Reviews from When Saturday Comes. Follow the link to buy the book from Amazon.
The Willie Miller Story
by Willie Miller with Rob Robertson
Birlinn, £14.99
Reviewed by Neil Forsyth
From WSC 256 June 2008
For the uninitiated, Willie Miller is not a mafia overlord but a long-standing servant of Aberdeen, also known as the Dons. Miller played for the club for 19 years, before a spell as manager and his current post as director of football.
The Autobiography
by Sir Bobby Charlton
Headline, £7.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 252 February 2008
There was a time during my early childhood when Bobby Charlton was every English boy’s hero, the one who only the finest player on the pitch was allowed to pretend to be. Then along came George Best and suddenly Bobby lost his lustre. He didn’t have long hair (or if he did, only on one side of his head at any rate), he didn’t throw mud at referees, he didn’t run around town in a Jaguar E-type and Chelsea boots. Compared to Best he was boring. And that, pretty much, is where things have remained over the past 40 years: Sir Bobby cast as the lugubrious spinster at football’s wild party.
The Biography of Manchester United’s Midfield Maestro
by Ian Macleay
John Blake, £ 17.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 260 October 2008
This is a book that should have been written two years down the line, when hopefully Owen Hargreaves has managed to put in something like a full season and lived up to his premature billing here as “United’s Midfield Maestro”. Currently, the Canada-born player is yet again not gracing the Old Trafford, or any other, pitch with his sublime skills, though his return to fitness is expected soon. It is undoubtedly true that without Hargreaves’s sporadic appearances Manchester United would not have won their two trophies last season, but the same could be said with more justification about most of the rest of United’s squad. He also showed some promise as the “holding midfield player”, the current mythical missing piece of the England team’s jigsaw, when fit. But he is still a work in progress.
Football in the war zone
by James Montague
Mainstream, £10.99
Reviewed by Mike Ticher
From WSC 261 November 2008
Let’s get the title out of the way first. It’s a bit – how can I put it – derivative? And it doesn’t really tell you what the book is about, which is the Middle East. James Montague travelled to a dozen countries to explore their football culture, or at least taste it, in trips that sometimes lasted only a few days.
The Story of the Footballers' Battalion in the Great War
by Andrew Riddoch & John Kemp
Haynes, £19.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 267 May 2009
Football folk are fond of commenting that some event – a natural disaster, terrorist outrage, loss of a relative to disease – has “put things in perspective”. And you can almost guarantee that five minutes later they’ll once again be arguing about a penalty decision as if their life depended on it.