Italy and sport: the passion that binds together a nation struggling to find its real identity

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK

Sport Italia: The Italian Love Affair with Sport, by Simon Martin

Published by: I B Tauris

What's It About?

Italian sport, as the title would suggest, but rather more than that.  Sport Italia is an expansive history of modern Italy viewed through the country's passion for sport.

As such it offers a completely new portrait of Europe's most alluring and most paradoxical country, a land of contrasts, of conflicting traditions and regional disparities once described as not so much a nation as a geographical expression.

Tracing Italy's sporting history at its high and low points, from its idealistic beginnings to its hijacking by political figures from Mussolini to Berlusconi, author Simon Martin interweaves elements of Italian history, its politics, its economy and society with the key moments in Italian sport.  In doing so he offers a fresh interpretation to the story of modern Italy, explaining how and why sport holds such an important position in both politics and society, and why it is at the heart of the nation's identity.

Football in particular offers many examples of the deeply embedded relationship between Italian sports and politics, from the story of Achille Lauro, the shipping magnate and one-time owner of Napoli, who used his association with the club to help keep him in power as the mayor of Naples, to the socialist President, Sandro Pertini,  who shamelessly attached himself to Italy's World Cup winning team in 1982, playing up to the television cameras at the final against West Germany in Madrid and inviting the team to the Presidential Palace on their return to Italy.

Martin is strong too on the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, who placed football at the heart of his political career, using the success and popularity of the football team he owned, AC Milan, alongside his vast Italian media and television empire, to enhance his own standing.  He took the terrace rallying cry of 'Forza Italia' as the name of his political party.

Others have tried to interpret the Italian character through food or art, opera or architecture.  Martin's deeply researched academic text contends that sport has influenced political attitude and cultural difference on a much broader scale, and has been much more effective in creating a sense of belonging in a country of many divisions.

Who is the author?

Simon Martin teaches at the American University in Rome and is a Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire and the British School at Rome. He holds a PhD from University College London.  He is the author of Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini, which was awarded the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for Sports History in 2004.

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Who's Who back to its trivial best

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Cricketers' Who's Who 2012, edited by Jo Harman

Published by: Pitch Publishing on behalf of All Out Cricket

What's it about?

As those who would damage the beloved County Championship know all too well, if there is one thing to which cricket followers do not take kindly it is change, in particular unnecessary change.

Outrage, therefore, greeted the 2011 edition of the Cricketers' Who's Who, which is not an institution of Wisden magnitude but has nonetheless been around now for 33 years.

Consternation arose largely from the disappearance of the personal information and opinions that added colour to the player profiles and gave the Who's Who its unique selling point.  This was forced in part by circumstance, with a change of publisher during the close season disrupting the normal process of gathering in forms filled in by the players themselves.

These gems of trivia were replaced for each player by 'an objective view of their skills and characters' in the words of the Pitch Publishing editorial team.

Happily, fears that the more earnest, worthy tone was the shape of things to come have been allayed.  The 2012 edition has been restored, more or less, to its former glory.

'We invited comment, we listened to it, we weighed it up, and we have reacted," wrote the editor, Jo Harman, in his introductory notes.

There has been a reaction, too, to complaints from some players about false information appearing in past Who's Who editions, sometimes to their embarrassment.  The paper forms players used to complete -- and which, inevitably, would be prime vehicles for dressing room mischief -- have given way to online surveys.

Hence we can hope that Jonathan Batty's assertion that he would be prime minister if he were not a cricketer is no less honest than Gareth Cross's that he would be a binman.  And that Will Bragg's preferred reading is the Financial Times and James Taylor's favourite band is the Pussycat Dolls.

The editor adds a warning for cricket writers looking for a line on a slow day, however. "As with Wikipedia, approach with care..."

The Editor

Jo Harman, former sports journalist at BSkyB, is web editor for the Professional Cricketers' Association's partner magazine All Out Cricket.

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From the heroically virtuous to the tearfully metrosexual - the changing face of manliness and Yorkshire cricket

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK

We'll Get 'Em in Sequins, by Max Davidson

Published by: Wisden Sports Writing

What's it about?

In short, it is the story of the evolution of manliness and masculinity written by an author with a fascination for bravery and chivalry in sport and an astute observer of human behaviour.

What counts as manliness is, of course, quite subjective and author Max Davidson is open-minded enough to accept all manner of interpretations of what makes a man.  But when he watched Darren Gough, a fast bowler with the heart of a lion, wearing make-up and spangled tops to win Strictly Come Dancing, sharing a stage with "gay prima donnas, weeping women and superannuated comedians" and saw an England cricket captain, Michael Vaughan, break down in tears as he announced his resignation, he clearly felt that conventions were being challenged enough to start asking a few probing questions.

What Gough and Vaughan had in common is that they are both Yorkshiremen, albeit an adopted one in Vaughan's case. Davidson had always supposed Yorkshire to be the heartland of manliness and Yorkshire cricketers its most upstanding ambassadors.  If their behaviour did not cast doubt upon this notion, perhaps it was time to redefine it.

It inspired Davidson to set his examination of manliness within the framework of Yorkshire cricket, building what he describes as "as much a social history as a cricket book" around portraits of seven Yorkshire players, beginning at the turn of the last century with George Hirst, a man admired for his Edwardian virtues and for visiting his mother, every Sunday, and ending with Vaughan, who not only revealed a painfully human face as he relinquished the captaincy, but had also left a cricket match early and unapologetically to attend the birth of a child.

In between, to accompany him on his journey, Davidson chose Herbert Sutcliffe, who sprinkled cologne on his flannels and brilliantined his hair, followed by the war hero Hedley Verity and the contradictory Fred Trueman -- "the blunt Yorkshireman...who could drink for England" but who would emerge standing from marathon sessions at the bar by hiding near-full pint pots behind handy curtains.

Then came Geoffrey Boycott, another who spoke his mind but who also had an unusual faith in star signs and horoscopes and who at least once visited a medium, and Gough, a fast bowler almost as broad in the beam as Trueman but who worried about his pointy ears as a boy and, finally bedecked in the sequins of the title, uttered the once unthinkable assertion, the mantra of metrosexuality, that he was "comfortable with my sexuality...in touch with my feminine side."

Legend has it that, at the critical stage of the last Ashes Test of 1901, with 15 needed to win and one wicket standing, that Hirst conferred with his partner, Wilfred Rhodes, and told him: "We'll get 'em in singles".

Some reviewers have suggested that Davidson's title is a play on words that doesn't work, or at least does not so justice to the book.  Irrespective of that,  the author makes his arguments well and does so with elegance and humour.

Who is the author?

Max Davidson is a prolific journalist, a regular in the pages of the Daily Telegraph, as well as a seasoned traveller who spent part of his childhood in Africa and makes an annual food pilgrimage to Venice every October. He is the author of six comic novels as well as books about sporting courage and chivalry. Although not a Yorkshireman himself, he had a Yorkshire grandfather and has a lifelong love affair with cricket that led him to join the MCC when he was 16.

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Elegant put-downs from a master of his craft

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK

CMJ: A Cricketing Life, by Christopher Martin-Jenkins

Published by: Simon & Schuster

WHAT'S IT ABOUT?

Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the sagely doyen of the Test match radio commentary box and the senior voice of the cricketing press, is far too polite to share every opinion he might have formed about his many colleagues over his career, even for the sake of selling extra copies of his forthcoming autobiography.

So don’t expect to find any hatchet jobs within the pages of CMJ: A Cricketing Life (Simon & Schuster), which will be in the shops from Thursday of next week (April 12).

Nonetheless, the serialisation of the book in The Times has some interesting if carefully worded observations about his co-commentators, some from years long gone but others of more recent vintage.

Fred Trueman, he said “like his fellow Yorkshireman, Geoffrey Boycott, could labour a point” while Trevor Bailey “was quite vague and imprecise when it came to the past.”

Never less than scrupulously fair, CMJ does credit Trueman with being “a peerless raconteur with an amazing memory“ while Bailey “as an assessor of current events, was sharp, pithy and an excellent judge of any player“.

Moving into more recent times, however, during which, with Peter Baxter giving way to Adam Mountford in the producer’s chair, there has been a change in the tone of the programme -- one that listeners used to its traditional, gently reverential style have not necessarily appreciated -- the observations become a little more pointed.

He says, for example that the team’s recent addition, former England captain Michael Vaughan, “has much to offer in interpreting the tactics and thought processes of the players“ but “has had to learn (like many before him) that the commentator needs time to set the scene, to give the score and to recap on events earlier in the day. There is nothing worse than listening for ages until he does.”

Vaughan could learn something, CMJ clearly feels, from another ex-England captain, Mike Atherton, with whom he would have liked to work for longer.

Atherton “had everything: humour, quick powers of observation and the all-important sense of rhythm and timing that most other former professional players acquire only with difficulty”

After only a brief stint on TMS, Atherton moved into television along with David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd, whom CMJ reckons had a “sense of humour ideal for TMS.”  On both counts, he adds, “our loss has been Sky’s gain.”

If that might be interpreted as mildly critical of his BBC bosses for missing a trick, it is nothing next to the swipe he takes at them for the unexpected axing of his friend and former TMS regular, the former Middlesex, Glamorgan and England bowler, Mike Selvey.

Describing Selvey and Vic Marks as “the nearest equivalent to Trueman and Bailey in the latter days of [Peter] Baxter’s control of TMS” he says that Marks “with his famous chuckle, like an old engine starting up on the third or fourth turnover on a cold morning, is deservedly popular with everyone” and that Selvey “may not have the same warmth in his voice, but he knows all there is to know about the art of swing and seam bowling and has a subtle humour."

“Perhaps those," he adds, sharply "who suddenly decided to sever their links with Mike Selvey, after twenty-four years of contributing to TMS at home and abroad, will think again.”

Who is the author?

Christopher Martin-Jenkins made his debut on BBC radio’s iconic Test Match Special in 1973 and apart from a period in which he commentated for BBC television in the 1980s has been a member of the team ever since.  He succeeded Brian Johnston as BBC cricket correspondent in 1973, holding that position until he in turn was succeeded by Jonathan Agnew in 1991.  In print, CMJ has been cricket correspondent for both the Daily Telegraph (1990-99) and The Times (1999-2008). The author of more than 25 cricket books, he has also served as president of the MCC and was appointed an MBE in the 2009 New Year Honours.

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Extraordinary story of Merckx the machine is subject of fascinating new biography

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK

Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike, by William Fotheringham

Published by: Yellow Jersey

WHAT'S IT ABOUT?

Lance Armstrong may have won more Tours de France than Eddy Merckx -- seven against five -- but consider this: between 1961 and 1978, the Belgian rider known as the Cannibal won 525 races, including the Giro d’Italia four times and and three world championships, in addition to his four straight Tour de France wins between 1969 and 1972, with another in 1974.

No cyclist has ever won more races in a career, which set Merckx apart from the rest in some minds as verging on mad. Armstrong would save himself for the big events, basing his season on being at his peak at the right moments.  Merckx seemed to want to be at his peak every time he rode.

He had an addiction to winning, so consuming that at the height of his powers he won the equivalent of a race every week for six years.  In his most prolific season, he won 54 races, a total never surpassed.  He holds the records also for most stage victories in the Tour de France (54) and the most days with the yellow jersey (96).  He is the only cyclist to have won the general classification, the points classification and the mountains classification in the same Tour de France, when he won it for the first time in 1969.

It was in the same Tour, with victory almost assured, that he committed the seemingly reckless and unnecessary act that his biographer, cycling journalist William Fotheringham, says encapsulated his character.   On Stage 17, a tough one involving three mountains and a 75-kilometre ride to the Pyrenees town of Mourenx, Merckx had a lead of eight minutes and was a comfortable favourite to win.  Yet instead of trying to conserve his energy, Merckx went on the attack, doubling his lead.  The final margin of victory -- 17 minutes and 54 seconds -- has never been matched.

It was his style almost every time he rode, relying on pure power to leave the field as far behind as he could.  Fotheringham says it was the result of the insecurity that he had never shed since as a boy he was shunned because he spoke French rather than Flemish.  His fear of failure led to him to strive for leads that were far larger than necessary, always fearful of disaster round the next corner, but in doing so he displayed a level of stamina, courage and  pain--defying determination that led people to perceive him as the ‘half-man, half-bike’ of Fotheringham’s title.

Who is the author?

William Fotheringham is a former competitive cyclist who has been writing about the sport since 1988, mainly for the Guardian and Observer newspapers.  He is the author of eight books, mainly on cycling, and has translated two others, including the biography of Laurent Fignon.

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Sweeping history of how commercialism and greed swallowed the sporting ideal

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Spirit of the Game: How Sport Made the Modern World by Mihir Bose

Published by: Constable

What’s it about?

In seeking to answer the question of how sport did help shape the modern world, the author has produced a sweeping history of sport in the modern world from its idealistic beginnings to the massively commercial present.

It is particularly relevant in an Olympic year, particularly in the year of an Olympics in Britain, since Bose begins his exploration of the sporting spirit with the advance of the modern Olympic movement as a phenomenon rooted in what its acknowledged founder, Pierre de Coubertin, cherished as an English virtue.

De Coubertin, a French nobleman, drew his inspiration from an English novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a book that paid homage to Rugby School and its headmaster, Thomas Arnold, whose beliefs in manliness and gentlemanly conduct and the health benefits of an outdoor life were set in a sporting context.

Coubertin used to make an annual pilgrimage to Rugby School and would stand at the altar of the school chapel, beneath which Arnold was buried, and imagine him as the man who invented the concept of sporting chivalry around which he would build his Olympic ideal.

Bose goes on to describe how the ideal was hijacked first by nationalism, in particular by the Nazi and communist movements in the 1920s and 30s, and then by big business, who saw the opportunities offered by sport’s post-War sporting boom and created the world that we know today, dominated by money, corporate and individual greed,  corruption and the culture of celebrity.

The picture it paints is somewhat bleak but it is a deep and fascinating study peppered with perceptive insights, written in a bright and engaging style.

Who is the author?

Mihir Bose, born in India and raised in Bombay, moved to England in 1969 at the age of 22 to study engineering at Loughborough University, then trained to be an accountant.  But he found opportunities to pursue his interest in writing and swapped accountancy for journalism in 1978, concentrating on business and sport.  He has since enjoyed a distinguished career with the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, the BBC and, more latterly, the Evening Standard in London.  He is the author of 26 books, which are mostly about sport but also include a history of Bollywood.   His History of Indian Cricket won the Cricket Society Literary Award in 1990 and his study of sports and apartheid, Sporting Colours, was runner-up in the 1994 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.

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Tied Up With Notts, by Colin Slater: Half a century of Notts County from the man who has seen it all and told the tale

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK

Tied Up With Notts by Colin Slater

Published by: Reid Publishing

WHAT'S IT ABOUT?

Few football stories in the last couple of years have been quite so bizarre or riveting as the tale of Notts County, Sven-Goran Eriksson and the Middle Eastern millions that never were.

And few individuals have been quite so well placed to describe it all as Colin Slater, the veteran BBC Radio Nottingham journalist who has been the station’s Notts County man ever since it was launched, some 44 years ago.

In fact, Slater’s association with Notts goes back even further. As a football reporter with the long-defunct Nottingham Evening News, he took his seat in the press box at Meadow Lane for the first time in August 1959.  There began a professional and personal relationship with the world’s oldest football league club that now spans 53 years, more than a third of its history.

No one, therefore, is better qualified to put in perspective not just the squalid, regrettable Munto Finance affair but every other headline-grabbing moments from six decades into perspective than the man nowadays known as the Voice of Notts County, which is a moniker that could not have been anticipated by a boy growing up in Bradford.  Indeed, his lilt, even today, is much more West Yorkshire than East Midlands.

He has done precisely that in a thoroughly entertaining and beautifully written memoir, Tied Up With Notts, published by Reid Publishing, which is best described as a personal history of the club.

Moreover, there have been many headline-grabbing moments on Slater’s watch.  No strangers to financial woes,  Notts sailed close to extinction in the mid-1960s and again in the first decade of the new century, when they went into administration.  So the circumstances in which, to the football world’s astonishment, ex-England coach Eriksson was unveiled as Director of Football in July 2009 -- a Slater exclusive, as it happens -- were not a new experience.

But there have been some high spots, too.  Twice since Slater began to report, Notts have clambered from the lower reaches of the Football League to rub shoulders with the elite, first under Jimmy Sirrel, who took them from the edge of the precipice to the First Division in 10 years, and again with Neil Warnock in charge.

Sirrel was the seventh manager with whom Slater worked in a list that now extends to 33 following Martin Allen’s replacement with Keith Curle last month.  Had he joined the News a year or so earlier and he could claim accurately to have been covering Notts since the Tommy Lawton era, given that Lawton was manager, for 14 months, until he gave way to Frank Hill in 1958.

Nonetheless, while he cannot claim to have witnessed Lawton’s era as a player, when Slater says that the coming of Eriksson could be compared with the signing of Lawton from Chelsea in 1947, he speaks with unrivalled authority.

Who is the author?

Colin Slater was made an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2001 for services to radio and the local community, a phrase that barely scratches the surface of his contribution to Nottinghamshire life.

Shortly before he began broadcasting, he had been appointed Nottinghamshire County Council’s first public relations officer and held that position alongside his growing profile at Meadow Lane for 20 years, in a continuation of the ‘double life’ he had enjoyed as a newspaper reporter, when he combined football with the role of chief municipal correspondent.

Subsequently he worked for Severn Trent Water and Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club.  Away from his professional life, he was a churchwarden at Christ Church, Beeston for 38 years and since 1990 has served the General Synod of the Church of England as lay representative for the diocese of Southwell and Nottingham.

He is also works as a trustee on behalf of several local charities, was a Justice of the Peace for 27 years and in 2005 was appointed chairman of the Nottingham Courts Board.

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Didi Man with a big place in Liverpool folklore

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Didi Man: My Love Affair with Liverpool

Published by: Headline (Hardcover)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

If Luis Suarez had only asked, a little advice from Dietmar Hamann could have spared the Uruguayan a lot of trouble.

The German international midfielder spent seven years on Merseyside, during which, quite apart from playing a major role in Liverpool’s epic triumph in the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul, he demonstrated everything that is correct about how a foreign player in England should conduct himself.

Intelligent and eloquent, even in a language not his own, Hamann won universal respect in the Premier League and particular affection among the Liverpool fans not least because of the evolution of his accent.  Just as the Dane, Jan Molby, seemed gradually to turn into a pukka Koppite, so Hamann appeared to learn his English from Jamie Carragher.  By the time he left, in 2006, he was calling himself the world's "only German Scouser".

Nicknamed The Didi Man with a nod towards another Merseyside icon, Ken Dodd,  at 6ft 3ins Hamann hardly qualifies as Diddy.  Yet it seems perfect for him as someone determined to embrace local culture.  So anglicised did he become that he even developed a fascination with cricket and managed to get a game for Alderley Edge Second XI in the Cheshire County League.

This book for the most part is a look back on his time at Anfield, told with warmth and a personality that reflects his humility and self-deprecating humour.  His part in the Istanbul legend, when he came off the bench at half-time, despite a broken toe, to inspire Liverpool’s fight back from 3-0 down, ensures a permanent place in the affections of the Kop.  The feeling is clearly mutual.

Who is the author?

Although Dietmar Hamann's name is on the cover, the words were assembled by Malcolm McClean, a writer and entrepreneur based in Alderley Edge.  He previously collaborated with Tottenham goalkeeper Brad Friedel on his book, Thinking Outside the Box.  He has written an entrepreneurial self-help guide, Bear Hunt, as well as To The Edge: Entrepreneurial Secrets from Britain's Richest Square Mile.

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Close, D'Oliveira and Packer - the three men at the heart of a cricket revolution

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK

Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977

Published by Elliott and Thompson

What’s it about?

The Swinging Sixties may have been notable for free love and psychedelic drugs and a new hedonistic pop culture but for the majority the Britain of 1967 was still essentially conventional and conservative, especially among its professional middle classes.

This was particularly true of cricket, which clung to the established demarcation lines of the class system as stubbornly as any area of society.  Until 1962, the annual match between Gentlemen and Players -- identifiable on scorecards by the position of their initials, before or after the surname – was still contested.  The fixture was a throwback to the kind of distinctions that set apart officers and the other ranks and domestic staff (downstairs) from their masters (upstairs) and the establishment cliques that ran cricket were not minded to challenge the traditional sociological order.

But outside the game the divisions were narrowing.  The line between working class and middle class was starting to blur and the economic dominance of the south was under threat.  There was a shift in cricket, too.  Where Surrey, led by the Charterhouse-educated England captain and amateur, Peter May, had dominated the County Championship in the 1950s, the 1960s was the era of Yorkshire, whose captain for much of the decade was the hard-nosed professional, Brian Close, whose roots were unashamedly working class.

Indeed, between 1967 and 1977, the decade that is the focus of Cricket at the Crossroads, the game experienced seismic change, propelled into a new era by three major crises.  Close, in fact, was the central figure in one of them, when his removal as England captain in 1967, despite a record of six wins and a draw from seven Tests, seemed to indicate that class prejudice was very much alive and well.  Less than two years later came the D’Oliveira affair, a significant moment in the breaking down of political apartheid in South Africa but one which again at times put the cricket establishment in an uncomfortable spotlight.  Finally came the emergence of Kerry Packer and World Series Cricket, moving the balance of power in the game for good.

Cricket at the Crossroads examines the personalities and attitudes that influenced this tumultuous era in cricket, using material drawn from original research and interviews to paint a vivid picture of the game in the 1960s and 70s, not only revealing what was going on behind the scenes as players sought to break the grip of the administrators, but setting it within a socio-economic context in a way not previously attempted.  It is a lively and entertaining read, for good measure.

Who is the author?

Guy Fraser-Sampson, who teaches at the Cass Business School in the City of London, has written a number of best-selling titles about finance and investment and his expertise is regularly sought in television and radio discussion programmes.  He has nurtured a love of cricket since he was a schoolboy, however, and his fascination with the influence of class and racial prejudices on the game in the 1960s and 70s led him to attempt to marry sporting and social history in his first cricket book.  A versatile writer, he has also won praise for Major Benjy, a novel written as a continuation of the Mapp and Lucia series penned by E. F.  Benson, and written with the blessing of Benson’s literary estate.

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Amazon’s current top five cricket bestsellers

Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography, by Chris Waters
Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds, by Chris Arnot
Graeme Swann: The Breaks are Off - My Autobiography
Start the Car: The World According to Bumble, by David Lloyd
The Last Flannelled Fool, by Michael Simkins

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Up Pohnpei -- how an English football journalist took charge of the world's worst national football team and turned them into winners

SPORTS BOOK OF THE WEEK

Up Pohnpei: A quest to reclaim the soul of football by leading the world's ultimate underdogs to glory

Published by: Profile Books (Hardcover]

What’s it about?

Football journalist Paul Watson and his film-maker pal Matt Conrad decide late one evening in Watson’s London flat to become international footballers, an unlikely ambition for two lads in their early 20s with no professional experience but one they think they can fulfil if they first identify the world‘s worst national team.
Research leads them to Pohnpei, one of a group of islands in the Pacific known as Micronesia, about 1800 miles north of Australia. The team is ranked 220 in the world, its last known result is a 16-1 defeat to Guam, after which the coach quit and the team effectively disbanded.

The idea runs into a snag when they discover they will need to live on the island for five years before they become eligible to play. So they offer instead to become coach and assistant coach, a job which involves not only assembling a new team but establishing an island league so the players can showcase their talents, which in a population of 34,000 with a 90 per cent obesity rate require considerable nurturing.

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All On Red offers an insider's view of Liverpool during their golden era

New in Football Books

All on Red: Ten Years at Anfield - A Liverpool fan's dream job

At first glance, All On Red might seem like just another offering from a football fan who fancies himself as a writer but Frank Gamble’s take on life as a Liverpool supporter comes from a slightly different perspective.

For a decade from 1979, Gamble was a particularly privileged fan, mixing work and pleasure as lottery sales manager of the club’s Development Association.

It was a decade in which Liverpool won six League titles, two European Cups, four League Cups and one FA Cup.  For Gamble, the experience of being behind the scenes at this time was unforgettable.  There were plenty of fans who shared his love for the club but few who had been asked to share their opinions with Joe Fagan, Bob Paisley and Roy Evans in the famous 'boot room'.

That happened to Gamble after one big European night at Anfield when, searching for his boss, commercial director Ken Addison, he stumbled across the club’s football brains trust in the middle of their customary post-match debriefing and found himself almost struck dumb when Fagan, then the manager, asked for his thoughts on the game.

“Joe Fagan was the nicest man I ever met in football by a country mile,” Gamble wrote. “His achievements in his first season replacing Bob (Paisley) have never received the acclaim they truly deserve.”

But All on Red, as an account of the Liverpool Gamble knew, is not without criticism.  He felt the club wasted the commercial opportunities presented by their success on the field, accusing chairman John Smith of being obsessed with cost-cutting when he should have been investing and of stifling Addison‘s creative flair by rejecting his ideas.

Manchester United 'light years ahead'

“These were the days and times that Liverpool should have pushed the pedal to the floor in terms of pulling away from our rivals commercially but certain people just couldn’t see the bigger picture and golden opportunities were missed,” he wrote.

By comparison, Manchester United were “light years ahead even then -- in February 1983.”

“We have been playing catch-up to this day and although commercial revenues have grown immensely in recent years we were slow out of the blocks and it cost us.”

Gamble, who now works in the energy sector, left Anfield in 2009 and went into print with All on Red only then.

He also gives an insider’s take on the Heysel tragedy, which he attributes in part to the atmosphere in Britain at the time, recalling a year of unrest at football grounds in the lead-up to the fateful night in Belgium that reflected the “angry society” that he felt existed in the country.

Gamble says he wrote the book to demonstrate how it felt to be a fan whose passion for a club became his livelihood and as such he has produced a supporter’s story that, for once, is unique.

All On Red: Ten Years at Anfield - A Liverpool fan's dream job, by Frank Gamble, is published by the excellent Cheltenham-based publisher, Sports Books.

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Clough: Confidential, by Dave Armitage: Sequel to popular 150 BC reflects perennial appetite for Brian Clough stories

FOOTBALL BOOKS

Clough: Confidential

Given that everyone in football of a certain vintage seems to have a Brian Clough story to recall it is not surprising that there have been around 20 books written about the late former Derby County and Nottingham Forest manager.

From the first biography, penned by broadcaster Tony Francis in 1987, to the latest -- and certainly longest -- account of his life and career, exhaustively researched and painstakingly documented by Jonathan Wilson, Clough has remained an enduring source of fascination.

Wilson manages to explode a few anecdotal myths in his 566-page tour de force but it is hard to imagine that the appetite for Brian Clough stories, apocryphal or otherwise, will ever be sated.

Midlands football writer Dave Armitage found that to be the case when he assembled 150 gems gleaned from press room colleagues and a host of figures from within the game under the imaginative title 150 BC.

It was a collection of amusing, amazing and sometimes touchingly poignant tales that proved very popular, so much so that the stories he reluctantly left out were soon supplemented by many more as memories were jogged and more classic Cloughie moments came to light.

Armitage, who publishes under his own Hot Air imprint, sensed a sequel in the offing and the end result was Clough: Confidential, which brings together almost as many snapshots of Old Big ‘Ead as the first volume.

'Best book on Brian Clough' -- Kenny Burns

"There was never a plan for a second volume until the stories kept coming in," Armitage says.

"Forest legend Kenny Burns kindly took time to tell me he felt it was the best book on Clough he had ever read. A number of people who knew Cloughie exceptionally well took pains to say how much they had enjoyed it and were happy to give up even more of their memories."

It’s a sparkling read, naturally dominated by the years at Derby and Forest for which Clough was clearly famed most but not without reference to his briefer tenures -- very much briefer, in one instance -- at Brighton and Leeds.

John Vinicombe, the former Brighton Argus reporter -- who passed away last year, sadly -- provided a taste of how the Clough effect manifested itself by tripling the gates at Albion’s old Goldstone Ground and how the Clough Era is still talked about on the south coast, even though it lasted only eight months.

And Norman Hunter, hardly a fan as a first-hand dressing-room witness to Clough’s disastrous 44 days at Elland Road, recalls that, on the day he was sacked, Clough walked into a meeting of his testimonial committee and implored them to “raise all the money you can for this man because he deserves it.”

Hunter says: “I find myself strangely protective towards the memory of Brian Clough despite the fact that it took him until the 44th day of his reign to say anything nice about me.”

Buy Clough: Confidential and 150 B.C.: Cloughie - the Inside Stories direct from Amazon.

Further reading
More Cloughie tales on way as Armitage scores a go-it-alone hit

Learn more about Jonathan Wilson's biography of Brian Clough...
Unravelling the real truth behind the legend of Brian Clough
Clough, Taylor and why Sunderland still wonders what might have been

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Inside the Divide: Richard Wilson gets to the heart of Celtic v Rangers rivalry

The rivalry between Celtic and Rangers has seldom been less than intense since they first squared up to one another on May 28th, 1888.  Explosions of hatred between opposing supporters have been commonplace but the 2010-11 season will be remembered as particularly poisonous.

It was a season in which Celtic fans protested against the poppy, in which Celtic’s continuous complaints against referees led the officials to go on strike, in which Uefa fined Rangers for sectarian chanting and a Celtic fan was jailed for racially abusing the Rangers player, El-Hadji Diouf.

It was a season in which an Old Firm game of three red cards, 13 yellows and 34 arrests inside Celtic Park ended with rival managers Ally McCoist and Neil Lennon having to be dragged apart but which then sank to even lower depths as death threats were made against Celtic boss Lennon, who received bullets and explosives in the post.  Lennon was subsequently attacked by a Hearts supporter on the touchline during a televised match at Tynecastle.

Given this backdrop, Richard Wilson’s attempt to get to the core of a football enmity that outstrips all others comes at a timely moment and his new book, Inside the Divide: One City, Two Teams ... The Old Firm, has already attracted some glowing reviews.

The author, who has spent much of his working life as a football journalist in Glasgow, collecting several awards along the way, builds his narrative around the unfolding of one Old Firm match, in January 2010, chosen simply because it was the first to occur after he found a publisher willing to run with his idea.

He set out to view this game from multiple perspectives, interviewing not only participants and supporters but those involved at the peripheries, including the senior duty police officer and the Sky television commentator, even an A&E nurse on duty to attend to incoming wounded.  With their stories as a central thread that holds the tale together, he finds points at which to delve into the history of the game and to explore its social, political and religious context.

Reviewing for the Observer, Kevin McKenna describes Inside the Divide as “insightful and wonderfully written” and applauds Wilson’s efforts to identify the factors that make the Old Firm game unparalleled among derbies.  “Wilson, more than anyone in recent years, has told us why Celtic and Rangers matter and why their adherents have little of which to be ashamed and much of which to be proud,” he writes.

Writing in The Scotsman, Richard Bath confesses to disliking Wilson’s interspersing of his own “excellent narrative” with dramatic, fictional re-constructions of actual events (in the manner of David Peace in The Damned United) but is otherwise largely complimentary.

He describes what he perceives as Scotland’s “simultaneous fascination and revulsion with the Old Firm” as “a complicated relationship which Wilson chronicles with some dexterity.”

He adds that “the chapter devoted to Mo Johnston is particularly good, as is his analysis of how non-Scottish players such as Paul Gascoigne...were sucked into the whirlpool of heightened emotions and sectarianism which accompanies the Old Firm rivalry.”

Inside the Divide is, he concludes, “an entertaining book that illuminates much about the Old Firm, and about Scotland as a nation.”

Buy Inside the Divide: One City, Two Teams...The Old Firm direct from Amazon.

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Arthur Kinnaird - a philanthropic nobleman and unsung football pioneer

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During the 1870s and 80s, when he appeared in a record nine FA Cup finals for Wanderers and Old Etonians, Arthur Kinnaird was almost as colossal a figure in football as W G Grace had become in cricket.

There were even physical similarities.  Grace was easily identified by his ‘yeoman figure and shaggy beard’ -- the precise words used by the editor of Athletic News to describe Kinnaird. And just as Grace had his trademark yellow and red cricket cap, Kinnaird’s white trousers and blue and white quartered cap made him easy to pick out on the football field.

But where the life of Dr Grace, and his importance in the development and popularity of cricket, has been documented many times, the role of Kinnaird -- he inherited the title of Lord Kinnaird in 1887 -- was less well researched until sports historian Andy Mitchell decided to investigate.

Yet quite apart from being a considerable player in his day -- he has been described as football’s ‘first superstar’ and ‘without exception, the best player’ of his era -- he also served the game as a hugely influential administrator.  A Football Association committee member at only 21 years old in 1868, he was the organisation’s treasurer for 13 years and president from 1890 until his death in 1923, shortly before the opening of Wembley Stadium.

It was a life that began to interest Mitchell when he was working in Perthshire, the home of the London-born Kinnaird’s Scottish aristocratic family.

“With my interest in football history I was intrigued by this character who hailed from Perthshire,“ Mitchell said in an interview with the Perthshire Advertiser.

“Kinnaird features in a lot of books but only on a superficial level – he was clearly important but nobody had ever researched his life. He has gone down for posterity as someone fond of 'hacking', a bit of a toff who dabbled in football. But he was a key influence in the development of the sport.”

Kinnaird was born in Kennington, educated at Cheam School, Eton College and Cambridge University and became a director of Barclays Bank.  Yet he selected and played for Scotland’s first international team and Mitchell’s interest intensified when he himself became involved with Scottish football as Head of Communications at the Scottish FA.

“I spent 10 years at the SFA, travelling with the Scotland team,” he said. “After leaving them in 2007 I took the opportunity to research early football in greater detail, and decided to write this book on Arthur Kinnaird.”

Mitchell’s research took him first to the Kinnaird family home at Rossie Priory, where his great-granddaughter, Caroline Best, still runs the estate, and later to London, both to delve into the archives of Eton College and the FA, and to visit some of Kinnaird’s favourite haunts in Victorian London.

He discovered that far from being merely ‘a toff who dabbled in football’(and whose reputation for 'hacking' - i.e. kicking opponents - was almost certainly misplaced), the 11th Lord Kinnaird pursued another life as a social justice pioneer of extraordinary philanthropy. He spent nights on the streets, helping destitute orphans learn to read and write, and set up schools for the poor, giving away considerable sums from the fortune he made in banking.  Himself touched by tragedy -- he lost two sons in the First World War -- he fostered the spread of evangelical Christianity as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and was president of both the YMCA and YWCA.

Arthur Kinnaird: First Lord of Football has won praise for Mitchell’s meticulous research and for editorial standards of accuracy and presentation not always associated with the independent and self-published sectors.

But, much more than that, it deserves to be acknowledged --  given that football rose under Kinnaird’s stewardship from a game played in muddy parks to an enormous, international spectator sport  -- for adding missing detail to a hugely important phase in the history of the game.

As Mitchell puts it: “Arthur Kinnaird was quite a man – and I hope this book belatedly brings him the recognition he deserves.”

“ARTHUR Kinnaird: First Lord of Football” is published by CreateSpace (www.createspace.com), an amazon.com company.

Buy Arthur Kinnaird: First Lord of Football

For more information about the book, go to www.lordkinnaird.com

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Ridley marks milestone with crafted chronicle of the Premier League

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Two decades ago, to mark the last season of English professional football in its traditional single-league, four-division structure, sports writer Ian Ridley embarked on a journey around the domestic game, from the top right down to grassroots level.

He aimed to capture a snapshot of football at what he knew was a watershed moment in its history, with the birth of the Premier League about to bring about a transformation.  His book, Season in the Cold, won critical acclaim.

At that point, football in England was in crisis, tainted by hooliganism, with attendances in decline at antiquated stadiums, and debts on the rise.  These were the factors which had collided catastrophically in two disasters, at Bradford and Hillsborough.  The Taylor Report into the latter, its recommendations leading to the compulsory development of all-seater stadia, had set the wheels of change in motion but the establishment of the Premier League and the riches generated by the new cash cow of satellite television would take change to a whole new level.

Now Ridley has retraced his steps to paint a new, updated picture of the state of the game in a sequel, There's a Golden Sky.   As in 1991-92, he analyses the state of the top clubs, but also stops off at many places further down the football pyramid, such as Crewe and Blackpool and Portsmouth, and takes the pulse of the non-League game for which, as former chairman of Weymouth and the current chairman of St Albans City, he has a particular affection.

He finds football at the highest level enjoying unprecedented wealth, the leading players earning astronomical rewards, yet ponders whether it has lost touch with reality. There's a Golden Sky, which takes its title from the opening verse of the football anthem, You'll Never Walk Alone, includes some fascinating interviews, including the chairmen of Wembley FC and Truro City and the Chelsea supremo, Bruce Buck, referee Mark Halsey and fallen star Paul Gascoigne.  He revisit’s the Doncaster Belles women’s team and searches for the soul of the game back on Hackney Marshes.

There's a Golden Sky serves as a history of football in the last 20 years, chronicled by one of the best writers working in football today.

Ian Ridley began his career as an editorial assistant on Building magazine and was sports editor at the Worksop Guardian before joining the Hemel Hempstead Evening Post Echo.  His first post on a national newspaper was with the Guardian and he has since written for the Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday, the Observer, the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Express.

In addition to Season in the Cold, His previous books include biographies of Eric Cantona and Kevin Keegan and Floodlit Dreams, which described his term as chairman of Southern League club Weymouth.  He has also collaborated on autobiographies with Tony Adams, Paul Merson and Steve Claridge.


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