Reviews from When Saturday Comes. Follow the link to buy the book from Amazon.
The Man Who Never Gave Up
by James Leighton
DB Publishing, £16.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 298 December 2011
Inconvenient truth as it is for some of us, Cardiff City's FA Cup victory in 1927 remains the greatest achievement by any Welsh club. The associated quiz question will endure until somebody else takes the Cup out of England, while the date is to Cardiff fans what 1966 is to England followers.
How football lost its soul
by Rob Smyth ansd Georgina Turner
Elliot & Thompson, £11.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 301 March 2012
Jumpers for Goalposts is predicated on the simple idea that over the past 20 years football has become shit. From Alan Shearer's anti-punditry to corruption at FIFA; from idiot fans on the internet to the abject Italian players who blamed their failure to beat Denmark on the rough weave of their socks. As a catalogue of all that is wrong with the game, the book is accurate and thorough. As rhetoric, it is stylish and irresistible.
Liverpool Football Club – The Biography
by John Williams
Mainstream, £16.99
Reviewed by Seb Patrick
From WSC 284 October 2010
There's an inherent problem in writing a "biography" of a football club. The term can suitably be applied to people, who have a finite lifespan of anything up to 80 or 90 years – but when it comes to top-level clubs, the fact that they can reasonably be expected to outlive the author means that it's impossible ever to write a complete one.
Tackling Scotland's Towns and Teams
by Daniel Gray
Luath Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Gavin Saxton
From WSC 287 January 2011
Daniel Gray – a social historian, Englishman and Middlesbrough fan exiled in Edinburgh – decided last season to explore his adopted homeland through its lower-league football teams. So, picking out 12 fixtures around the country, he set out to learn about Scotland and its football. The result is this series of vignettes, 12 chapters each based around a match, but for the most part an excuse to delve a little into the history of the home teams, the towns that host them and the connections between the two.
by Kevin Drinkell
Black and White, £14.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 293 July 2011
Kevin Drinkell was a great centre-forward whose career never quite hit the top. There's a credible argument that he was unlucky not to have made the England squads of the late 1980s. This was partly down to the wrong transfers at the wrong times, admits the player in this autobiography, and partly due to the intransigence and skulduggery of Robert Chase, his chairman at Norwich, in handling approaches from Manchester United and Tottenham.