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Search: 'Alan Harper'

Stories

250 Days: Cantona’s kung fu and the making of Manchester United by Daniel Storey

387 Storey

HarperCollins, £9.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 387, June 2019
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Game Changers

357 GameChangersInside English football
by Alan Curbishley
Harper Sport, £20
Reviewed by Jon Matthias
From WSC 357 November 2016

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It’s tempting to see this as a cash-in. Alan Curbishley has gone through his contacts book, made a couple of calls and set up some interviews with a mix of big names and people you and I probably won’t have heard of. How many of the interviews he’s done and how many are by his collaborator, freelancer Kevin Brennan, is hard to tell. The bits that are meant to be Curbishley introducing topics are full of cliches such as “in and around” and long run-on sentences that last for paragraphs. So they feel genuine.

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American Huckster

353 HucksterHow Chuck Blazer got rich from – and sold out – the most powerful cabal in world sports  
by Mary Papenfuss & Teri Thompson
HarperCollins, £20
Reviewed by Alan Tomlinson
From WSC 353 July 2016

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Chuck Blazer: the Father Christmas lookalike whose weight had mushroomed to 450lbs by the time the FBI and the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) nobbled him on the Manhattan pavement outside his Trump Tower base in November 2011. This was just under a year after FIFA’s decision to award the next two World Cups to Russia and Qatar, and while a generation of FIFA powerbrokers and crooks was beginning to shatter the silence of a long-held code of omertà.

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How Not To Be A Professional Footballer

by Paul Merson
HarperSport, £16.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 292 June 2011

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Most football memoirs carefully ration the racy bits as a way of punctuating the otherwise straightforward retelling of a career. How Not To Be A Professional Footballer does precisely the opposite. Cast adrift with Merse on a seemingly endless sea of lager, cocaine and crumpled betting slips, the sensitive reader ends up desperately scanning the horizon for Alan Shearer paddling towards them aboard an uncreosoted fence panel.

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Split personality

As national manager Guus Hiddink takes charge at Chelsea, Dan Brennan reflects on worries in Russia over what is said to be only a temporary job-share

If Guus Hiddink turns Chelsea’s season around, don’t expect too many loud cheers in Russia. The Dutchman’s decision to combine his permanent job as Russian national team coach with a makeshift one at Stamford Bridge has been met with what might best be described as resigned dismay.

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