Reviews from When Saturday Comes. Follow the link to buy the book from Amazon.
by Mark Hodkinson
Pomona, £9.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 242 Apr 07
Mark Hodkinson’s funny and poignant new book is a deftly written account of coming of age in a scruffy north-of-England town, Rochdale – “built to be rained upon or swathed in mist, joyous in a sulk” – in which football plays its part, not in any particularly pivotal way but simply as part of the fabric of growing up.
The inside story of Clough’s Derby days
by George Edwards
Tempus, £12.99
Reviewed by Terry Staunton
From WSC 250 December 2007
Brian Clough was football’s first great multi-media star, an endlessly quotable mouthpiece whose fame and notoriety stretched far beyond the sport itself. He was a constant subject/target for TV impressionists, and his profile was so high that he was an obvious and welcome guest on Parkinson at a time when the show was awash with A-listers of the calibre of Robert Mitchum and Orson Welles.
The Biography of Jimmy Johnstone
by Jim Black
Sphere, £18.99
Reviewed by Graham McColl
From WSC 247 September 2007
The post-football fate of Jimmy Johnstone is one of the best arguments that can be mustered in favour of the super-inflated salaries of today’s footballers. He was voted the greatest ever Celtic player in 2002, yet for the previous two decades, after finishing with football as a player, he had found himself skint and, as outlined here, spent that period meandering unsatisfyingly through various menial jobs. These included three years as a manual labourer and, irony of ironies, a spell as a satellite-dish salesman, purveying the very piece of equipment that has made today’s players rich beyond Jimmy’s wildest dreams.
The Story Behind the Legend
by Clive Youlton
Stadia, £12.99
Reviewed by Simon Bell
From WSC 243 May 2007
Geoff Chapple never took charge of a League team. His managerial career never extended beyond the Conference and, although he saw his teams win five times at Wembley, they did so not in the FA Cup but in the FA Trophy, with the ground at best a quarter full. At first glance, then, an odd subject for a biography, let alone one that bears the startling subtitle “The Story Behind the Legend”.
The Lands that FIFA Forgot
by Steve Menary
Know the Score, £16.99
Reviewed by Jonathan Wilson
From WSC 253 March 2008
Every country, Henry Kissinger once said, needs an army, a bank and a football team. Many of the countries discussed in Outcasts don’t have an army or a bank. Many aren’t even countries, at least not in the traditional sense. And yet all are desperate for a football team that would somehow give them legitimacy. When Tibet played Greenland in a friendly in Copenhagen, who did not see it as a strike against the Chinese authorities who would deny them statehood? And yet there is a sense in which Greenland are rather more wronged than Tibet, at least in terms of FIFA’s refusal to acknowledge them as a member.