Sir Curtly Ambrose: why he finally broke his silence in new book Time to Talk

• West Indies fast bowling legend opens up to Richard Sydenham
• What he really thinks of ex-teammates and opponents
• Inside story of his battles with Steve Waugh
• The good and bad sides of Brian Lara

Jon Culley

Amid the debate over the rights or wrongs of the send-off salute that the West Indian cricketer Marlon Samuels gave England's Ben Stokes during the second Test match in Grenada, I noticed something that once would have caused jaws to drop in astonishment...a comment from Curtly Ambrose.

The former fast bowler, one of the greats of West Indies cricket and the scourge of English batsmen for more than a decade after he was first unleashed upon them in 1988, famously observed what amounted to a vow of silence with the media for virtually his entire career.

His steadfast refusal to offer a quotable comment, let alone grant interviews, became his trademark.  Requests, it is said, were politely declined and greeted with five words: 'Curtly talks to no man!'

But that has all changed now.  Invited by sports writer Richard Sydenham to share his thoughts some 15 years after his retirement as a player, Ambrose agreed.  Together they produced an autobiography entitled Sir Curtly Ambrose: Time to Talk.

In an interview with The Sports Bookshelf, Sydenham revealed how he came to the decision to test whether Ambrose might be prepared to break his silence.

"I'm just about old enough to remember what it was like trying to get an interview with him back in the day," he said.  "I remember several futile attempts.

"Fast forward several years and I was thinking one day about the legends that were out there who had not done a book and he struck me as an obvious one to pursue, not only for the fact that there was no Curtly book but because none of us really knew anything about him.

"I approached him at first in 2013 via Richie Richardson and was delighted when he said from the start that the time felt right for him to do a book."

Nonetheless, Sydenham admits that he still felt a certain amount of trepidation about their first meeting in London.

"I didn't know what to expect, with this mystique that surrounds him," he said.  "You imagine he might be a bit moody, that he is not going to say much, because you think of him as the way you see him in the field.

"But as he says in the book he is a totally different character off the field.  He would often say that once I cross that rope I've got my game face on.

"I was pleasantly surprised.  When he sat down with a Pepsi to discuss the key moments of his career and what we were going to talk to publishers about, he was really engaging and interesting and friendly.  We hit it off straight away and it was clear he had a lot of great stories to tell."

Sydenham also spent time in the Caribbean to get a flavour of the life Ambrose leads away from the spotlight and to learn about his early life.

"I had about 16 days out there.  I went to Antigua and although Curtly wasn't there because he was coaching at the Caribbean Premier League but I was introduced to his friends and family and looked up where he went to school and his house.

"I couldn't speak to his mother because she was very ill at the time.  But I went St Kitts and caught up with Curtly there.  It gave me a flavour of what his life was like there and I felt I couldn't really have written the book without doing that."

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He found Ambrose, who was knighted by the Antiguan government in 2014, to be a person not keen to create unnecessary controversy but eager to be honest and therefore candid in sharing his opinion of teammates and opponents from his career.

His comments on Brian Lara, for example, could hardly be more blunt, particular when he talks about Lara's disruptive effect on the 1995 tour of England -- the year after he had broken the records for both the highest Test and first-class scores in the space of two months - when the brilliant left-hander's behaviour and ability to polarise opinion made him the Kevin Pietersen of his day.

"Curtly is quite a loyal person really, not a person who chases controversy, and at first he might have been reluctant to talk about a few things," Sydenham said.

"But in the end I think he realised he wanted this book to be very authentic, very honest and there were a few things where he said 'No, if this is going to be a very honest book, this has to go in the book' and he would jab his finger on the table.

"He was very determined that this would be a book that has not really hidden anything."

Ambrose, in fact, thought Carl Hooper was a better batsman than Lara, in terms of natural talent. "He would quite often chastise Hooper because he felt he wasn't making enough of his ability, whereas Lara knew he had to work hard to get the best of his ability."

He talks frankly as well about Michael Atherton and Alec Stewart, the Waugh brothers, Ricky Ponting, Javed Miandad, Sachin Tendulkar and Jacques Kallis among others.

He speaks of his admiration for Richard Hadlee, his respect for Glenn McGrath and how the bowler he would rate the greatest of his time was Wasim Akram, the Pakistan left-armer.

"He thought Wasim Akram was the tops, someone who had the ability to do everything. He almost called himself a mere mortal in comparison to Wasim, who he felt had the box of tricks to produce any wicket-taking ball at any time."

And, of course, he talked at length about the great comrades from his heydey, and the highlights of his bowling career, which Sydenham found a particular joy to listen to.

"It was riveting because I'm a guy who was passionate about West Indies cricket from the time I got into the game in the early 80s. Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes were my childhood heroes.  I loved watching Malcolm Marshall and Joel Garner and latterly Curtly and those guys, so it was all fascinating for me.

Sir Curtly Ambrose

"And there were the memorable moments like the six for 24 against England in Trinidad, the Steve Waugh confrontations, that extraordinary spell of seven for one against Australia at the  WACA.  We all know about them and the basic details but it was a lot more interesting getting to know the depth and the origins of those kind of great moments, whether controversial or just great bowling spells.

"He told me the story of the seven for one, how he had sprayed it around a bit in the early session of that day, had not gone for many runs but knew that he hadn't made the batsmen play on a pitch that was conducive to fast bowling.  He sat in a dressing room with his head in a towel for 40 minutes, angry, and then came out and produced that spell of seven for one.

"A couple of times when he was answering my questions, and I did think to myself 'is this really happening?' Is this Curtly Ambrose, who's never said a word through his career, all of a sudden spilling his life story to me? It did seem a bit surreal at times."

So why did he give away so little of his time during his playing career, why did he insist on all bar a few occasions, that 'Curtly talks to no man'?

The phrase itself may be a bit of an urban myth, since Ambrose cannot recall ever having used those exact words.  Yet he does not deny that the usual response if a journalist asked if he might like to offer an opinion was 'no'.

"His explanation was it just wasn't for him," Sydenham said.  "He said there were plenty of guys happy to go yapping to the media at the end of the day's play but he just wasn't really comfortable doing that.  He said that he preferred to let his five and a half ounces do the talking for him.

"He did not speak about anything specific but it was clear he had had a couple of instances in his rookie days where he had given an interview and it did not come over as he wanted or expected.

"I explained from our point of view that sometimes you do an interview for half an hour and you only get space for 400 words and you have to be selective in picking out the most interesting bits.  He accepted and understood that but said that it didn't really help if the Curtly Ambrose portrayed is not the one he was expecting to see.

"So he thought it was better not to say anything and let people make their judgements based on what they see on the field, so that's why we have had to wait 15 years to hear what he has to say and all the experiences he has been through."

Buy Sir Curtly Ambrose: Time to Talk (Aurum) from Amazon, Waterstones or WHSmith.

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The special relationship: how football and the media have grown together

New book studies a history of mutually beneficial co-existence

What football owes to Sky and Sky owes to football

How one of game's great traditions came about to suit the press

Why women's game should feel let down by football and the media

As Sky were committing themselves to paying £4.2 billion as their share of the latest record-breaking deal to show the Premier League, for every armchair football fan relishing the prospect of even more world-class players flooding to these shores for their entertainment, there were others wondering how much more perversion of the game's traditions might result from television's ever-tightening grip.

Yet, as Roger Domeneghetti reveals in his fascinating new book, From the Back Page to the Front Room, football has been bowing to the wishes of the media since the century before last.

Take the 3pm Saturday afternoon kick-off, possibly the most cherished of all the traditions, the tinkering with which has been the subject of endless gripes since the first satellite dish appeared on a south-facing UK wall in 1989.

That tradition, believe it or not, began at the behest of the media, when evening newspaper editors in the 1880s lobbied for a uniform 3pm kick-off time to aid the production of their booming Saturday night Football Specials.

From the Back Page to the Front Room is a history of football and the media that explains that while at times their relationship has been turbulent it has for the most part been mutually beneficial almost since the game began.

Speaking to The Sports Bookshelf, Domeneghetti said that the bidding wars that attract such interest when TV rights are up for grabs are, in fact, nothing new.

"You could think this was a new phenomenon but it happened initially with radio and then with the cinema newsreels," he said. "The newsreel companies fought for the rights for football just the same.  Obviously the sums involved were a lot less, but the companies nonetheless saw football as something of value to fight over.

• Buy From the Back Page to the Front Room from Amazon

"From the beginnings of the media industry, sport has been seen as a way of selling content and a way of selling technology.  It was all very well inventing a radio, for example, but you needed something on the radio to listen to.

"Radio, TV and newspapers have all found a lot of success on the back of sport in general but through football in particular.

"And it has been a mutually conducive relationship. Just as football was important to newspapers in selling their Saturday night editions, so newspapers were important to football in those initial years of the Football League as a means of communicating and promoting the game.

"It has always been a relationship to benefit both parties. I'm not sure Rupert Murdoch's success would have happened on the scale it has if he had not won the football rights.   Likewise the money Sky gave to football was vitally important in kicking on from the low point of the 1980s and post-Hillsborough to become the very different and much more modern entertainment product it is today."

Football drove satellite TV boom

Domeneghetti, a journalist since the 1990s and currently North-East football correspondent for the Morning Star, set about writing From the Back Page to the Front Room largely because it was the kind of book he would have been keen to read had it existed already.

"It occurred to me that while there were a lot of histories of the media, such as the Andrew Marr book My Trade, a lot of books about the history of football and also some books about sports media, there wasn't a book that looked at the relationship between football and the media," he said.

"Yet sport has played a key part in the development of all media -- newspapers, radio, television, satellite television and now the internet.  It was the kind of book I wanted to read, so I thought I'd try to write it myself."

Domeneghetti combines his football writing with lecturing in journalism and the sociology of sport and his interest in football's influence on society as well as its position in the media industry shines through in the text.   The depth in which he explores each part of the story makes the reader's experience a little like being escorted through a museum of football and media history with a personal guide ready to provide extra background information to go with every exhibit, or to put it into the context of the day.  Interviews with prominent figures in both the game and the media industry, including Greg Dyke, Henry Winter, Jacqui Oatley, Jonathan Wilson and Hope Powell, further enhance the tour.

There is so much detail, in fact, that it is hard to imagine that anyone, no matter how deeply involved with the football media industry, could fail to learn something new.  Little wonder that one reviewer suggested it should be adopted as a definitive textbook for media students, and not just those with an interest in sport.

"I wanted to produce a book that non-academic people could read and enjoy and get something from and that academic people could look at and recognise as well researched and could add something to the subject," Domeneghetti said.

Author Nick Hornby

As well as charting the relationship between football and newspapers in the past and with radio and television in the modern era, the author looks at such diverse areas of the media as the fanzine explosion and the men's magazine market.  There is even a chapter on football comics.

Football literature and the influence of Nick Hornby's groundbreaking Fever Pitch comes under the microscope in a chapter on the changing nature of books about the game, in which Domeneghetti asks why it took so long for the intelligent analysis with which we are so familiar now to find willing publishers.  The answer to that question comes broadly within the spectrum of social change, in which football and football coverage by the media, the author argues, has had a key role.

Fever Pitch changed the books market, and to a certain extent even the perception of football across English society, in the way that it allowed middle class fans, largely ignored previously as the media remained wedded to the notion that football was a working class pursuit, to acquire some ownership rights of their own by opening the way to intelligent discussion of the game across a whole range of publications that might once have seen football as too trivial to be worthy of their attention.

Domeneghetti argues that, far from being trivial, football has been and will continue to be hugely important to the British culture and that of all the nations in which it is played. Much can be learned about a country, he says, from the way its media covers football and sport in general.

"If you want to understand a country there is probably no better way than looking at its coverage of sport," he said. "It will tell you how strong is that country's sense of nationalism, what its attitudes are to race, to women, to homosexuality, all manner of things, through the prism of football.  Not many other things can you do that with, I would have thought."

Media starved women's football of publicity

Nowhere is this theory more strongly supported than in the book's chapter on women in football, which demonstrates how prevailing attitudes towards women across society are reflected in and perhaps magnified by football, from the Football Association's effective banning of organised women's football soon after World War I -- in spite of, or perhaps because of its enormous popularity while the country's menfolk were otherwise engaged -- to the barriers faced by female football journalists and broadcasters.

Liberally sprinkled with footnotes, and with a comprehensive bibliography and a well-organised index, From the Back Page to the Front Room has the feel of an academic textbook.  Yet Domeneghetti's style is light and accessible and quite apart from anything else it is a good read.

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From the author of Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds, a celebration of the golden era of cricket festivals

Cricket festivals were once as much a part of the English sporting summer as Test matches, Wimbledon and the Epsom Derby.
  
They were the chance for the cricket counties to venture from their metropolitan headquarters into the shires, where club grounds would dress themselves up to welcome the stars of the county and international circuits.

Chris Arnot, author of the wonderfully nostalgic Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds, has now written an equally engaging tour of the country's rich cricket heritage that puts the spotlight on that cherished era.

In his introduction to Britain's Lost Cricket Festivals, the Warwickshire-based journalist notes that as recently as 1961 there were 64 cricket festivals in the county fixture schedule, an average of three per county.

By 2001 this had dwindled to 16; today there are fewer still.  Cheltenham and Scarborough continue, and there has been a revival of county cricket in Chesterfield, which Derbyshire deserted between 1998 and 2006.  Other outgrounds survive, and there are other mini-festivals, but with a different structure to the Championship and more exacting standards for facilities, most of the genuine cricket weeks of old have gone.

Unlike Arnot's disappearing grounds, some bulldozed in name of progress and turned into shopping centres, others left to the tumbleweed, the homes of the lost, lamented festivals for the most part still exist, as public parks or local cricket clubs, and he spent a memorable summer in 2013 exploring as many as he could pull in.

"I started in March at Stourbridge in Worcestershire and ended in Scarborough in August, visiting grounds all over the country.  I was lucky in that it was a glorious weather.  It's probably the best summer I've ever had," he said.

Arnot unearths some new tales and revisits some much-loved old ones.  No cricketing yarns about Buxton, for example, could fail to include the famous snow storm of Monday, June 2, 1975, which halted play between Derbyshire and Lancashire and produced one of the most extraordinary matches of the century.

Cheltenham College hosts the annual Cheltenham
Festival in Gloucestershire

When play resumed on the Tuesday, Derbyshire had to bat on an uncovered pitch into which the snow had melted. Replying to the 477 for five declared posted by Lancashire in the heat of the Saturday, Derbyshire were bowled out for 87 and 42. Such was the hazardous nature of the pitch, the Derbyshire batsman Ashley Harvey-Walker, Arnot relates, took guard after handing umpire Dickie Bird his false teeth.

"It was at Buxton, too, that John Arlott confounded the locals, having turned up to commentate on a Sunday League game without his fabled briefcase full of claret, by asking if the pavilion bar possessed a bottle of good red," he said. "The First XI captain, Peter Cockram, had to tell him they only drank beer but took pity on him and spent the opening overs of the ground's first-ever John Player League game scouring the local branch of Victoria Wines for a decent claret."

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Arnot tells another wonderful tale passed on to him by Mike Turner, the former Leicestershire player and later secretary-manager, of the county side's visits to the Bath Grounds at Ashby de la Zouch.

"The ground adjoined the gardens of the nearby Royal Hotel, which was owned by a posh chap called Richard Derrington-Fenning," he said. "He wore a pin-striped suit and drove a yellow Rolls-Royce and provided hospitality for the players in the form of a four-course lunch so lavish they had to had extend the 40-minute break to an hour.  He always advised people to choose the monkey gland steak, whatever that was."

Arnot's tour opened his eyes to the pleasures of Cheltenham and Chesterfield and what he had missed as a cricket fan of urban roots.

"I grew up watching cricket at Edgbaston -- I was born in Birmingham and never knew any better -- but on an average county day now it is a huge ground with vast areas of empty seats and the players hidden away in their changing rooms," Arnot said.

"There is so much more of an intimate feel to the outgrounds, the spectators are closer to the players, it feels more of an occasion.

"You can understand why counties want to maximise their headquarters grounds, having in many cases spent a lot of money on providing their players with reliable pitches and state-of-the-art facilities.

"But festivals can be such pleasurable occasions and I hope I've conveyed a sense of that in the book."

Britain's Lost Cricket Festivals: The Idyllic Club Grounds that Will Never Again Host the World's Best Players, by Chris Arnot (Aurum Press) is available from Amazon, Waterstones, WHSmith and other retailers.

Also by Chris Arnot: Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds. Read more.

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After his Trueman triumph, Chris Waters tells the story of history's most famous bowling analysis

When cricket writer Chris Waters delivered the manuscript for Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography to his publisher three years ago, he told friends his first book would also be his last, echoing the words of countless writers before him. The journey from first thoughts to final page can be long and arduous, so grueling sometimes that many vow never to go there again.

A modest man, not inclined to blow his own trumpet, Waters wasn't sure whether he had done a good job or otherwise.  The reviews, however, were highly complimentary. Indeed, Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography won a hat-trick of awards: Wisden Book of the Year, MCC/Cricket Society Book of the Year and British Sports Book Awards Cricket Book of the Year.

The thousands of readers who shared the enthusiasm of the award judges will be delighted to learn that Trueman was not his last book.  The second is due out next month.

10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat is probably the book that would have marked his literary debut had he not been commissioned to do Trueman first.

He can trace the idea for it back to an assignment handed to him in his day job as a cricket journalist some 14 years ago.

"It was while I was working on the Nottingham Evening Post back in 2000," he told The Sports Bookshelf. "A chap called Frank Shipston, a former Nottinghamshire player, had just become the oldest surviving county cricketer at the age of 94 and I was asked to go along to interview him.

"It was while I was researching his career -- and he only played 49 games -- that I found that one of the matches he played for Notts was the one in which Hedley Verity, the Yorkshire spin bowler, had taken all 10 wickets for 10 runs at Headingley in 1932.

"I had always been taken with the 10 for 10, which I had seen in Wisden, in the records section, as a child, and it had stuck with me.   There were other bowlers who had taken all 10 wickets in an innings -- in fact, it wasn't the only time Verity did it -- but to me there was something magical, almost perfect about 10 for 10. Perhaps it was the symmetry of the numbers; it seemed like the ultimate bowling analysis.

Verity was one of Yorkshire and England's greatest cricketers. In a career that ran from 1930 to 1939, he took 1,956 wickets at an average of 14.90. He was chiefly responsible for England's only Ashes victory at Lord's in the 20th century, when his 15 wickets helped to win the 1934 Test -- 14 of them captured in a single day.  No one dismissed the legendary Australian batsman Don Bradman more times in Test cricket than Verity, who claimed his wicket on eight occasions.

"I interviewed Frank Shipston, wrote a piece for the paper and that was that," Waters continued. "But it came to mind again five years later, by which time I was working for the Yorkshire Post, when there was a Hedley Verity exhibition on at Headingley to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.

"His son, Douglas, brought over a number of items of memorabilia from his home in North Wales, including the 10 for 10 ball.  I saw the ball and introduced myself to Douglas and when I said I had been thinking about writing at length about his father's feat he only encouraged me in thinking it was a good idea.

"I began researching, at the Yorkshire Post, looking at the old papers, the reports from 1932, which added some wonderful colour to the story and I just thought 'yes - there is a book in that.'

"After I'd written a piece for the paper about the exhibition, a guy wrote to me and said he had seen the 10 for 10 and I drove over to see him at his home on the Lancashire border.

"So I had it in mind to do this book before the Trueman one was offered to me."

Although this great feat of bowling, better than anything that had gone before and not remotely threatened since, is the book's centrepiece, Waters sets the scene and describes the aftermath, tracking Verity's early life and the years that followed, from his upbringing in Leeds, the son of a coal merchant, to his premature death in combat in Italy, as a captain in the Green Howards, the Yorkshire Regiment that was part of the Eighth Army invasion.  He also provides biographical background on the other participants in the match, and where their careers took them subsequently.

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"I started the book with my meeting with Frank Shipston, the personal connection I had with the story and why it has fascinated me," he said.  "So I write about Verity's life and career up to the date of the match, which is quite early on in his career. He had only been playing for two years.

"And then there is the match, with some chapters afterwards on the rest of his career and his death in the War, in Italy, to put it into context."

Verity had volunteered for the army, driven by a patriotic instinct and a staunch conviction that the war was a just one, that Hitler had to be stopped. "He believed the war had to be fought," Waters said. "On the 1933-34 tour of India, he had met Colonel Arnold Shaw of the Green Howards in Madras at a post-Test party, and when he saw him again at Headingley in 1938 he said he really wanted to get involved.

"Colonel Shaw said to get in touch with him again when war was declared and in the meantime gave him a lot of military handbooks, from which Verity started studying assiduously how to prepare for war.

"He died in 1943.  The story endures in many ways because of his tragic death, even 70 years on.  I actually found that writing about it was very moving.  It was such a sad end and he was a great guy by all accounts."

But Waters does not let Verity's tragic demise dominate the story, which is, after all, about a moment of spectacular brilliance on the cricket field.

"It is a fascinating story," he says.  "Although he did it in the days of uncovered pitches, no one else has come anyway near the record.  No one has ever even threatened it.  It is one of the most phenomenal things, to my mind, in the history of the game, one of the most romantic and remarkable records.

"It was a match between the second and third placed teams, massive rivals in county cricket, a bit of a title decider.  Harold Larwood and Bill Voce led the Nottinghamshire attack, in the summer before the Bodyline tour.

"Notts batted first, batted all day for 234 runs in 130 overs.  The irony was that it was a really dull start and all the writers complained that Notts were killing the game, that they always did this against Yorkshire.  It was a really soporific start to this incredible game.

"Yorkshire replied with 163-9 and then there was a massive storm. Brian Sellers declared 71 runs behind.  Notts batted again and were 44-0. Then the sun came out, Verity took 10 for 10 and they were all out for 67.  Percy Holmes and Herbert Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire openers, then knocked off the 139 runs needed to win with ease.  It was just incredible.

Hedley Verity

"Frank Shipston opened the batting and joint top-scored in the innings.  He was the second victim.  He remembered that Verity wasn't spinning the ball much but just enough to take the edge."

Waters does not claim to have written a definitive biography, not in the way that his Trueman book cut through the many myths surrounding the legendary fast bowler to present a much more credible assessment of his real character, but makes worthwhile additions to what is already known and recorded about Verity's life.

"It is a long time since anything was written about him so I wanted to bring his life up to date," Waters said.  "A lot has happened since the last book, there have been exhibitions and things, adding a little more to the story.  I got to know his son very well and he helped me illuminate a bit of the man.

"He was a man who was spotless, really, quite dull from a biographical point of view.  But to me the real joy of the book is the fascination of the colour around the match.  Cricket writers at the time covered the games in huge detail, so there was a lot of colourful stuff written. You almost get a ball-by-ball account."

There are numerous photographs that enhance the written description, including one that shows that the game was played against a backdrop not exactly fitting for such a momentous day in cricket history.   The end from which Verity was bowling when he took the 10 wickets was out of public use following a fire a few months earlier, which had resulted in the double-fronted Rugby Stand, the predecessor of the current structure standing between the cricket field and the Leeds Rhinos rugby stadium, being demolished.

"The new Rugby Stand was actually being built at the time," Waters said. "It was a chaotic scene with rubble everywhere. There was a cement mixer close to the boundary's edge.  Essentially, this great moment in cricket history, this bowling feat never surpassed, was performed to the backdrop of a building site."

Buy 10 for 10: Hedley Verity and the Story of Cricket's Greatest Bowling Feat from WH Smith. Also available via this site from Amazon and Waterstones by clicking on the link.

Also by Chris Waters: Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography (available from Amazon, Waterstones and WHSmith)

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Tragic story of the cricketer who inspired P G Wodehouse's most famous comic character

The Real Jeeves: The Cricketer Who Gave His Life for His Country and His Name to a Legend, by Brian Halford

By conservative estimates, the Battle of the Somme claimed the lives of more than one million soldiers, to be remembered as one of the great tactical mistakes in the history of warfare, its name becoming a byword for pointless, indiscriminate slaughter.

Among them was a cricketer whose name would become famous, not for anything that happened in the horror of the trenches but because of a fictional character in a series of comic novels that are still read - and indeed adapted for stage and television -- to this day.

Jeeves was the name chosen for the valet devised by the author P G Wodehouse to act as a foil for his comic lead, Bertie Wooster, in a series of novels and short stories, making his first appearance (without meeting Wooster, as it happens) in Extricating Young Gussie, which was published in the United States in September 1915 in The Saturday Evening Post.

Wodehouse was a cricket lover, a member of the Authors XI, a cricket team made up entirely of writers that included also Arthur Conan Doyle and AA Milne.  He named his character Jeeves after Percy Jeeves, a Warwickshire player he had seen in action at the Cheltenham Festival in August 1913.  He is said to have been charmed by Percy's demeanour on the field and impressed with his bowling action. The name stuck.

By the time the name appeared in print for the first time, Wodehouse having chosen Reginald as the first name for his Jeeves, Percy had already put his cricket career to one side in order to join up.  In November 1915, having signed up to a battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment that became known as the Birmingham Pals, he was on his way to France.  The following July, three weeks into General Haig's misguided attempt to push back the Germans' Western Front, during an assault on a German position that was futile even by Somme standards, Percy Jeeves perished.

His story intrigued the Birmingham Mail journalist Brian Halford, who is a both cricket writer and a student of First World War history.   "I became aware of the Jeeves story soon after I began working here in 2000," Halford said. "I've always been interested in the First World War and began to wonder why the story had never been told.

"It was a slow burner for a number of years, mainly because the day job had to come first, but the more I learned about Percy the more I admired him.  With the 100th anniversary of the First World War coming up, I thought that if there was a time to do it, now was that time."

Once he had begun researching in earnest, Halford soon discovered that there was not much to go on.  There were records of his cricket career -- a Yorkshireman, Jeeves was a medium-fast bowler and handy batsman who had played for Goole Town and Hawes, in Wensleydale, before undergoing an unsuccessful trial with Yorkshire and subsequently joining Warwickshire -- but filling in the other details proved more challenging.

"The statistics of his two full years at Warwickshire suggest he would have gone on to become an exceptional player," Halford said. "He was good enough to dismiss batsman of the calibre of Jack Hobbs, Philip Mead and Plum Warner for example.  After he had represented the Players against the Gentleman in 1914, bowling his team to victory, Warner earmarked him as the coming thing.

"But finding out about the man behind the figures was more difficult.  Interviews with sportsmen were quite rare in his day and as far as I could see he only ever gave one, to a magazine called Cricket - A Weekly Record, after his first season.  He came across as a modest fellow.

"After he had been killed, the Yorkshire Post said he would be missed as much as a person as a cricketer.  It seemed he was a smashing bloke."

Almost 100 years after his death, locating anyone who could corroborate this estimation proved difficult. There would be surviving relatives, but locating them was another matter. It turned out that help was on the doorstep.

"My nextdoor neighbour, as it happens, is interested in family trees and it was through his research that we tracked down a great nephew in Aberdeen, Keith Mellard.

"I didn't know what to expect when Keith first took a call from this bloke asking him about his great uncle but it turned out that not only was he aware of his relative but he was very proud of him, having been told about him by his grandfather, Percy's brother, Alick.

"Keith's assistance was invaluable and it was great to have a member of the family involved."

Halford did not have to travel far to research Jeeves's military career, or at least the records of the 15th Warwickshires, the battalion to which he was attached.  They are preserved at the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers Museum, in Warwick.

"They allowed me to go through the battalion diaries, enabling me to follow their movements from the day he joined up to his time on the trenches."

Jeeves joined up, in fact, almost immediately he could after war was declared on August 4, 1914.  "He fulfilled his obligations to Warwickshire by completing the season but volunteered for the Royal Warwickshires as soon as he could after the season," Halford said.

The new recruits were based at Sutton Park in Birmingham and over the next year were trained for combat.  From Sutton Park, Jeeves and his comrades moved to Leyburn in Yorkshire -- somewhat ironically only 15 miles from the idyllic cricket field in Hawes that had been his once home ground -- and then to Codford Camp, on the southern edge of Salisbury Plain.

Finally, on November 22, 1915, Jeeves found himself sailing out of Folkestone Harbour on the SS Invicta, bound for Boulogne.  His cricket career had been suspended, his record from precisely 50 first-class matches an impressive one -- 199 first-class wickets at an average of 20.03, plus 1204 runs, including four half-centuries.  It was a record on which he had ambitions to build.  In fact, the receding view of the cliffs as the SS Invicta chugged out into the channel would be his last sight of England.

Jeeves lost his life in the summer of the following year, only three weeks into the Battle of the Somme, a campaign that was to last four and a half months, and in which the British Fourth Army suffered 60,000 casualties on the very first day, July 1.  Initially part of a reserve company, Jeeves was part of an assault on a strategically important diamond shaped wooded area of 75 acres, in a lofted position, known as High Wood.

"It was as it sounded, an elevated and heavily guarded, densely wooded area," Halford said. "It was a hopeless offensive.  The British soldiers were ordered to walk towards the enemy up an open slope, flanked by German positions.  They were cut down in the crossfire en masse.

"Percy disappeared without trace, either blown to bits or buried alive in the mass of bodies.  His name is on a memorial at Thiepval but no remains were recovered that could be said to be his."

In the author's judgment, the assault was tantamount to murder, not by the Germans, who were engaged in the legitimate defence of their positions, but by the British officers who sent their men to their inevitable fate.

The story of Percy Jeeves is just one story, unique to him but with the characteristics of countless others, of young men with everything to live for who were simply slaughtered.  In Halford's words, it is "a microcosm of the sickening waste entailed in the conflict."

Hugely talented, immensely popular, with the potential to make a real impact in his lifetime, Percy Jeeves was the kind of man his family, friends and colleagues might have called 'one in a million'. In death, tragically, he was just that.

The Real Jeeves: The Cricketer Who Gave His Life for His Country and His Name to a Legend, by Brian Halford,  is published by Pitch Publishing

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The Lion who roared back - a footballer's triumph over illness, poverty and war

Julie Ryan was only a toddler when her father's football career was drawing to a close, too young to know anything about the goalscoring feats that made him a favourite with fans at Millwall, Brighton and Gillingham during the post-War boom years of the 1950s.

But as she grew up it became clear that the story of John Shepherd, who scored 121 goals in his nine seasons in the professional game, was a particularly exceptional one.

Barely 18 months before making an extraordinary Millwall debut in which he scored four times, Shepherd had been admitted to hospital in Cornwall suffering from poliomyletis, a dreaded disease of childhood and adolescence that claimed thousands of victims in the first half of the last century.

Shepherd, who contracted the paralysing illness while on national service with the RAF, lost all feeling in his left foot and doctors warned him he might never walk again, let alone realise his dream of professional football.

The dark days spent in an isolation ward hundreds of miles from his London home, the gruelling road to recovery and, against all odds, the fulfilment of that dream added up to a remarkable story, one that Julie felt for many years would make for a fascinating book.  But, as she was to discover, there was another part of her family history that was equally extraordinary.

Author Julie Ryan - John
 Shepherd's daughter

Her Madrid-born mother, Esther, had been only a few days old when the man Julie would later know as her Spanish grandfather had left to fight for the republican side against Franco's fascists in his country's horrific civil war.  It prefaced an upbringing defined by the heartbreak and anguish of separation that went on for so long that the family were not reunited until 10 years later -- in London, where they would settle and, of course, Esther would meet John.

It was a passage in their lives of which Julie knew only patchy details but which she realised, as she researched her father's life, could form a narrative just as compelling, if not more so.  It was a story, she decided, that had to be told and these two gripping and parallel threads of her family history, adroitly set in social and political context, have been brought together in a wonderful just-published book entitled In and Out of the Lion's Den: Poverty, War and Football (CreateSpace).

Julie, who now lives in Switzerland -- her husband, Andrew, is executive director of ASOIF (Association of Summer Olympic International Federations, based in Lausanne -- told The Sports Bookshelf how a long-nurtured idea eventually came to fruition.

"This book was something I had had in mind for a long time," she said. "They say every family has a story to tell, but I did think the story of my father growing up in poverty and overcoming polio to become a successful professional footballer was worth writing.

"It took me some time to get it started. But after moving to Lausanne in Switzerland I found I had more time on my hands and so the research finally began.

"The book took almost four years from the start of my research to publication. For the football side of things, I spent many hours talking with my father, often using his old scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings and match programmes to help piece his story together. I was also able to speak to some of his former team-mates, and this enabled me to offer a real insight into the life of a 1950s footballer, an interesting comparison to that of a professional footballer today.

"The other part of the book, which relates the story of my maternal Spanish grandfather who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, involved more extensive research.  He died some years ago, so I was reliant on stories handed down through the family, which I found can lead to many contradictions and inaccuracies that therefore needed extensive research to separate fact from fiction. My research took me to France and Spain, so my language skills proved useful."

John and Esther still live in Brighton, John now in his 81st year.  For Julie, piecing together the details of their lives was both a fulfilling and, at times, emotional experience.

"It was definitely a labour of love, and quite moving at times," she said. "My father had grown up in relative poverty, in overcrowded conditions in a house with no electricity, no heating and no bathroom.  He was evacuated during the Second World War, and later, at the age of 18, was sent off to complete his obligatory national service.

"It was during this time that he contracted polio, and doctors feared he would never walk again. The thought of my father lying in an isolation ward at such a young age, not knowing if he would walk again, let alone play football, still brings a tear to my eyes.

"Likewise, for the story of my grandfather José. I managed to piece together a very personal account of his suffering both during and after the war which I didn't fully appreciate or understand whilst he was still alive.

John Shepherd scoring for Brighton against Sheffield
United at the Goldstone Ground in March 1959

"I was too young as a child to know that my dad was a professional footballer, though one of my earliest memories is being at the Goldstone Ground -- Brighton's old ground, now demolished.

"In those days, the life of a footballer wasn't much different to that of the average working man. Whilst I was growing up, my dad was always involved in football and well respected on the Sussex football scene. I always felt a surge of pride when articles appeared in the Sussex newspapers about 'former Albion favourite, John Shepherd'.

"He went back to help at the Goldstone during the 1970s when he set up the first ever Brighton and Hove Albion youth team when Alan Mullery was manager.  Alan kindly contributed a foreword for my book."

John Shepherd's story is good enough -- and told well enough -- to warrant a publisher's attention even in the current, challenging climate.  Interestingly, Julie chose the self-publishing route, via the Amazon platform, CreateSpace.

"I contacted several publishers and received a fair bit of interest and some very useful feedback," she said.  "But the publishing world has changed so much so I decided to self-publish using modern technology, new media and direct routes to market.

"After extensive research, I decided that Createspace provided an independent publishing platform that was easy and economical to use, particularly for someone with computer skills.

"Luckily, I was able to do my own formatting and my 14-year-old son Nathan created the cover for me, which I was delighted with. Then it was simply a matter of using Createspace tools to upload the manuscript and cover and request a proof copy.

"I would certainly recommend Createspace to any aspiring self-publishing authors.   A big upside is that books ordered from Amazon.co.uk are printed on demand in the U.K. and are eligible for free postage under the Amazon 'super-saver' delivery scheme."

There are downsides to going it alone, however. Having a good grasp of grammar and spelling is vital if the end product is to look suitably professional, as is having some idea of how to market the book on a low budget.

"I worked as an administrator at the University of Gloucestershire for many years, where I also completed some courses on writing which ultimately helped me with the book project," Julie said "I was also fortunate to have the help of a retired professor from the university, with whom I had worked, who helped by reading my manuscripts and giving me invaluable feedback.

"My dad's former clubs, Millwall, Brighton and Gillingham, are all helping to promote the book via their websites, social media and match programmes.  In particular, Chris Bethell at Millwall was very encouraging and helpful during the writing of the book, and he is now helping promote it. I have been given a slot on Lions Live Radio to talk about the book.

"The Sussex Argus and South London Press are running articles and competitions to win signed copies. I am also promoting the book using social media and networking sites and websites, and my parents and brothers are proving themselves to be useful salespeople in Brighton!"

In and Out of the Lion's Den: Poverty, War and Football -- follow the link for more information and to buy.

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No making tea for this new boy! Chris's first task is to ghostwrite the Fabrice Muamba story

As first assignments go, it wasn't a bad one.  Sports journalist Chris Brereton, newly recruited by publishers Trinity Mirror Sports Media and still readjusting to life back in the UK after a year in Thailand, was asked if he fancied ghosting an autobiography. 


He had never written a book before but when he learned that the subject was footballer Fabrice Muamba, there was only going to be one answer.   The schedule set out was almost impossible -- it was already August and the book was due in the shops in early November -- yet the Muamba story, of the young Bolton Wanderers player who collapsed on the field during a match at Tottenham Hotspur and was effectively brought back from the dead, was too good to turn down.

"From a journalist's point of view it has been the story of 2012," Brereton said. "I had been working on the Bangkok Post but the impact of Fabrice's story was just as big over there.

"The English Premier League is massive in Thailand and even though I was 6,000 miles away from where it was happening, for that moment, as people became aware of the drama taking place, I got the impression that the entire footballing world was as one.

"It was a story that showed how strong football can be when it decides to unite in a positive direction and it was one that transcended the game.  My mother, for example, has never watched a football match in her life but when I told her I was doing the Fabrice Muamba book she knew instantly who he was."

Having agreed to take on the project, 30-year-old Brereton quickly became glad of the tough grounding he had been given working for sports news agencies Hayters and Wardles, where reporters seldom have the benefit of time on their side.

"There have been a lot of 17-18 hour days, a lot of working weekends, but in one sense my naivety has been a good thing because I was not daunted by the task.  Having worked at Wardles, where the onus was on you to get to the nub of an issue and turn around copy very quickly, and having worked to very tight deadlines in Bangkok, I am used to working under pressure and that held me in good stead.

"From the day I met Fabrice for the first time at Mottram Hall Hotel near Wilmslow in Cheshire, to signing the book off to the printers, was 38 days.

"If had written half a dozen books that had all taken six months or more such a tight turnaround might have been a bit daunting.  But I just rolled up my sleeves and jumped in and it has been a wonderful experience."

Muamba had a compelling story to tell even without what happened last March, when he suffered his cardiac arrest during an FA Cup quarter-final at White Hart Lane.  Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the height of civil war, he was left behind in Kinshasa when his father, a government advisor, had to flee to London to escape rebel fighters who had set out to kill him.

'A tale of hard work, luck, perseverance...even fear'

He and his mother Gertrude were reunited with father Marcel only when Marcel was finally given leave to stay in London after several years living in asylum centres and the family were allowed to join him.  In the meantime, Fabrice had been more or less in hiding, moved from one home to another by his uncle, Ilunga, who eventually was killed.

"It is the kind of story that, if you walked into the office of a Hollywood studio executive and said I want to pitch you an idea and told him the story of Fabrice's life, you'd be laughed out of there because it really is a story that's stranger than fiction," Brereton said.

"His father had to leave Congo because he was under threat, because he worked for the president, and Fabrice did not see his father for five years.  He came to England when he was 11, not speaking a word of English, a young African coming to live in Walthamstow in London with all the challenges that brings.

"He gets the chance to go along to Arsenal because one of his friends is training there.  He tags along and gets spotted and before you know it he is playing in the Premier League, the best league in the world.

"It is a ludicrously implausible tale of hard work, luck, perseverance and even fear because he was terrified for a long time in Congo because of the civil war there.

"If you stop it there it is still a remarkable story, but when you add March 17 on top of that it makes a story that transcends everything.  It is not a football book but a book about a footballer with an amazing story to tell."

Central to the story is Muamba's recollection of events and his efforts to make sense of what happened, to assess the impact on his life and to convey the thoughts and feelings and emotions he has experienced, although he has no memory at all of the 78 minutes in which he was technically dead.

"When he was 'dead' he feels he wasn't there to worry about himself.  When he came round in hospital he had no idea that the world had been hanging on every medical bulletin, he had no recollection of what had happened, no memory of it, no comprehension of it

"So for the details of what happened, there are interviews with Dr Andrew Deaner, the cardiologist who came down from the stands at White Hart Lane, and with Dr Jonathan Tobin, the Bolton Wanderers club doctor, who played such a big part too.

"We have spoken also to the first paramedic on the scene, to the Bolton club chaplain, to Owen Coyle, the manager.  It is a very comprehensive account of what happened that perhaps  give people a different perspective on their own lives, knowing that if a 24-year-old can collapse face first at White Hart Lane then who knows what fate has in store for any of us."

'Fabrice feels he is in the driving seat, but God is doing the steering.'

The relationship between a subject and his ghost need not be a friendship.  In some cases, too much familiarity can be a hindrance, since there are often issues that require the kind of probing questions that a close acquaintance may feel uncomfortable about asking, and lack a little objectivity.  But it is essential that the collaborators get along.

Happily, Brereton and Muamba were soon comfortable in each other's company.

"I'd spoken to people who knew him and the general view among football folk was that, to use their expression, a 'top lad'," Brereton said. "In other words, a nice guy, and I found him to be a well-mannered, clearly well brought-up young man.

"We clicked straight away. He would come to Mottram Hall always on time, always very polite, and he'd ask for nothing more than a hot chocolate.  People would come up to him from time to time.  One day there was a wedding and the groom was having a pre-ceremony pint to calm his nerves and he spotted Fabrice and nervously came over but Fabrice was happy to have his picture taken with him and talk to the other guests.  He is a very pleasant, very intelligent guy, the polar opposite to the stereotypical image of the modern footballer.

"He was honest, straightforward, a good talker -- from my point of view a dream.  His now-wife Shauna came along sometimes and she was just as impressive, straight down the line, very unaffected by fame.

"What I learned about his character is that he is very religious and he believes that what happened in March was part of God's bigger plan.  He feels that in life he might be in the driving seat but God is doing the steering.

"There have been points, and they are chronicled in the book, when he hoped his career was not over, which is natural.  But when he was told that effectively he was finished as a footballer, he straightened his tie and got on with his life.   If you have a career-ending knee injury at 23 you might have a degree of bitterness but with Fab because of the severity of what happened, because he was to all intents dead, any thoughts about 'what if' relating to his career take second place to the feeling that every day is a bonus.

"He does not yet know what he is going to do with his life.  His health is monitored, as you would expect, and he has been fitted with an implanted defibrillator, so that if his heart rhythm is thrown out again the device would administer a shock to set it right again.   He can do some light exercise and there is no cause for concern now.

"He enjoys doing media work, which he is getting very polished at, and he wants to use his story to inspire people, perhaps disaffected youths, maybe even go into prisons, to tell people that if he could come back from the dead then anything is possible.  He believes very strongly in that.

"But in other ways he has his life ahead of him and while he assesses what to do with it he is just enjoying being alive, appreciating things that other people might regard as mundane.

"I thoroughly enjoyed working with him and I'm honoured to have played a small part in his story."

Fabrice Muamba: I'm Still Standing is published by Trinity Mirror Sport Media.

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Jessica Ennis adds final chapter to a golden year with story of how she fulfilled her Olympic dreams

COMING SOON: Unbelievable - From Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold

The autobiography of Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis

It is a measure of the essential modesty of Olympic golden girl Jessica Ennis that she was reluctant to commit to telling her life story before London 2012 because she was not sure that she had done enough to warrant it.

The idea was discussed earlier this year, when she asked Rick Broadbent, the athletics writer who had ghosted her column in The Times since 2009, if he would be willing to work with her, only to decide that she did not want to blur her focus on her ultimate goal.

"We talked about it but she was always in two minds," Broadbent told The Sports Bookshelf. "She didn't want to do it because, in her mind, she had not really achieved anything, so the project was put on hold."

Ennis had been European and World heptathlon champion but only Olympic gold would satisfy her definition of achievement and it was not until the medal was hers on that memorable August night in east London that she felt she had a story to share. The rights to her autobiography were not assigned to publishers Hodder and Stoughton until the first week in September.

It gave Broadbent a testing schedule to deliver the manuscript on time but having written a number of books in his own name and ghosted others, he had some experience to draw on.  He had the benefit, too, of a well-established working relationship with his subject. The book will be published on November 8.

"It helped that I've known Jessica for some years so a lot of the background was familiar to me already," he said. "I first met her in 2008 and we have worked together on her column in The Times since 2009.

"And I like her as a person. She is genuinely lovely and a pleasure to deal with, and that isn't something you can always say about people involved in professional sport at the highest level.  She is the nicest person I've met in my career in journalism."

"She had never cried on the podium before."

Ennis has a personality that exudes warmth and her place in the affections of the British public was only reinforced when, in her trackside interview with the BBC's Phil Jones in the aftermath of her Olympic victory, she struggled in vain to hold her emotions in check.  Tearful scenes at the moment of triumph or defeat have become commonplace but for Ennis, a proud Yorkshire girl with some Sheffield steel beneath the soft exterior, it was a first.

"She had never cried on the podium before," Broadbent said. "It was a first show of emotion in public.  She had always managed to hold it in before, even at the lowest moments.

"She has been through the mill with injuries, missing the Beijing Olympics of course.  So after winning in London I think it was just a total outpouring of relief.  She knew it was her one chance really to be Olympic champion and she had done it."

Broadbent first encountered Ennis at Gotzis in Austria in 2008, when he was among the journalists who interviewed her as she lay on a couch, her foot encased in ice after the fateful injury to her right ankle had forced her to withdraw from competition only 10 weeks ahead of the Beijing games.

"It was typical of her that she insisted she would be okay, that it was only a precaution.  Of course when she got home the scans revealed the triple fracture and her Olympic dream was over."

It would not be the first time she would put on a brave face while inside wanting to cry.  Her book will reveal, however, that away from the public gaze Ennis can be as emotional as any young athlete.

"Behind the scenes there have been tears left, right and centre at times," Broadbent said. "It is not a misery memoir by any means but there bits that the public don't see.

"She has what you might call a love-hate relationship with her coach, Toni Minichiello, that can get a bit feisty.  They can go at each other pretty hard.  She has been with him since she was 13 and I think she feels he treats her sometimes as if she were still 13.

"There have been moments, too, when she has been deeply worried about her health.  She had a time when she was suffering from serious bouts of dizziness, so bad that she could hardly stand, and she had to undergo a brain scan.  It turned out that it was an inner ear problem but she found it pretty scary at the time."

The story reveals, too, that Ennis has a strong sense of what she feels is right for her and that she will not be pushed around.

"This was her one last shot."

"She came under a lot of pressure to move to London at one stage," Broadbent said. "Charles van Commenee, the head coach of UK Athletics, wanted all the elite athletes and coaches to be based at the Lee Valley Performance Centre in London, and tried to engineer things so that Toni would have to operate from there.

"But Jessica's life was in Sheffield.  She is very close to her family and has a long-term boyfriend and simply refused to move.  It was having that strong connection with her roots that probably kept her grounded and she felt it was important to have a normal life in Sheffield to go back to, away from the limelight."

Broadbent revealed that Ennis speaks out from personal conviction on the subject of body image and eating disorders, prompted by the remarks attributed to an unnamed Great Britain official during the build-up to London 2012 that the 5ft 4ins athlete, renowned for her six-pack, was overweight.

"She was really worried about the message comments like that put out, particularly to young female athletes and girls in general," he said. "She has strong views on body image and eating disorders and drugs as well and she puts them across very well."

There is much in the story about her upbringing in Sheffield as the daughter of a painter and decorator originally from Jamaica and a social worker from Derbyshire who now works for a charity helping people with drug and drink addiction, but also about balancing the commercial opportunities opened to her by fame with the need to keep her eyes on the goal of winning.  Her endorsement contracts only reinforced her status as the poster girl for London 2012, adding to the pressure on her to deliver on the day.

"Don't get me wrong, she likes the profile she has," Broadbent said. "But the build-up to the Games became incredibly stressful for her.  People were expecting her to win but she knows what can go wrong in competition. She also knows she might not get to the next Games in Rio so this was her one shot, her one opportunity to achieve what she had worked for.

"One of the interesting things was that she never wanted to go to the stadium beforehand.  She had never competed in London before the Olympics, not even at Crystal Palace, and she wanted it to be new and exciting."

Ennis has subsequently said that when she stepped into the stadium for the first time ahead of the 100m hurdles event that began the heptathlon programme and was hit by the noise generated by 80,000 spectators in response to her name being called -- a far cry from the half-empty stadiums that often witness the first event in the seven-part programme -- it did give her a significant lift.  Clearly the strategy was the right one.

Unbelievable - From Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold is published by Hodder and Stoughton on November 8.

Rick Broadbent is the author of several critically acclaimed books, on football, boxing and motorsport.
His Ring of Fire: The Inside Story of Valentino Rossi and MotoGP was shortlisted for the 2009 William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

That followed Looking For Eric: In Search of The Leeds Greats and The Big If: The Life and Death of Johnny Owen .

He returned to motorsport this year with That Near Death Thing: Inside the Most Dangerous Race in the World, which focuses on the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races through the story of four leading riders.

He also collaborated with paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson and motorcycle racer Ron Haslam on their autobiographies.

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Ex-footballer David McVay comes face to face with himself in new play by Billy Ivory based on his Notts County diaries

David McVay's professional football career spanned only nine seasons, during which time the imprint he left on the game was such that the title he chose when he was encouraged to publish the journal he kept during part of that time seemed entirely apt.  

Diary of a Football Nobody, first published in 2003, was exactly as described: a collection of daily reflections, reproduced exactly as they were written at the time, on life as a player of modest ability plying his trade with a club associated mostly with modest attainment, in his case Notts County, the world's oldest football league club, during the 1970s.

McVay gave up keeping the diary, he recalls, early in 1976, thanks to "a lager-logged brain and an incurable bout of apathy" and though he had the foresight to stow his ramblings in a drawer rather than bin them, it was not in any expectation of revealing them to a wider world.

Yet for the next couple of weeks they are being not only revisited but brought to life, at the Nottingham Playhouse, in a drama written by Billy Ivory, the Nottinghamshire-born writer who had a 90s hit with the TV drama Common as Muck and more recently wrote the screenplay for the BAFTA-nominated film, Made in Dagenham.

Diary of a Football Nobody opens tomorrow (October 5) and runs until October 20 and McVay is just about coming to terms with the surreal experience of seeing himself portrayed on stage, having watched Perry Fitzpatrick, who is cast in the McVay role, going through his paces in rehearsal.

"I've met him a couple of times now," McVay said. "Is he anything like me? Well, he's tall, dark and handsome, so what can I say...

"I didn't know too much about the cast before but they all have solid careers behind them.  Perry is actually a local lad, from Long Eaton.  People will know him from the TV drama This is England, that was on Channel Four a couple of years ago."

Other characters who will rekindle memories for Notts County fans include former Scotland international Don Masson and fellow players Steve Carter and Arthur Mann, all played by Rupert Hill (once Jamie Baldwin in Coronation Street), plus Dave Smith and Kevin Randall, both played by Luke Gell (of Two Pints of Lager), and Les Bradd (Christopher Hogben).

In the challenging role of eccentric manager Jimmy Sirrel is a very familiar face -- Eric Richard, who for 20 years was desk sergeant Bob Cryer in The Bill.  Richard is 72 and an Arsenal fan from Margate, yet managed to transform himself into the idiosyncratic Glaswegian under whose peculiar brand of management McVay enjoyed some memorable moments.

"He really gets into the character," McVay said. "I think it helped that he knows football and will have remembered Jimmy.  He will have studied archive clips of Jimmy, too, so he has been able to pick up his mannerisms and intonation.

Celebration

"And of course Billy (Ivory) grew up as a Notts County fan, so the characters are the players he used to watch.  He has been able to pass on a lot of first-hand knowledge, as did Colin Slater, who was covering Notts County for BBC Radio Nottingham then, as now."

McVay concedes that some of the events that will be seen on stage are not exactly faithful to his writing but is happy with Ivory's interpretation.  The tales of wild women and hard drinking are entirely authentic.

"Of course, you can't make an entire play from a collection of anecdotes," he said. "There has to be a plot, or at least a theme. So there are certain things that have been embellished, even made up, to keep it as a story.

"But in any case the play is really a celebration of the 1970s in Nottingham, and the lives of a group of footballers, on and off the field, with bits and bobs from my own personal life woven in.  One of Billy's great strengths is capturing the flavour of the times.

"In Nottingham it was an exciting time.  We had Paul Smith opening his first shop and we had our first wine bar, Uriah Heep, which became a haunt for footballers, along with the Flying Horse and the Palais."

McVay now works as a journalist for the Daily Telegraph as well as running his own small publishing company, Reid Publishing, under which imprint the diaries, originally published by the now defunct Parrs Wood Press, have been reprinted.

Previously, he was Midlands football writer for The Times, having developed his writing skills on the Nottingham Evening Post, which he joined a couple of years after quitting football. He covered his old club for the Post for a while, before showing his versatility by branching into feature writing, with a particular fondness for local history and nostalgia.

"I did have a period after I'd stopped playing when I didn't know what I was going to do," he said. "But I'd left school with three A-levels and if I was good at anything apart from football it was writing.  I suppose that's why I wrote the diaries, to keep my hand in.

"I was grateful to Barrie Williams, the editor of the Post, for giving me the opportunity to write for them."

Cameo role

As it happened, McVay knew Billy Ivory's father, Bill senior, who was night news editor on the Post, so the connection goes back a long way.

"When I originally dusted off the diaries, I asked Billy to read through them and give me his opinion.  He ended up writing the foreword and has been keen to do something with them, either a film or a play, ever since."

McVay once joked that if his work ever did make it to the big screen, he wouldn't mind a little walk-on cameo, Alfred Hitchcock style.  He has not quite been granted his wish in Diary of a Football Nobody, but he does make an appearance, after a fashion...

"There is a little clip of film at the start where you see someone's hands opening the pages of the diary -- they're my hands."

Diary of a Football Nobody opens at the Nottingham Playhouse on October 5 and runs until October 20. For more details and to book, visit www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk

Buy a copy of Steak...Diana Ross: Diary of a Football Nobody (to give the book its full title) direct from Reid Publishing or from Amazon.

Browse more football books at The Sports Bookshelf Shop

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