The Globalisation of Football
by John Samuels
Book Guild, £17.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 253 March 2008
The author confesses he started out with an analysis of the decline of midlands football but his publishers, seeking returns more global than those encompassed by the Nuneaton-Cannock-Worcester triangle, persuaded him to broaden his scope. He went away and did his reading, but his analysis is not particularly compelling.
The Inside Story
by Harry Harris with Martin Jol
Know the Score, £19.99
Reviewed by Luke Chapman
From WSC 253 March 2008
This is one of Harry Harris’s better books. Faint praise in view of the standard of some of his previous efforts, but, in picking over the bones of the Martin Jol era at Tottenham, Harris’s gossipy style is well suited to an omnibus edition of the long-running Spurs soap opera, in which catty politics and melodramatic intrigue are features of the script. Steering a steady course through events, Harris is neither feverishly pro-Jol nor anti-ENIC. Instead, he provides a tour through recent Tottenham history, charting the rumours and machinations, the brief highs and customary setbacks, while offering his “inside view” gleaned from “high level sources”. In fact there’s little that is particularly revelatory to anyone who has followed the story, and much of the sloppily edited material has the unmistakeable mark of filler.
A Search for the Truth
by Brian Belton
Pennant Books, £16.99
Reviewed by Darron Kirkby
From WSC 254 April 2008
In Len Shackleton’s autobiography, a chapter entitled “What the average director knows about football” famously comprised a blank page. Brian Belton, on the other hand, manages to eke more than 270 pages out of Terence Brown’s 15-year tenure as chairman of West Ham United.
The Life, Football and Faith of a Soca Warrior
by Marvin Andrews with Tom Brown
Mainstream, £15.99
Reviewed by Alex Anderson
From WSC 254 April 2008
It’s not often you have to read between the lines of the real story to get to the autobiography. If you’ve heard of Marvin Andrews, you’ll know he’s a devout Christian. For him, however, this is all the information you really need. Details of his earthly achievements may eventually wriggle out through the endless evangelical preaching, but they’re merely giving testimony to this book’s real subject: God.
The Life and Times of a Football Obsessive
by Rob Grillo
The History Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Pete Green
From WSC 254 April 2008
Mainstream culture has reached a peculiar position with regard to knowing things. On BBC1’s The One Show recently, an expert guest prefixed one interesting contribution with the phrase “Sorry to be a nerd, but…” Think about that for a moment: he was invited on to the show specifically to share his knowledge about a particular subject, yet deemed it necessary to apologise for doing so.