Despite the title, this isn’t exactly a profile of John Toshack, Liverpool’s towering centre forward of 70s vintage. It’s in fact a likable, nostalgia-fuelled recap of his first, and arguably most improbable, achievement after he became a manager: getting Swansea City from the Fourth Division to the First in double-quick time between 1978 and 1981.
Toshack, now talking in avuncular fashion from retirement in Mallorca, went on to bigger things with Real Madrid and the Welsh national side, but his vertigo-inducing ride up the Football League is still fondly remembered four decades later – not least by the grizzled collection of Toshack’s former players who talk about it like it happened only a few weeks ago, and can’t really believe it. Director Pete Jones does a pretty decent job of compensating for the fact that this all happened in the pre Sky Sports era, when archive footage of lower-division games is largely nonexistent. The film makes up for it with homespun charm: it disinters topics as varied as Dolly the catering manager, the team holiday in Magaluf as they neared promotion, and the type size of the headline in the local paper once they got there.
One of Toshack’s managerial masterstrokes turned out to be the importation of further Liverpool legends, including Tommy Smith and Ian Callaghan (and later Ray Kennedy) who together turbocharged Swansea’s run, but this is not simply a case of buying success: the core of the squad were local boys who played throughout the charge up the league. (One case in point was striker Alan Curtis, who was nabbed by Leeds in 1979, but who returned to Swansea in time for their epic 1980-81 promotion push that saw them make it to the top division.)
It all adds to the emotional, misty-eyed atmosphere of the film, a tribute to football’s less complicated days. It would perhaps have been ungallant for the film to mention Swansea’s swift descent back down the league (Toshack left in 1984 shortly before they were relegated back to the Third Division), or the heavy spending on players that led the club to being wound up in 1985. (Neither does Wimbledon’s similarly fast Fourth to First rise get a nod, but possibly this would have ruined the mood.) Nevertheless, this is a fascinating glimpse into a football world that has entirely vanished, for better or worse.
• Tosh is released on Tuesday in cinemas.
