Book reviews

John Tandy makes a case for there being signs of a method in Barry Fry's madness

What’s it like watching Birmingham City these days? Imagine you’ve tuned in to Coronation Street. You want to find out whether Kev’s going to buy the garage. Instead you find two strangers that you’ve never seen before, and they’re making no sense at all. You check the Radio Times and discover that they only joined the cast the day before. They’ve not had time to learn any lines yet but they’re making it up as they go along. Then Reg Holdsworth disappears. It’ll turn out three weeks later that he’s been transferred to Brookside in part exchange for Barry Grant. You tune in the next day, and Curly’s been flogged to Pobol Y Cwm.

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What can Howard Wilkinson do to turn around Leeds' fortunes after such a disappointing season? Don Watson has a suggestion

Perhaps it was symbolic that Aston Villa were the opposition. There had, in our first season back in the top division, been indications to the broader audience that Leeds had at last produced a team capable of superseding all those flickering monochrome memories of the Whites of the Sixties and rose-tinted visions of the smiley-badge Seventies. But it was the performance away to Aston Villa in November ’91, televised live on ITV, that showed the world, well  the country anyway, just what a force the new order really was.

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Matt Nation issues a heartfelt plea to footballers to get on with what they do best and stop, well, messing about

“We lost because we done too much fanny dangle,” Dave Bassett once fumed a couple of years back after Sheffield United had gone down without a fight to Coventry. He may well have been right, but this was probably scant use to his team when they looked to analyze the defeat, since they, along with most people on the planet, don’t even have an inkling of what fanny dangle is.

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Borussia Dortmund's recent success in the Bundesliga is a throwback to the days when their region dominated German football, as Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger explains

Just over a month into the New Year and Borussia Dortmund are exactly where they were twelve months ago: at the top of the Bundesliga and in the quarter finals of a European cup. In 1995 they beat Lazio to reach the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup. This year their Champions League run seems likely to end at the hands of Ajax. If you had predicted this scenario a decade ago, you would have been taken to a place where the rooms have no windows.

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Nick House explains how Torquay Utd have come to find themselves light years adrift at the bottom of Division Three

They say when things are looking brightest the worst should be expected, when things look bad the best is to come. Such has been the story at Torquay United where spells at the foot of the Football League give way to play-off appearances before depths are plummeted again. The score since 1987: Fights for League Survival, 3; Play-off Heroics, 3.

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