Book reviews

Phil Town on Jose Mourinho's short-lived TV debut

“I’m the face of Portugal in the world,” José Mourinho told the current affairs magazine Visão recently. While footballing heroes such as Eusébio, Luis Figo and Cristiano Ronaldo may still lay some claim to that distinction, it is hard from a global perspective to disagree with Mourinho’s assertion. London-based fashion designer Nuno Reis told Visão: “Suddenly, I’m not someone from a Third World country… I’m from the same country as José Mourinho.”

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For a £30million footballer, Rio Ferdinand is going to need to start showing class off the pitch, writes Ashley Shaw, as well as on it

Any footballer who associates himself with Jody Morris is looking for trouble. The turning point in PFA player of the year John Terry’s career was probably the night he opted to stay in when Morris and his pals were urging him to join their latest bender. England centre-half Rio Ferdinand, by contrast, seems to court publicity and, following successive tabloid stings involving Peter Kenyon and a fight with a photographer on a night out with Morris, it seems he doesn’t learn. Ferdinand has the millionaire lifestyle – the car, the clothes and presumably the women – but he lacks the vital component required to take the next step to football greatness: common sense. Morris, who has a conviction for assault and was sacked by Leeds for being drunk at training, is the personification of the current football disease – so why would a player of Rio’s standing think that a night on the tiles with him in celebrity central was a great idea?

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Winning the European Cup twice is all very well, but just makes it worse when you slip to your country’s third division, as Al Needham testifies

It’s great when you support a heritage team such as Forest, usually. You can always win arguments with fans from London clubs by merely saying “So how many European Cups have you won again?” You can travel anywhere in the world and get a response from the most undereducated cabbies by mentioning Archie Gemmill’s goal in the 1978 World Cup (note to Irvine Welsh; that was a Forest goal, not a Scottish one, so shut up about it). And even if they do nothing of worth ever again, everyone knows about them.

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Peterborough may have been relegated under chairman-manager Barry Fry but, as Graham Dunbar reports, they have arranged a lucrative testimonial

Amid all the fake outrage about Ashley Cole’s companions for afternoon tea in a swanky hotel and Rio Ferdinand’s chance partners for a plate-smashing session in a Greek restaurant, one potential tapping-up scandal has largely escaped attention.

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Life has, as ever, been stranger than fiction on Tyneside this season, to the dismay of the fans, but Harry Pearson wonders if their loyalty is part of the problem

“Patrick Kluivert was in the other night,” an employee at one of Newcastle’s most salubrious bars told me a few months ago. “By the time he’d walked from the door to the table he had the Jesmond wives stuck all over him like Elastoplast.”

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