunned French football and was greeted with fevered excitement in Scotland. Rangers supporters were beside themselves at the news that the 'Coming Man' of European football coaches - the so-called 'new Arsene Wenger' - was on his way to Ibrox. Le Guen had been phenomenally successful with Lyon, winning three successive championships, and David Murray, an embattled Rangers chairman, hailed him as 'a massive moonbeam' heading towards the club. The marriage of Le Guen and Rangers lasted seven months and ended in disaster. By Christmas, Rangers lagged 17 points behind great rivals Celtic in the league and Le Guen's team played every type of football: good, bad and ugly. After 200 days in the job, the Frenchman simply walked away. Yet, many Rangers fans still admire and respect Le Guen, and ask why it was that one of Europe's best young coaches couldn't succeed at Ibrox.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #148732 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

About the Author
Graham Spiers is a sportswriter on The Times. He has written for the Sunday Times, The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and Scotland on Sunday, and was chief sportswriter on The Herald from 2001 to 2007. He also regularly broadcasts on the BBC and STV. Spiers has been honoured seven times at the Scottish Press Awards, including being voted Sportswriter of the Year on four occasions.

Customer Reviews

An Opportunity wasted
Bearing in mind the dramatic swings and rounabouts that characterised the short reign of Paul Le Guen as Rangers manager, the opportunnity was there for a skilled writer to produce an insightful, analytical and definitive book on the subject. Sadly, this is none of those.

The book reads like a series of poorly written newspaper columns, and you get the impression that they were written separately and then joined together to make a book - often subject matter covered in one chapter is then gone over again in the next.

Mr Spiers also refuses to 'stick to his brief' and wanders all over the place - a history of Paris St Germain, Football in Austria for example. Even when he does deal with the matter at hand, much of it is by way of hearsay and unattributed sources. When he does get the chance to speak to Paul le Guen, the resulting conversation is remarkable only in it's blandness.

Add to this Mr Spiers predilection for showing he owns a thesaurus and his florid writing style(why use one word when a paragraph will do?) and you are left with what could have been the defining work on the most turbulent period in the history of Rangers Foootball Club, but in fact is a disappointing piece of 3rd year prose destined for the bargain bin (if the print run is large enough for that).

The true story of Paul le Guen at Rangers remains to be written, hopefully by someone with the ability to apply investigative skills to the work.

A Poor Effort
The title is basically inaccurate as this is not a chronicle, but a series of chapters based on themes. There is no enigma either; a manager came to Rangers, was unsuccessful, and threw in the towel.

Mr Spiers has taken the time to meet the Le Guen family and appears to enjoy their company based on his fawning account of their attributes.

Why did Paul Le Guen have such a good reputation? Mr Spiers fails to give any proper assessment of Paul Le Guen's time at Lyon.

* Does his record at Lyon merit this reputation?
* Did Santini build the team, did he buy a team, or were the players in place for Santini?
* Did Paul Le Guen piggy back onto Santini's success?
* Did Paul Le Guen buy more players; did he spend wisely?
* What was the state of French football at the time?
* Was a youth system supplying young talent?
* Were the traditional title challengers ¨Marseille, PSG, Nantes, Monaco ¨ rebuilding? Did Lyon win the league with above or below average points?
* How well did they do in Europe?
* Could he be regarded as lucky, etc etc

Was Paul Le Guen suited to the task at Rangers?

He was taking the post from a manager who knew Scottish football inside out. He was taking over from a manager who was denied funding to finish off Celtic after Rangers had won the league in 2005. Mr Spiers makes no assessment of the task confronting Paul Le Guen.

Having missed most of the above Mr Spiers didn't miss his opportunity to denigrate Rangers fans and goes back 35 years to use the words of a former Rangers manager in so doing. What went on 35 years ago is utterly irrelevant to Paul Le Guen's period at Ibrox.

This is a really poor attempt to assess Paul Le Guen's very brief time at Ibrox. Someone with more analytical skills and a better knowledge of football could easily produce a better book.

In truth this is a 'no star' book...

It is, I suppose, unsurprising, that someone so consumed with himself would write a book ostensibly about Paul Le Guen's short and ill-starred tenure as manager at Ibrox but, instead, the book's contents focus on two main and for Spiers obsessively recurrent, themes; firstly, Spiers rampant egoism and unashamed self-regard and secondly his hatred of David, now Sir David, Murray. This latter subject is made manifest by yet more outrageous accusations against The Rangers Football Club and its fans. The suggestion that Rangers' fans did not take to PLG because he is a Roman Catholic is as absurd as it is offensive-the months before Le Guen's arrival saw a frenzy of anticipation and optimism flood through the Rangers support.

If you buy this book to read about Paul Le Guen and his reign, that promised so much but delivered nothing, then you will, I believe, be bitterly disappointed. This book is yet another Spiers rant (only this time the mega-mix) against people Spiers dislikes for, presumably, sleights against him (real or imagined).

This really is a bad book; padded out with material irrelevant to its stated subject and verbiage the purpose of which, I would suppose, is to convince the reader of just how clever Mr. Spiers is.

Unfortunately, the padding, the irrelevances to the stated subject and general unevenness of the writing, it reads like what it is a cut and past together job, make this book a wholly unsatisfying read. If this is Spiers' meisterwerk then it is very poor fare and as monument to intellect and prowess as a writer, well, yes, I think, in this, it gives us a true reflection of his abilities.