Book reviews

George Best at Hibs
by John Neil Munro
Birlinn, £9.99
Reviewed by Graham McColl
From WSC 289 March 2011

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Scottish club football began the 1970s in the cigar-toting strata of European football, but by the end of the decade it was doing the equivalent of rummaging around looking for fag-ends. Hibernian, whose hugely progressive Turnbull's Tornadoes side had jousted with the likes of Sporting Lisbon and Liverpool early that decade, were chief among the Scottish game's derelicts by the closing weeks of 1979. The Edinburgh club was in an abject state and heading for relegation.

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44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys
by Brian Reade
Quercus, £12.99
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 292 June 2011

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As you might surmise from the title, Brian Reade's account of Tom Hicks' and George Gillett's turbulent time at Liverpool doesn't exactly propose to be a balanced one. But this book proves to be much more than it suggests. Not that the American pair, who took over in a leveraged buyout in February 2007, escape without the bashing they deserve.

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by Dave Roberts
Bantam Press, £12.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 295 September 2011

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This is a life measured out by football programmes. Roberts is under wifely orders to reduce his collection from 1,134 to 32 and he tells the personal story behind each of his selections. The other 1,102, it is revealed much later, simply go into storage. I was quite worried about them for a while.

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Memories of Matt Busby, Jimmy Murphy and Manchester United
by Keith Dewhurst
Yellow Jersey Press, £8.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 302 April 2012

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"It seems almost incredible that the best team in Europe, and one of most thrilling in history, was run by two elderly men who had theories, put players together accordingly and then more or less let them get on with it." Those two elderly men were Matt Busby and his assistant Jimmy Murphy, the hero of Keith Dewhurst's masterly memoir of a partnership that began in a stuffy Nissen hut at the Army Recreation Centre in Bari in the summer of 1945.

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From Hitler Youth to FA Cup Legend
by Catrine Clay
Yellow Jersey, £16.99
Reviewed by Mike Ticher
From WSC 279 May 2010

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Bert Trautmann was born in the worst possible year for a 20th century German, 1923. At ten he was eligible for the Hitler Youth just as the Nazis came to power. At 17 he was ready for war. Most of his contemporaries did not make it to 25, let alone quiet retirement in Spain.

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