Book reviews

Love, Death and Football
by Jason Cowley
Simon & Schuster, £14.99
Reviewed by Terry Staunton
From WSC 270 August 2009 

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Michael Thomas’s last-gasp goal for Arsenal at Anfield on May 26, 1989, has proven to be hard to top, in terms of live and unscripted televised sporting drama. Possibly the most replayed clip from a domestic football match of the last two decades, what has happened to the game in the intervening years forms the basis of Cowley’s persuasive argument that nothing was ever the same again.

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The Remarkable Life and Death of Leigh Richmond Roose, Football's First Play Boy
by Spencer Vignes
Tempus, £9.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 249 November 2007 

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While those with even a passing interest in cricket can probably name a dozen Edwardian players without recourse to Wisden, I suspect that even the die-hard football fan finds the era before the First World War a good deal less familiar. Because while cricket regards the years that spawned Frank Woolley, Jack Hobbs and Victor Trumper as its “golden age”, to most people football doesn’t really seem to get going until the 1930s.

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The Biography of Joe Cole
by Ian Macleay
John Blake, £17.99
Reviewed by Taylor Parkes
From WSC 245 July 2007 

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No, I couldn’t believe the title either. Another lavishly packaged quickie, Cole Play is predictably bland and impossibly turgid. It’s not that badly written – unlike most football-themed hack product, you would feel safe handing this in as English Language GCSE coursework – but it is so boring, so terribly uninspiring, like a book that’s played under José Mourinho for three years. There are no secrets here, no fresh perspectives, yet it runs to a whopping 310 pages, of which 309, at least, are entirely forgettable. Cole Play may not give short weight, but it’s topped up with a lot of ballast.

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Man and Bhoy
by Neil Lennon with Martin Hannon
Harper Sport, £17.99
Reviewed by Robbie Meredith
From WSC 241 March 2007 

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Irish footballers have been among the most prominent exponents of the mea culpa sports autobiography in recent years. Tony Cascarino and Paul McGrath have produced open and apologetic works detailing personal failure, far in tone from the bland self-justification inherent in most of the genre.

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A Football History
by Gary James
James Ward, £21.95

Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 258 August 2008 

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Gary James’s ambitious aim is to tell the history of football in the Manchester area and thereby establish its importance to the city and its environs. The game was banned there 400 years ago because the inhabitants had been “greatly wronged… by a company of lewd and disordered persons… breaking many men’s glass windows at their pleasures and other great enormities”. As James points out, the authorities have not always been sensible of the myriad benefits of what became the region’s favourite pastime. You can hear James’s exasperation as he writes: “It says much about how the early history of football has been viewed in Manchester that the only plaque commemorating the history of [Manchester] City is actually incorrectly positioned.”

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