Reviews from When Saturday Comes. Follow the link to buy the book from Amazon.
Clive Charles, one of the most sought after coaches in the US, says he benefited from leaving Britain. Mike Woitalla reports
British coaches in American soccer are as easy to find as fast-food restaurants on Main Street. In a nation long dependent on foreign teachers, who more likely to dominate the tutorial corps than expatriates from a land of the same language?
Former England international Tony Woodcock had two spells as a player with Cologne and settled in Germany aftr retiring. He has since worked as a coach and for a management company representing players as he told Andy Lyons
“I got a FIFA agent’s licence when I joined the company I now work for 18 months ago. We do everything connected with sport from TV production to internet coverage. My department is sports management, dealing with boxers and ice hockey players as well as footballers. When I first moved to Cologne from Forest [in 1979], a transfer to another country was a complicated business, like something from a James Bond story, with secret talks and flying here and there. I learned a lot about how things were organised and later in my career players would come to me for advice on things like moving clubs.
Piers Pennington takes on the mysteries of the Didcot triangle, with three teams that lurk around the periphery of the big time
Look at a map of England, go left from London and you’ll come across a footballing desert stretching across Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Somerset. Only three oases of league football offer succour to the parched lower division journeyman and many a camel towards the end of its career has found refreshment in Oxford, Reading or Swindon. In the middle of the three lies Didcot, the railway junction which links them, and this has persuaded some to call this area the Didcot Triangle.
Ian Plenderleith looks back to the late 1970s, when Lincolnshire buzzed with football enthusiasm – for Nottingham Forest
Where is Lincolnshire? It’s the second biggest county in England after Yorkshire, but you’d be surprised how few people know the answer. Even some of the people who actually live there. A similar sense of bafflement can be seen etched on the face of anyone who might be asked the following: name three professional football clubs in Lincolnshire? And what have they ever won?
None of Devon's three clubs can claim glorious, trophy-laden histories, yet one seems to attract more than its fair share of attention, says Nick House
Some years ago, Harry Pearson wrote a wonderful book about football in the north east of England. By calling it The Far Corner he unwittingly paid a compliment to football west of Taunton Deane services by not labelling Devon as English football’s outpost. Unfortunately, others continue to do so, portraying Devon football fans as wretched individuals who spend Saturdays travelling to Old Trafford courtesy of Taw and Torridge Coaches.