Recommending a football book ...

I'm pals with Dan, good bloke and a wonderful book.

Edit : As for good football books, Tor - Uli Hesse, The Outsider - Jonathan Wilson, Calcio - John Foot, Danish Dynamite - Lars Erickson.

Mike, you're recommending a book you wrote.

Thank you Mike.

I have read it, of course, and an interesting read it is - as are your other collaborations with Ian and Stephen. But it's not quite what I was after really; It's not quite the poetry and prose I mentioned before. When I started the thread, rather than a standard biography, I was looking more for the quality of writing: something evocative; a football book that contains metaphors and similes; a book with a nice smattering of colons, semi-colons, dashes, and hyphens.

However, the title of the thread does say "Recommending a football book ...", which it most certainly is, so I should let it pass. 

The Miracle of Castel de Sangro (sp?) is v good, although the wide eyed naivety of the writer/narrator gets on your tits before the end

Dynamo : Defending the honour of Kiev - highly recommended, is less about football and more about the 2nd world war, made me tear up...

A Life Too Short by Ronald Reng is a must read. Harrowing but an incredible book.

First, I'll take it for granted that you've already enjoyed Martin Bull's "Away the Gas", "Print That Season" and "Double Darrell"!

On my shelves are:

"The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble Through North-East Football" (1995) Harry Pearson.
Funny. Trips to some of the non-League outposts as well as the League clubs.

"Soccer in the Dock" (1985) Simon Inglis
A history of British football scandals. I haven't read this since the 1980's, but I seem to remember Rovers coming out of it quite well for their disciplinary stance on our own early 60's scandal.

"Sightlines - a Stadium Odyssey" (2000) Simon Inglis
Focus on stadia around the world and the life that goes on around them. I remember enjoying reading this book on holiday.

"The Beautiful Game A Journey through Latin American Football" (1998) Chris Taylor
What it says on the tin.

"Manchester United Ruined My Life" (1998) Colin Shindler
Pre-Etihad Manchester City fan's envy of the Red-side. Contains the warning - 'do not attempt to read this book if you are a Manchester United supporter'. Also enjoyable was "George Best and 21 others" which follows the subsequent fortunes of the players in the FA Youth Cup match between the two Manchester sides in the early sixties.

"Football Against The Enemy" (1994) Simon Kuiper.
"The bizarre effects football can have on politics and culture".

"The Football Man" (1968) Arthur Hopcraft
'Repeatedly quoted as the best book ever written about sport' - according to the blurb on the back. It is very well written, though.

"The Game of Our Lives" (2015) David Goldblatt
There was a fanfare about this prize-winning book a year or two ago, as the Bristol-based author has enjoyed watching the Gas at the Memorial Stadium. My own view is that about a quarter of the book consists of a superficial scoot around all 92 League clubs, providing very little information that wouldn't be considered common knowledge to anyone who has watched football for more than a decade or so. But there is a lot of very good and thoughtful sociological insight in other chapters, and scathing attacks on the p*£$-poor governance of the game in this country.

And a couple of Rovers-related biographies that I've read recently:

Punky: The Paul Randall Story (2013) Paul Randall and Neil Palmer
If you watched Rovers in the seventies and eighties, every chapter jogs your memory. Even if you didn't, I would recommend this book.

Don Megson - A Life in Football (2014) Don Megson with Chris Olewicz
Mainly from the Sheff Wed angle, but also contains a chapter or two on his time Rovers. Interesting words about the background to the 9-0 defeat at Spurs!

As someone who reads most of this stuff quite closely I would argue that the situation has now flipped around and that modern football writing is on the whole far superior to modern cricket writing which, with a few noteworthy exceptions (Gideon Haigh for one) has largely failed to move with the times and produces a load of 10th rate versions of the above mentioned writers.  Cricket is no longer the game of public schools, village greens and empire but most writers still seem stuck with that image and seem out of touch to me.

Football writing on the other hand I used to find pretty tedious - either it was sensationalist and poorly written, hagiography, stat-obsessed (and with highly questionable poor quality stats at that) or strangely snobby when written about in the 'grown-up papers' - in none of those cases did the descriptions of the game remotely resemble the experience I, or the people I talk to about football, have of the game.  Also I always found the obsession with self-promoting autobiography to be tedious.  Now though there seems to be a much wider range of football writing that approaches the game from a much wider range of perspectives and angles.  The fanzine did make a difference because for the first time it acknowledged the bleeding obvious - that football is actually mainly about the fans and the people who follow the game and their experiences and perspectives which had been ignored and condescended for decades.  Dry as dust match reports or season descriptions that discuss the game as if it was a statement of parliamentary record or some kind of high-art performance and hero-worshipping biography exercise miss the point for me; it's about the people in and around the game and their warts and all stories.  Both the history of the game and the current sport itself becomes far more interesting when people take off the rose-tinted specs and present the human stories and frailties that exist behind it - it doesn't taint the legacies of the past, it enhances it.  But football was for a long time a very closed shop with a 'what goes on in the dressing room stays in the dressing room' attitude that permeated the whole sport.  Cricket on the other hand has always been far more gossipy.  That's what has changed - basically people have started writing about the interesting stuff and the wider social and cultural context of the game which is actually why most people like the sport in the first place.

I'd add to people's positive reviews of Tor. Forza Italia by Paddy Agnew is very good.  'Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 years with Brian Clough' is very good.  I like David Goldblatt's the Ball is Round but that is quite heavy going in places.  Generally though I'd recommend picking up a copy of the Blizzard (quarterly journal of quality football writing largely based on these kind of principles) and using that to identify some writers you like.  That's the main football journalism that I read.  Oh, and anything by Hunter Davies - who was lightyears ahead of everybody in noticing the simple fact that football is about fandom.

There's probably a debate to be had over the extent to which this whole boom in football writing is part of the bottom-up process that started with fanzines or the bourgeosation of football in which middle class people suddenly feel the need to put a wider significance to their football fandom.  However, I do think it's a great shame that there wasn't really a 'great chronicler' of the golden age of the game before the 2nd world war in the sense of those cricket writers mentioned.  Says a lot I think about the snobbish and condescending attitude the publishing industry had towards football for much of the 20th Century.  The fact that no one had really written a 'football novel' until Fever Pitch came along says it all really.

"The fact that no one had really written a 'football novel' until Fever Pitch came along says it all really"
OR
'The Arsenal Stadium Mystery' is a 1939 English mystery film adapted from a novel by Leonard Gribble.

I spotted that on another post recently.  Fair enough the fact is acknowledged, looks at best disingenuous if not IMO

I wouldn't bother to post, but I very much liked the History of BRFC book