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Tub-thumping one minute, critical the next. The English press switches from swagger to insecurity

Wayne Rooney proved irresistible to the tabloids during the World Cup, with his features grafted onto a striking variety of cartoon characters, superheroes, animals and members of the Beatles. When not coloured green and depicted as Shrek, Wayne was gurning menacingly in front of a St George’s cross. Such excesses nothwithstanding, the tone of the England coverage was distinctly different to recent tournaments, albeit not until the games had started.

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My love affair with Liverpool
by Dietmar Hamann
Headline, £16.99
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 303 May 2012

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For a man whose diligently effective playing style did little to dispel that old cliche about cold German efficiency, Dietmar Hamann is a burning romantic at heart. At least when it comes to the institution he served so well for seven seasons. In this hugely engaging memoir, written with Malcolm McClean, he likens his "magnificent romance" with Liverpool to "a passionate, flaming and enduring love affair" with both club and city.

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by Graham McColl
Bantam Press, £12.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O'Brien
From WSC 280 June 2010

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By the law of averages, a sizeable number of you who are reading this will be having a flutter on the World Cup. So, before you put your money down on Spain (who are forever only one Sergio Ramos backpass away from potential disaster), or Brazil (whose star playmaker has endured a poor season), or even England, have a leaf through this entertaining look back through World Cup history that passes itself off as an instruction manual for managers hoping to bring home the big one.

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Dynamo Kiev's Soviet Supreme League triumph in 1975 put the club on the way to being the most successful team in league history. Saul Pope reports

The long-term significance
Dynamo Kiev were midway through a run that would ultimately see them win more Soviet league titles than any other side. Spartak Moscow picked up six titles through the Fifties and Sixties but Dynamo accumulated eight through the Seventies and Eighties, leaving them with a total of 13 titles to Spartak’s 12. A large part of Dynamo’s success could be attributed to manager Valeriy Lobanovsky, a pioneer of football science who used physical and psychological testing to evaluate players’ potential and blended the total football of the era’s Dutch sides with tactical discipline. As well as winning the league in 1975, Lobanovsky’s Dynamo won the Cup-Winners Cup. They would repeat this feat in 1986 before Lobanovsky led the USSR to the Euro 88 finals and Dynamo to the Champions League semi-final in 1999. The English FA’s forthcoming National Football Centre is partly based on the training centre he built for his Dynamo side in the Seventies.

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Directors of football are a little-loved breed. Paul Joyce looks at changing attitudes in Germany, where despite successes many clubs now have doubts

Kevin Keegan is hardly unfamiliar with outside interference in managerial affairs. His move to Hamburger SV in May 1977 was engineered by one of the Bundesliga’s first general managers, Dr Peter Krohn. A football layman who saw sport as “show business”, Krohn changed HSV’s blue shirts to pink to attract female customers and made the team ride into the stadium on elephants. Viewing himself as more important in the club hierarchy than “overvalued” coaches with “insufficient school education”, Krohn’s meddling meant that HSV finished only tenth in Keegan’s first season.

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