Search: ' Norman Hunter'
Stories
The Rivals Who Changed the Face of English football
by Roger Hermiston
Mainstream, £10.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 293 July 2011
There has been such a veritable swath of titles about these two managers in the last few years that you would imagine a joint honours degree in Cloughology and Revienomics to be possible. Is there space for yet more? Yes, this is a terrific read. Roger Hermiston has an easy and mature style. His research looks meticulous yet is modestly displayed. He is a journalist rather than a writer and it shows in the quality of access he gains and the digging he does.
My Life and Crimes as a Football Hatchet Man
by Peter Storey
Mainstream Publishing, £16.99
Reviewed by Jon Spurling
From WSC 287 January 2011
Arsenal's Double triumph in the 1970–71 season garnered few of the plaudits which Tottenham had received ten years earlier after winning both the Championship and the FA Cup. Critics insisted that Charlie George (who was injured for much of the season) and George Graham aside, the team was overly functional and, to put it bluntly, dull. No player appeared to typify the Gunners' distinctly blue-collar, often attritional approach better than midfield enforcer Peter Storey. Granted assorted nicknames during his career, including "Cold Eyes" and "Snouty" (due to his ability to "sniff" out weaknesses in the opposition's midfield), former Chelsea skipper and fellow 1970s hatchet man Ron "Chopper" Harris recently labelled Storey "the bastard's bastard".
A Yorkshire MEP is campaigning for an investigation into the 1973 Cup-Winners Cup final. Matthew Barker wonders why
The 1973 European Cup-Winners Cup final wasn’t, by all accounts, a great game. Leeds United and Milan kicked chunks out of each other in a typically brutal early-Seventies footballing culture-clash, played in a torrential downpour in Salonika. Luciano Chiarugi scored the only goal from a third-minute free-kick (indirect, claim Leeds), with the Italians happy to defend deep in a catenaccio master class under the tutelage of Nereo Rocco. Don Revie’s team had three penalty claims waved away by Greek referee Christos Michas, while Norman Hunter was sent off. It was, as Italian newspaper Il Manifesto recently put it, “a disaster from beginning to end … a night of rain and rage”, with a disgruntled local crowd pelting Milan’s players with missiles as they attempted to celebrate their win.
The Biography of Terry Paine
by David Bull
Hagiology, £19.95
Reviewed by Tim Springett
From WSC 267 May 2009
You can’t accuse the author of this excellent tome of not doing his homework, or loving his subject. David Bull, a retired social policy lecturer and lifelong Southampton fan, has penned a fully authorised biography of the player he considers to have been the best that he ever saw play for the Saints. Paine was certainly a remarkable player: 713 league appearances for Saints as they rose from the Third Division South to the top flight and remained there for eight seasons tell their own story. Likewise the 19 England caps that he won – the last against Mexico in the 1966 World Cup finals – without having kicked a ball in Division One.