There is a question that haunts any serious football biography: how do you bring a legend to life? Not the myth, not the sepia-toned highlights reel, but the actual person — the man behind the dribble, the character beneath the cap? Jon Henderson’s The Wizard: The Life of Stanley Matthews answers that question with considerable skill, patience, and a quietly impressive depth of research.
Football’s First Superstar
Stanley Matthews was, by any reasonable measure, football’s first global superstar. He made his professional debut for Stoke City in 1932 and played his final match in 1965, at the age of fifty. Fifty. Let that sink in for a moment. In an era of mud-caked pitches, leather boots that weighed more than a modern goalkeeper’s gloves, and defenders who treated the phrase “fair tackle” as entirely optional, Matthews endured for over three decades at the highest level. It is a feat that stretches credulity, and Henderson does an excellent job of explaining not just how Matthews managed it, but why.
The answer, it turns out, lies in an almost monastic dedication to physical fitness and diet that was decades ahead of its time. While his contemporaries were having a pie and a pint after training, Matthews was experimenting with vegetarianism, fasting, and exercise regimes that would not look out of place in a modern Premier League dressing room. Henderson traces this obsession with care, showing how it was rooted in Matthews’s upbringing in the Potteries — a world of hard graft, modest means, and quiet determination.
The 1953 FA Cup Final
No book about Matthews could avoid the 1953 FA Cup final, and Henderson handles it beautifully. Blackpool 4, Bolton 3 — the “Matthews Final,” as it has been known ever since, despite Stan Mortensen scoring a hat-trick in the same match. Henderson captures the drama of the afternoon with real narrative verve: Matthews, then thirty-eight, tormenting the Bolton left-back Ralph Banks in the final twenty minutes, conjuring crosses and chances from nothing, willing his team back from 3–1 down. It is stirring stuff, even read six decades later.
But Henderson is too good a writer to let the myth go unexamined. He is honest about the fact that Mortensen deserves far more credit than history has afforded him, and he places the final in its proper context — as the culmination of years of near-misses for Matthews, whose previous cup final appearances had ended in defeat.
Beyond the Pitch
Where The Wizard truly excels is in its portrait of Matthews the man, rather than Matthews the footballer. Henderson is unsparing in his examination of Matthews’s personal life, which was considerably more complicated than his genial public image suggested. His first marriage was unhappy; his relationship with his children was, at times, strained; and his post-retirement years were marked by financial difficulties and a somewhat restless search for purpose. Henderson navigates this territory with sensitivity but without hagiography, and the book is all the better for it.
There is also a fascinating thread running through the book about Matthews’s relationship with the wider world. His tours of Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, his genuine affection for the people he met there, and his later work coaching in Soweto — these are stories that deserve to be more widely known, and Henderson tells them with evident enthusiasm.
An Arsenal Fan’s Perspective
Matthews was never an Arsenal man, of course. He was Stoke through and through, with a stint at Blackpool in between. But part of being a football supporter — a proper football supporter — is the ability to appreciate greatness wherever it appears. And Matthews was greatness incarnate. Reading Henderson’s account of the way Matthews could beat a man — that famous body swerve, the drop of the shoulder, the burst of acceleration that left full-backs grasping at thin air — one cannot help but think of the players we have loved at Highbury and the Emirates. The principle is the same: football at its best is an art form, and Matthews was one of its finest artists.
The Verdict
Henderson has produced a biography worthy of its subject: thorough, engaging, and refreshingly honest. The writing is clean and assured, the research meticulous, and the narrative pacing excellent. If there is a minor criticism, it is that the middle section — covering the war years and Matthews’s move to Blackpool — occasionally sags under the weight of match-by-match detail. But this is a small quibble in what is otherwise a superb piece of football writing.
The Wizard is essential reading for anyone with an interest in football history, and highly recommended for anyone who simply appreciates a well-told story about a remarkable life. Published by Yellow Jersey Press.
Rating: 4 out of 5