Book reviews

Tommy Lawton – My Friend, My Father
by Barrie Williams and Tom Lawton Junior
Vision Sports, £16.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 288 February 2011

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"Notts County will be the Arsenal of the Midlands." If anything demonstrates the cyclical nature of football it's this comment made by Magpies chairman Len Machin back in the summer of 1957. It is a statement that has been echoed in one form or another ever since by the owners and directors of provincial clubs – including, naturally, those of Notts County.

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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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50 years of trials and triumph with football’s 
also-rans
by Tim Quelch
XPublisher, £14.99
Reviewed by Nick Miller
From WSC 301 March 2012

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Part memoir, part collection of anecdotes and – perhaps slightly surprisingly – part modern history, Underdog! is a collection of stories about when the improbable occurs in football. There are the obvious tales, such as Wimbledon winning the 1988 FA Cup, along with more obscure stories, like the Northampton Town side that reached Division One in the mid-1960s.

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The Dark History Of The World Cup
by Jon Spurling
Vision Sports, £14.99
Reviewed by Terry Staunton
From WSC 281 July 2010

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Zaire full-back Mwepu Ilunga's odd behaviour at the 1974 finals, breaking off from the defensive wall to boot the ball away just as Brazil's Rivelino is about to take a free-kick, has gone down as one of the most comical scenes in World Cup history. It is replayed time and again on the obligatory TV clips shows in the run-up to each subsequent tournament.

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My Inside Account of the 2010 World Cup
by Gary Lineker
Simon & Schuster, £16.99
Reviewed by Ian Farrell
From WSC 285 November 2010

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If you've caught any of Gary Lineker's promotion for Still Dreaming, you might have picked up a distinct lack of enthusiasm from him. Having now read it, I can say that this is no self-deprecation. To be fair, books of this type are only really as interesting as the tournament they describe, and while England's campaign certainly wasn't the glorious triumph the publishers would've been hoping for, it wasn't the disaster they'd probably take as second-best either, despite what the papers would have you believe. France had a disaster, and there's undoubtedly a fascinating book to be written about it. Ours was merely a big disappointment, a damp squib. And turning material like that into a cracking read takes a very special literary talent, not an ex-goal poacher.

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