Book reviews

by Rowan Simons

Macmillan, £14.99
Reviewed by Ben Lyttleton
From WSC 260 October 2008 

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All eyes were on China in August as Beijing proved, with the odd journalist-napping aside, to be an excellent host city for the Olympics. Rowan Simons has spent most of the past 20 years living in China and this book charts his period in the country, from his student days watching the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 to his rise as a football pundit (though not a very good one as one of his favourite lines is “He’ll never score with a haircut like that”) and a political figure trying to create more pitches and more opportunities for Chinese amateur ­footballers.

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by David McVay
Reid Publishing, £9.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 261 November 2008 

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How should a serious newspaper cover lower-league football? The Guardian hardly bothers at all, contemptuously summarising 72 clubs’ weekends in a negligible bullet-point “round-up”. The Times and Telegraph, superficially at least, sometimes offer the lower divisions greater respect, with weekly columns dedicated to life outside the top flight. But exactly how respectful is it to commission lower-league specialists to get their hands dirty at Underhill while their staff writers hoover up the posh nibbles in comfy Premier League press rooms?

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From Blackpool To Barcelona; Football’s Greatest Rivalries
by Andy Mitten
HarperSport, £15.99
Reviewed by Mark O'Brien
From WSC 264 February 2009 

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One of the oldest questions asked in football is: “Which is the biggest derby game?” Like trying to argue who is the biggest club or who has the best supporters, it’s actually something of a pointless exercise, but nevertheless these fierce local rivalries retain a unique fascination, and even if sides have been slugging it out forever – and at least four times a season for the Old Firm – the sense of anticipation before each encounter rarely dissipates.

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The Biography of  Terry Paine
by David Bull
Hagiology, £19.95
Reviewed by Tim Springett
From WSC 267 May 2009 

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You can’t accuse the author of this excellent tome of not doing his homework, or loving his subject. David Bull, a retired social policy lecturer and lifelong Southampton fan, has penned a fully authorised biography of the player he considers to have been the best that he ever saw play for the Saints. Paine was certainly a remarkable player: 713 league appearances for Saints as they rose from the Third Division South to the top flight and remained there for eight seasons tell their own story. Likewise the 19 England caps that he won – the last against Mexico in the 1966 World Cup finals – without having kicked a ball in Division One.

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Malcolm Allison, Joe Mercer and Manchester City
by Colin Shindler
Mainstream, £17.99
Reviewed by Ian Farrell
From WSC 268 June 2009 

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Back in the late Nineties, Colin Shindler’s Manchester United Ruined My Life became one of football writing’s biggest break-out hits, earning its author plenty of mainstream praise, a spin-off TV documentary, and, it has to be said, a fair amount of criticism, amid suggestions that it was just a Manchester City version of Fever Pitch. Such carping about merely putting his own club’s spin on a recent success is clearly of no concern to Shindler if the strangely familiar premise of his latest work is anything to go by: a piece of nostalgic ­“faction” about a big-mouthed, larger-than-life coach battling for control… of Man City. In fact, given that its release has been timed to follow that of The Damned United’s much-hyped film version, it doesn’t look like Shindler and his publisher’s publicity department mind one little bit if you make the comparison. Now that I’ve done their bidding, I’ll say this: they’re nothing like each other.

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