Book reviews

Joyce Woolridge wades through yet another book allegedly written by George Best and finds it more honest than the previous ones, but no less depressing

Blessed is George Best’s fourth autobiography. He has also been the subject of at least two other major biographies and a film. Aside from Billy Wright, he is probably the most prolific producer of various versions of his life story. Potential readers of what might be Best’s last book, given his increasingly fragile health, might ask if there is anything else to be said about his brilliant football career and spectacular fall from grace. Blessed, though full of much familiar material, is sufficiently different from what has gone before to be of interest.

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Ever since he signed Argentina's Alberto Tarantini for Birmingham in 1978, Jim Smith has been one of the managers most willing to introduce foreign players to English football. Andy Lyons asked him about the pitfalls and benefits

What have been the main barriers to the integration of foreign players in English clubs? Has the traditional “team building” culture of drinking together been a particular problem?
I think that was true at one time but generally there is less of a drinking culture around English football these days. Players will go out together to restaurants and so on but you don’t us­ually get a whole team all going out on a Thursday night or what­ever. One thing that did concern foreign players in the early days especially was our level of medical treatment. They’d often prefer to go back home to get treated. I think we have caught up in that respect and work with the best international specialists now, rather than just with staff at the club. The for­eign players couldn’t believe we didn’t have full-time masseurs and that it was down to the old physio doing a bit on a Friday or Sat­urday morning. The foreign players work religiously on mas­saging muscles after training, far more than English players do.

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With the acrimonious industrial dispute over TV money settled, John Harding sifts through the wreckage and concludes the PFA have retained important principles

On the surface this year’s PFA dispute seemed an eerie rerun of the TV cash row of a decade ago, when a similarly rock solid vote gave Gordon Taylor a mandate to secure a deal with the newly formed Prem­ier League. However, this time around it’s been a dar­ker, murkier struggle. In 1991, Taylor was football’s White Knight, who had never put a foot wrong, was the saviour of small clubs, a doughty opponent of Thatch­er and so on. There were no “dirty tricks” and no club chairmen firing off vitriolic broadsides.

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Dave Espley looks at Stockport County as Andy Kilner departs and Carlton Palmer gets his first taste of management

In what might seem to an outsider to be one of the least surprising sackings of the season, Stockport County dispensed with the services of Andy Kilner the Monday after a 4-0 home de­feat by Millwall on October 27. What is per­haps surprising, however, is that the County chairman Brendan Elwood was still insisting to all and sundry on the Saturday night that Kil­ner’s job was safe. Granted, chairmen do that as a matter of course and, as we all know, votes of confidence usually precede a sacking as inevitably as night follows day, but in El­wood’s case, he genuinely meant it.

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Dianne Millen looks at Aberdeen's hopes to move to a new stadium and complex as part of Scotland's bid to host the Euro 2008 Championships

Aberdonians of a certain age can remember the glory days. Not the hot Eighties nights un­der Fergie when even the likes of Bayern Mun­ich were sent home from Pittodrie to think again, but further back yet, to the Fifties and Sixties. In those pre-wage inflation days, an ordinary league game against Hibs or Dundee United would see the official 40,000-odd cap­acity swelled by a good few hundred who never touched a turnstile – clinging to the roof of the Main Stand, maybe, or even perched peril­ously on the newly installed, state-of-the-art floodlights.

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