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.
