The Sports Bookshelf

Squeaky Bum Time -- of all the words to have tumbled from the lips of Sir Alex Ferguson during his 37 years as a football manager, those three have become the most famous. The phrase can be found in a dictionary now, variously defined but taken generally to mean ‘the tense final stages of a sporting competition’. Yet Daniel Taylor, who has assembled a collection of Ferguson quotes under that title, says that there remains a doubt over whether they really were the words he used one morning in the spring of 2003 as he tried to find a humorous way to describe the state of that year’s Premier League title race. He should know.  As the man responsible for The Guardian newspaper’s coverage of Manchester United, Taylor was present at the press conference in question with his notebook open and his voice recorder running.  But he admits that none of the reporters present can be 100 per cent certain of exactly what Sir Alex said, even to this day. “His accent can make him a bit difficult

If there was only one promotion success story that really mattered to football writer and Leeds United fan Phil Shaw in the season just gone, there was another that prompted a quiet cheer. Blackpool’s elevation to the Premier League means that Ian Holloway, the man behind the tangerine dream come true and a manager with no peers when it comes to off-the-wall observations on the game, will at last have a national audience -- and for Phil that can only mean good news. That’s because, as a sideline to the serious business of reporting on the national game for The Independent and other publications, Phil is an avid collector of witty, pithy and pertinent football quotations.  And if there is anyone almost guaranteed to be worth listening to next season, it is Blackpool’s loquacious Holloway. “He says he wants to be taken seriously but I don’t think he can stop himself,” Phil says. “It is people like Holloway and Gordon Strachan whose interviews you read with particular attention bec