Reviews from When Saturday Comes. Follow the link to buy the book from Amazon.
Apparent misfits in the Premiership, more than a few imports have gone on to have perplexingly good careers elsewhere. We tracked down three of them, Craig McCracken looking at Marc-Vivien Foé
Marc-Vivien Foé was an early developer. A first team regular for Cameroon’s top club Canon Yaoundé at 17, an international at 18, a World Cup player at 19, he won his first transfer to Europe when he signed a contract shortly after his 20th birthday to join Lens.
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.
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.
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.
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.