Captain of the North
by Stan Anderson & Mark Metcalf
Sportsbooks, £17.99
Reviewed by Joe Boyle
From WSC 292 June 2011

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The urge to revisit football's once firmly embedded localism strengthens the more global the Premier League becomes. As local heroes go, Stan Anderson is hard to beat. Born in County Durham in 1933, Anderson is the only man to captain all three major north-east clubs. The bulk of his career was spent at Sunderland, playing at wing-half, a now defunct defensive midfield position. Anderson's instincts, however, were to push on, resulting in 46 goals in just over 500 appearances.

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Conflicts and Conscience in an English Football Club
by Matthew Bell & Gary Armstrong
Peakpublish, £16.99
Reviewed by Ian Rands
From WSC 292 June 2011

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A book detailing the comings and goings of the Sheffield United boardroom over the last 30 years may not seem to have universal appeal. But while stories of mismanagement and its fallout are familiar to a large number of football fans, this tale warrants further telling due to the extraordinary cast of characters. These include the country's biggest white-collar fraudster, an Iraqi businessman later to undergo gender realignment before subsequent reversal, a chairman subject to an international arrest warrant, a fugitive still on the run from Interpol and a London socialite known as "The Count" with indirect connections to Libyan arms dealers.

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by Paul Merson
HarperSport, £16.99
Reviewed by Tom Lines
From WSC 292 June 2011

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Most football memoirs carefully ration the racy bits as a way of punctuating the otherwise straightforward retelling of a career. How Not To Be A Professional Footballer does precisely the opposite. Cast adrift with Merse on a seemingly endless sea of lager, cocaine and crumpled betting slips, the sensitive reader ends up desperately scanning the horizon for Alan Shearer paddling towards them aboard an uncreosoted fence panel.

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by Kevin Drinkell
Black and White, £14.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 293 July 2011

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Kevin Drinkell was a great centre-forward whose career never quite hit the top. There's a credible argument that he was unlucky not to have made the England squads of the late 1980s. This was partly down to the wrong transfers at the wrong times, admits the player in this autobiography, and partly due to the intransigence and skulduggery of Robert Chase, his chairman at Norwich, in handling approaches from Manchester United and Tottenham.

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The Alex Stepney Story
by Alex Stepney with David Saffer
Vertical Editions, £17.99
Reviewed by Terry Staunton
From WSC 293 July 2011

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On the morning of Manchester United's 1977 Cup final showdown with Liverpool, Alex Stepney left the team's hotel for a stroll and, on coming across a barbershop, decided to get his haircut. As Stepney settled down in front of the mirror, the man with the scissors asked him if he was planning to watch the game later that day, seemingly unaware that his customer was one of English football's most famous keepers.

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