Book reviews

Where were you when you heard the news about Jimmy Glass's goal? In an excerpt from his autobiography, the goalkeeper recalls Carlisle United's JFK moment

We were well into added time when Scott Dobie hit a cross from the right. It came off a Plymouth defender and went out for a corner. I looked across at the manager, Nigel Pearson. At other times when I’ve wanted to run up the field, people have told me to go back. No faith in football to come up with a wonder moment. But now I thought, “Sod it.” What was there to lose? Nigel shrugged his shoulders and waved me up. I began my 100-yard dash up the pitch, hoping to arrive in the penalty area before Graham Anthony took the corner.

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Regardless of how West Bromwich Albion fare in the Premiership this season, Neil Reynolds explains why the rocky ground between manager Gary Megson and chairman Jeremy Peace doesn't necessarily mean a sacking is on the cards

Gary Megson took over as manager of West Bromwich Albion on March 9, 2000 and saved the club from relegation back to Division Two; in his next season he got them to the play-offs. Automatic promotion to the Premiership came 12 months on, followed by not un­expected relegation and automatic promotion again last season. That’s an impressive record over the past four years, plus he’s young and he’s English. So how can there possibly be any doubt over his future?

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Caroline Bailey was dancing in the streets of East Anglia in May and hasn't given up hopes of a repeat performance

Picture a golden evening in May. Fifty thousand peo­ple, drunk on unaccustomed success, are clinging precariously to phone boxes and lamp posts as an open-top bus, its passengers playing pass-the-parcel with the First Division trophy, inches into view. With Premiership football to look forward to for the first time in almost a decade, it’s easy to believe, as grown men weep openly around you, that this is just the beginning.

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The death of Nottingham's "surrogate dad" still hasn't sunk in, writes Al Needham

It goes without saying that Brian Clough was the greatest manager ever, but to the people of Nottingham and Derby it ran much deeper than that. He put us on the map and gave us a reason to be proud of where we came from. Kids from Nottingham were not supposed to see their club win the League, go to Wembley more times than to Skegness, see their club wearing nasty jumpers on Top of the Pops, hold up the European Cup in their Dad's local, or listen under the sheets at 3am to them playing in Tokyo. For anyone in Nottingham between the ages of 30 and 45, Brian Clough was responsible for some of the happiest moments of our childhood. And, despite what anyone else thinks, underneath the media bluster he was a really nice bloke: Nottingham's surrogate dad. 

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With talk of the club being up for sale, the heady days of Jack Walker's reign at Blackburn Rovers seem so long ago,  Bruce Wilkinson writes

Reports in the Daily Mirror that the owners of Blackburn Rovers could be willing to listen to offers for the club have come as a shock to the team’s supporters, under the impression that the Jack Walker Trust, set up on his deathbed, would run the club in perpetuity.

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