Book reviews

Al Needham has met a fair few footballers in Nottingham but the experience has been far from rewarding

Whenever a friend of mine gets into a pub argument about Manchester United (which is often), he relates the following story: when he worked in one of Nottingham’s trendier clothes shops in the early Nineties, the only place that had Timberland boots in stock, Roy Keane came in. After a nod from his manager, my friend mentioned the obligatory 25 per cent discount. “And he didn’t say thank you or anything, he just walked out the shop with the boots under his arm,” my friend says, his face screwed up in a righteous sneer, as he prepares to unleash the killer line. “And he had his fucking jumper tucked into his jeans, the… the twat.”

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Ray Ranson's consortium ensured Coventry City avoided administration. Neville Hadsley reports

Coventry City have experienced last-gasp escapes plenty of times down the years so, by previous standards, surviving with just over half an hour to spare seemed rather comfortable. But that is how close the club came to extinction in December, when a takeover deal by the SISU consortium – headed by former Manchester City defender Ray Ranson – was finally sealed. Without the deal, administration would have been a certainty and a return to the old Third Division for the first time in more than half a century would have been more than a probability.

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Just occasionally, a thumping win becomes a massacre. Ian Farrell looks back at the most recent time a League team posted double figures

Though the points were totting up nicely, Manchester City’s record of ten goals in their first eight games of this season was nevertheless an underwhelming and depressingly familiar return. When, at the start of November, Sunderland were then subjected to their regulation 1‑0 defeat – the sixth such home win at Eastlands – nostalgic fans couldn’t help thinking back almost exactly 20 years, to a time when a very different MCFC matched Sven-Göran Eriksson’s eight-match stats in 77 insane minutes.

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Richard Barker recalls when a top-flight side last hit nine

When Manchester United entertained Ipswich Town at Old Trafford on March 4, 1995, there was little reason to expect much of a contest. Defending champions United were locked in a struggle with Blackburn Rovers at the top, while Ipswich were going hell-for-leather to clinch the bottom spot.

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The PFA has celebrated its centenary at a time when players aren’t held in especially high regard. But that doesn’t mean the union’s battles weren’t worth winning, says John Harding

In December 1907, a group of Manchester United players entered a hotel in the city centre and created admiring headlines by forming a union. One hundred years on almost to the day, another group of United players, at another city-centre hotel, created altogether different headlines, ones that must have had PFA chief executive Gordon ­Taylor weeping tears of frustration.

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