Book reviews

Neville Hadsley explains what it is like to be stuck following a team to whom very little has happened for over four decades

Many football fans love this time of year. The season has not yet begun and anything is possible. The start of the campaign cannot come soon enough. As a Sky Blues fan of four decades all I feel is the onset of mild resignation. Experience tells Coventry City supporters  that, in all likelihood, our dreams will be squashed by Christmas and all Santa will bring are the annual recriminations and the knowledge that all that lies ahead is six months of treading water until the whole thing starts over again.

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Jon Spurling looks at how footballers' holidaying habits have changed radically since the days of the maximum wage

For England’s multimillionaire footballers, there is one major consolation to having flopped so dismally on the grand stage earlier this summer. With cash to burn, they have the choice of jetting off to any destination in the short gap between the World Cup and the new season. Frank Lampard, with girlfriend Christine Bleakley in tow, holidayed in Italy with the Redknapps while the newly single Ashley Cole took a break in Los Angeles. According to the tabloids, Cole quickly got over the trauma of his split from Cheryl by partying until the early hours in “the city’s top nightspots”.

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First Division defences extended the season of goodwill to Boxing Day in 1963, when 66 goals were scored. Jon Spurling reports

As Christmas 1963 approached, weathermen warned a shivering nation to expect a recurrence of what had happened 12 months previously. The winter of 1962 was the worst since the big freeze of 1946, when the snow began on Boxing Day and wiped out football for virtually the next two and a half months. The occasional game was played here and there, but most were played out in the minds of the newly created Pools Panel, who met each weekend in a secret London location and guessed what each result might have been.

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Taylor Parkes reads a controversial and much-delayed book on England's key player and tabloid star. And then wishes he hadn't

It’s known on the back pages as a “moment of madness”. Probing the Church of Scientology on behalf of the BBC’s Panorama, John Sweeney – investigative journalist of some repute – is harassed by sharp-suited goons. No surprise to anyone familiar with that organisation, but too much for Sweeney, who blows his top.

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Although they both have grounds on the same street, the fortunes of Dundee and Dundee United have contrasted sharply in recent seasons. Neil Forsyth looks at a remarkable few months on Tayside.

In any two-team city a football club’s perceived success is measured in two ways – their success and the comparative success of the other. For the city of Dundee that delicate arrangement has just encountered a volatile season.

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