Book reviews

The European Union is expanding as rapidly as the waistlines of retired footballers. Al Needham puzzled over an event that brought the two together

The Europe United Masters tournament was held at the London Arena on a miserable October Sunday, wedged between the Disney Channel Kids Awards and Beauty and the Beast On Ice. It had a weird premise: the Foreign Office decided that the best way to mark the admission of ten new coun­tries to the European Union was to organise a kick­about for retired foot­ballers, some of them not exactly re­nowned for their Europhilia (one of the British Masters squad once said living in Italy was like being in a foreign country and another famously told Norway to “Fuck off”). Mind you, if you needed reminding that there have been worse ideas, we’re only a stone’s throw away from the Millennium Dome.

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Squads are now so vast that players can sink to the bottom and never come up again. Matthew Hall goes in search of Mark Bosnich

Three years ago, Mark Bosnich had it all. He had turned down Juventus to rejoin his beloved Man­chester United, the club he spent three seasons with as a teenager a decade earlier, as successor to Peter Sch­meichel. During the same summer, after a night that ended in a police cell, he had remarried. Happy at work and happy at home, the future was bright. Three years later, the sunglasses are well and truly off, most likely replaced by pyjamas, slippers and a blanket. Mark Bos­nich doesn’t get out much these days, and in that relatively short space of time, Bosnich has felt the wrath of Sir Alex Ferguson, then his new wife and now Claudio Ranieri.

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As Roy Keane reflects on an eventful career, Joyce Woolridge questions the representation of United's skipper and the influence of the ghost writer

“Journalists and players have an uneasy relationship… Journalists tend to try and make the player say the things they want him to say. And it is all too easy for them to do this… This shows particularly when they are on the ‘discontented player’ story.”
Eamon Dunphy, Only A Game?

A ghost stalks the pages of Roy Keane’s autobiography: the unquiet spirit of professional Irish malcontent, Eamon Dun­phy. The ghostwriter who transcribes the tapes and knocks the pieces into shape usual­ly leaves some sort of footprint on the text of a footballer’s life, whether a flowery met­aphor or a stock phrase.

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Jon Lymer looks at the deal that, to all but Darlington's publicity staff, looked doomed from the start

In the run up to the closing of the new transfer window, Darlington came within a whisker of clinching one of the most unexpected moves of recent years. In the event, however, the club and its erratic chairman, George Rey­nolds, sim­ply continued along their romp to the heart of insanity.

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Suddenly, the midlands is full of financially stricken First Division clubs. Peter Gutteridge tries to isolate the reasons for Derby's spectacular plunge

Rams fans can tell you that rock bottom does not ex­ist. No matter how far you sink there is plenty of room to sink deeper. Derby County are a reported £30 million in debt and the bank is feeding in cash through an intravenous drip. We can’t even sign non-contract players un­til we have reduced the wage bill. We can’t reduce the wage bill because the transfer market is dead and we can’t release players because we can’t pay off their con­tracts. Rumour has it that two takeover bids and one refinancing package are under discussion. In four seas­ons we have progressed from the top half of the Premiership to relegation and the fringes of administration.

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