Book reviews

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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Another summer of transfer-related theatre and drama resulted in some surprising deals and a whole lot of bad feeling, Jon Spurling writes

Sir Alex Ferguson described the summer transfer window as “an annual farce of half-truths” and David Moyes claimed it gives football writers the chance to “peddle irresponsible headlines”. The latest doses of rumour and counter rumour seem to have left many Premiership managers feeling far more drained and insecure than normal. “Yous are talking out of your backsides,” barked an apoplectic Ferguson when a gaggle of hacks suggested that Ruud van Nistelrooy was poised to move to Real Madrid. By simply adding the “ski” suffix to a player’s surname, or deploying the “Real deal” headline, tabloids can give even the most experienced manager nightmares, such is the financial clout of Chelsea and the Madrid giants.

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Thanks to a financial incentive scheme from Littlewoods Pools, things could be looking up for Scotland's perennial losers, East Stirlingshire. Neil White explains

For the past two years, the safest bet in British football has not been on Arsenal or Martin O’Neill’s dominant Celtic side. The smart money, if you have enough of it to counter increasingly prohibitive odds, is on whoever happens to be playing East Stirlingshire.

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Wigan Athletic's chairman controls clubs involved in both codes of rugby, too, but Ashley Shaw finds that few object to this takeover of a town as the Latics fly high

Pies, piers and rugby league used to dominate Wigan. Yet as a town situated handily between the football hotbeds of Manchester and Liverpool, it comes as little surprise that supporters of Wigan Athletic reject the stereotype straight away.

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