Book reviews

David Lee was good enough to play 150 league games for Chelsea in the 1980s and 1990s – but was only worth one game for Matt Nation's Sunday league side

It was unclear what exactly Bob Lee said or did to his kid brother in the car park before the match, but it certainly did the trick. After a couple of minutes of Chinese burns, dead legs and threats to tell Mum ex­actly what was in those magazines on top of the ward­robe, little David came back and agreed that, al­though he’d only come along to watch and even though he’d just broken into the Chelsea first team, he would deign to make up the numbers for his brother’s Sunday league team after all.

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When taking over at QPR, Ian Holloway did not realise the severity of the situation he was getting into. Here he talks to Barney Ronay about administration, finances and Kevin Gallen

QPR were among the clubs to have been traumatised recently by relegation from the Premiership. What was it like being a manager picking up the pieces?
Funnily enough it was all a bit of a shock for me at the time, because I didn’t know quite how bad things were. We were talk­ing just before deadline day about doing this and doing that, we even made an offer for a player with money it turned out in hindsight we didn’t have. It was a very difficult time. It also brought some reality. For the fans it was a shock, rather than moaning about where we are, to realise that we might not even be on the map. With the gates we get, that was 13,000 people looking like they might not have a team any more. The players were concerned about being paid, and all credit to David Davis and Chris Wright, they did keep paying us. But what we had to try and do was overcome the fact that we’d had a rich sugar daddy who’d built up a huge gap between what we were paying our players and what the fans were paying to come in and watch us. Feeling that the whole thing might die at any moment was very, very difficult.

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Bolton Chairman Phil Gartside tells Andy Lyons how his club is ready for anything

"We have a plan for various eventualities, such as whether we stay up or go down. If the worst came to the worst we could reduce our wages significantly. We haven’t really looked at other clubs who have gone down as case studies of what not to do because we’ve been up to the Premier League and relegated twice before, so we’ve had the experience. It might be possible to do things like increase the parachute payments to relegated clubs, but the rules are the rules and you have to plan around them.

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Martin Edwards' unpopular reign at Old Trafford is reassessed by Ashley Shaw, putting forward another side of the argument

Martin Edwards is a misunderstood figure. The well publicised attempts to sell his controlling interest in Manchester United have clouded supporters’ judgements of the progress made at the club under his chairmanship. Fans consistently forget his key role in est­­ablishing the club as the dominant economic power in British football, making Manchester United a res­pected name from the City to the Champions League.

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Having a bad season? Worried that things couldn't be much worse? Cheer yourself up with some schadenfreude as Chris Lynham looks back on Gillingham's darkest hour

In 1993, Gillingham celebrated 100 years of chronic underachievement with a cam­paign so inept it even failed to meet the very limited expectations of our band of world-weary supporters. Having put up with five years of steady decline, we could all cope with the boredom of inoffensively squatting in the lower half of the old Fourth Division, but the et­ernal agony of the 1992-93 season was a step too far.

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