Book reviews

In the blue-and-white striped corner, Dave Allen; fresh out of the blue corner, Ken Bates. Graham Lightfoot reports on a ding-dong of a contest for ownership at Hillsborough

You can say what you like about Ken Bates, but he certainly draws the media in like wasps to a jam pot. His recent interest in buying into Sheffield Wednesday has meant that once again supporters can read about their club in the national press. For the past four years the club have slowly disappeared from main-stream media coverage. Languishing in mid-table in the Second Division there is no certainty that their matches will even get a few lines in the broadsheets’ divisional round-up column these days.

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Nottingham council have called Forest’s bluff over their cash crisis, leaving Al Needham and many fellow fans in no doubt  as to who is to blame for the problems at the City ground

It’s no fun at all being a supporter of Nottingham  Forest these days, but their latest twirl on the morbid carousel of financial mismanagement takes the bis­cuit, if not the whole packet. You’ll remember Forest – big club last century, won a few things, endearingly bonkers manager, held the world’s most jubilant relegation party, yo-yoed be­tween the Premiership and the First Division for a bit under assorted bosses. At time of writing, they have just hauled themselves out of a winless streak spanning 18 games and are staring relegation to the Second Division squarely in the face – but at least we could take comfort in the fact that we weren’t as financially ravaged as Notts County.

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Coventry's fall from the Premiership in 2001 and financial decline have now led to a team reliant on players borrowed from others, to the confusion of Neville Hadsley

Standing on the temporary, open, terrace on a freezing day at the National Hockey Stadium watching Coventry recently, I found myself squinting at our back four, feeling puzzled. It wasn’t the garish Ajax-style red away shirts, incongruous as they were. Nor the fact that the numbers on the four shirts seemed to add up to a rid­iculously high number – 98, in fact, a total sur­pas­sed the following week when it reached 114. It was the fact that I didn’t recognise two of our defenders.

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Football’s history remains largely untouched by the marketeers – but FIFA are determined to do something about that. Barney Ronay ponders Pelé’s official hot 100 selection

History is written by the winners. Pelé, twice a World Cup winner and the highest-earning 20-years-re­tired sportsman on the planet, is in the process of taking this process to a ludicrous extreme. As part of FIFA’s centennial celebrations the great man has been commissioned to draw up – possibly in biro on the back of an envelope – the “FIFA 100” list of the greatest living players, due to be unveiled this month after a mildly snowballing web-centred publicity campaign. As FIFA-run web­site The-100.com explains: “For the 100 years of FIFA, Pelé has chosen a living footballer that represents the best, most outstanding, crea­tive, play­ers of their generation.”

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Football's history remains largely untouched by the marketeers – but Francis Benali and Matthew Le Tissier are determined to do something about that. Taylor Parkes goes online in search of Jimmy Case's knee joints

TrueGreats.com is a website started by Matthew Le Tissier and Francis Benali (the two chums are pictured in charming my-elbow-on-your-shoulder male-bond­ing pose on the home page), to provide an online com­munity for retired footballers. “We both realised that, although there are many club and fan-based websites for football, there is nothing for those who’ve retired from the game,” they explain. Rather than what first occurred to me – build the world’s most enormous golf course – they’ve opted to set up in cyberspace instead.

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