Reviews from When Saturday Comes. Follow the link to buy the book from Amazon.
Michael Hughes looks at Jamie Cureton and Bristol Rovers
Boxing Day 2000 at the Memorial Stadium, Bristol and and obscene chants are being aimed at a visiting player. Just four months previously Jamie Cureton had beena terrace hero, scoring for Bristol Rovers on the opening day of the season. Now he was back playing for Reading and facing some vitriolic abuse.
Ken Sproat looks at why Lee Clark left Newcastle United – for local rivals Sunderland
To the sort of people who produce WH Smith adverts, and Bobby Davro, Paul Gascoigne is the living embodiment of the typical Geordie. More representative of the area, however, inasmuch as every estate seems to have dozens, are charvers – image obsessed teenagers standing outside 8-til-late shops comparing tracksuits, trainers and baseball caps. Though some cause a nuisance they are, after all, sons and daughters who love their mams and dads.
Coventry are one of the moving spirits of the Phoenix League. Neville Hadsley believes their frenzied activity masks panic about their own financial position
It’s always struck me that the acting career of the Kemp brothers from Spandau Ballet was limited by the fact that there weren’t enough up-to-no-good twins around to portray. Once you’ve done the Krays, who else is there? Step forward Geoffrey Richmond and Bryan Richardson. True, they are not twins. Also true they are upstanding citizens, rather than criminal gang leaders. But they do have a certain physical resemblance – too many good meals in decent restaurants, one suspects – and they are also the joint architects of a rather rum scheme.
David Montrose remembers West Ham United's 1985-86 season
August, 1985: the omens were ominous. West Ham had ended the previous season just clear of relegation, and Paul Allen, Hammer of the Year, had since decamped to Spurs under freedom of contract – a trenchant vote of no-confidence. Few thought jockey-sized Mark Ward, ex-Oldham, would prove an adequate successor. The acquisition of St Mirren’s Frank McAvennie, meanwhile, aroused more mystification than anticipation. Who? Even his position was uncertain. Striker, midfielder?
Phil Ball remembers Grimsby Town's 1979-80 season
There’s pleasure in purgatory. Thus speaks the Grimsby Town supporter, a strange creature stuck out in the wilds of north-east Lincolnshire, miles from anywhere, in a cut-off place with a cut-off mentality to boot. If you are handed the burden of following this club from an early age, you very soon learn that you are likely to spend the rest of your life having the piss taken out of you, a curious state of affairs which nevertheless hardens you and makes you all the more determined to face things out – to go into the world, as Val Doonican might have put it, walking straight and looking at your adversaries in the eye.