Biteback, £20
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 366, August 2017
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with Leo Moynihan
Pitch Publishing, £16.99
Reviewed by Chris Lewis
From WSC 365, July 2017
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Bloomsbury, £20
Reviewed by Seb Patrick
From WSC 364, June 2017
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Yellow Jersey Press, £20
Reviewed by Rob Kemp
From WSC 360, February 2017
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Inside English football
by Alan Curbishley
Harper Sport, £20
Reviewed by Jon Matthias
From WSC 357 November 2016
It’s tempting to see this as a cash-in. Alan Curbishley has gone through his contacts book, made a couple of calls and set up some interviews with a mix of big names and people you and I probably won’t have heard of. How many of the interviews he’s done and how many are by his collaborator, freelancer Kevin Brennan, is hard to tell. The bits that are meant to be Curbishley introducing topics are full of cliches such as “in and around” and long run-on sentences that last for paragraphs. So they feel genuine.
Winning hearts, minds and matches
by Carlo Ancelotti, with Chris Brady and Mike Forde
Portfolio Penguin, £16.99
Reviewed by Ed Wilson
From WSC 356 October 2016
The authors of this book – Carlo Ancelotti, Chris Brady and Mike Forde – aspire to something more profound than the score-settling, indiscretions and self-justifications of the typical sports memoir. Instead, they hope to offer the general reader an insight into how “an expert practitioner” in “one of the most competitive markets imaginable” can be “instructive for anyone in modern business”. What results is an awkward hybrid that is unlikely to satisfy readers hoping to move up the management chain, or those who are simply interested in the game of football (frequently referred to in this text as “the product”).
by Elmar Neveling
Ebury Press, £12.99
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 351 May 2016
Attempting to write a biography of someone with an ongoing career means that your work is never quite done. As a contributor to DFB Bundesliga magazine, Elmar Neveling has been well placed to chart the rise of Jürgen Klopp over the past decade. A book published in Germany in 2011 Echte Liebe (Real Love) brought Klopp’s achievements with Borussia Dortmund into some kind of focus, but landed between back-to-back Bundesliga titles. A new version, published four years later, was able to evaluate his achievements (including the German double and reaching a Champions League final) from a better perspective. Klopp’s decision to cut short his post-Dortmund sabbatical has now necessitated an extra chapter in this English version of the book, probably earlier than Neveling anticipated, to cover the start of his Liverpool tenure.
The extraordinary life and times of Glenbuck and its famous sons
by Adam Powley and Robert Gillan
Pitch Publishing, £18.99
Reviewed by Graham McColl
From WSC 348 February 2016
With the Scottish football landscape currently ravaged almost beyond repair and Gordon Strachan, our jokey, England-based national-team manager telling us that Ikechi Anya and Scott Brown are talents to be reckoned with, it seems timely to be transported back to the village of Glenbuck. This was Bill Shankly’s childhood home and one that symbolises a footballing epoch – a century or so from the late Victorian era to the late 20th century – when Scotland produced reams of talented players from tight-knit working-class towns and villages, united by dangerous work in industry and an obsession with football.
Blue Thunder
The Jock Wallace story
by Jeff Holmes
Pitch Publishing, £17.99
Big Jock
The real Jock Wallace
by David Leggat
Black & White, £9.99
Reviewed by Ian Plenderleith
From WSC 347 January 2016
Jock Wallace was the manager of Rangers from 1972 to 1978, and is revered at Ibrox for leading the club to two trebles that ended a decade of dominance by Jock Stein’s Celtic. In the 1980s he returned for a second, less successful, spell at the club. He is also famous for making his players run endlessly up and down the sands of Gullane, a costal town east of Edinburgh.
My autobiography
by Sam Allardyce
Headline, £20
Reviewed by Jon Callow
From WSC 347 January 2016
As a Bolton supporter, I have a fairly uneasy relationship with Sam Allardyce. Without question, he brought my club some of the greatest days in our history, and took us to places I could never have imagined when I was watching him plod through his second spell as a player at Burnden Park in the mid-1980s. Still, there’s something about him I just don’t like.
