Just FootBall and Soccer - Teams, Championships etc

Red Army General: Leading Britain’s Biggest Hooligan Gang
Author: Tony O’Neill (Usually dispatched within 24 hours)

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Amazingly honest recollection
I’ve only read a couple of other “hoolie” books and they read like superhero comics. None of it “rang-true”… these guys were never scared and never beat up.

This is a more honest account of football hooliganism. As well as the excitement and victories are tales of fear and failures, running away and getting beaten up.

I actually met Tony in Bordeaux watching United several years ago. I had no idea who he was, because despite following United since ‘76 (aged 7) I’d never been involved in (organised) football violence. I actually met him by “nicking” his taxi at the airport. Despite this, he was polite, courteous and friendly to both my wife and myself. For some reason though I knew that he was not a man to be messed with (call it “inner city Manc sixth sense”)

You may not agree with his actions but this book conveys the complexity of a man who can be incredibly violent and yet uphold a code of honour. This violence isn’t indiscriminate, he only directs it at other people who are looking to fight. His disgust at hooligans who attack “straight” football fans and those who use weapons can seem strange rules to live by but in the end he comes across as a likeable bloke and definitely someone you’d want as friend but not as an enemy.

A “must read” for anyone interested in football hooliganism, Manchester United or football history.

Fantastic, superb……….
A book well worth the money. No ego filling reminiscence full of exaggeration. The myths of likewise authors are put to the test, probably no reaction yet on the opposition’s side…….

Couldn’t put it away, kept reading.

Can’t wait for the sequal later this year called “MEN IN BLACK”.

red army general
Wasn’t sure if this would be yet another of those ego filled reminiscences full of spin, distortion and gross exaggeration. Thankfully, it was far from it. O’Neill’s account of his life has more than a ring of truth about it, especially when you compare his recollections to those offered by some of his southern counterparts.

Well worth the read, if only to dispel some of the myths created by opponents and officials alike.

Fever Pitch
Author: Nick Hornby (Usually dispatched within 7 to 10 days)

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Amazing
I am a woman, not british and not a big football fan, but I do watch a match every now and then. I came upon this book by accident and I was very reluctant to start reading, as I guessed I was not the intended audience. I have watched a couple of times Arsenal games on tv, I can identify a hadfull of the most important british players and I have a vague idea where Highbury is, but I imagined it would take more than this to enjoy the book. I was pleasantly surprised to discover some authors can really capture any audience. This book is brilliant. You can completely relate to the writer and feel his passion, his anticipation for the next game, his disappointments and his happy moments. A great read, highly entertaining, and not just for hardcore Arsenal fans (ok, I will not recommend it to people who have never watched a football game in their life).

An Gooner’s Point of View
This book is amazingly intuitive. Nick Hornby has been there and done that so far as genuine football supporting goes. He assesses in a surprisingly rational way (for one so irrational at times) both the benefits and the destructive nature of obsession. Although this book is based around the games of Arsenal (and a brief flirtation with Cambridge United) it says a lot more about human nature (and Charlie George’s haircuts) than the tactics of George Graham! This book could save thousands of people from heartache if it was handed out to people entering relationships where only one partner is football obsessed! If you have a partner who baffles you with their shouts and screams and moods every Saturday afternoon between August and May - this book will help you to understand that they are the ones who need help - you will learn to pity and support them in their affliction. If you are one of those people who shout and scream and have moods every Saturday afternoon between August and May - you will learn that you are not alone. Read this book!

Nice,trustful,almost perfect
“Fever Pitch” is about a boy, a man, a football fan, his life, his time, his regretting old times and the feelings he had…Arsenal meant to him his life as a child, when everything he wanted was to watch his team score a gol, to go every saturday to Highbury, with his father, his friends..He grows up,even though he does not want to, Arsenal becomes a more and more important team,and what happens?He lacks the old team,his world…I’ve been to Highbury and I’m a football fan,I support Juventus and Alex Del Piero and I think one day I am going to feel like Nick Hornby, with my team winning the cup and me, there…but being a different me!!That’s life…the problem is not let anything change your way of being, like the author does. Football can be the essence of the world because it’s able to hold all your experiences and let them go at the same way. Highbury, London, football:it’s impossible not to fall in life with this book!!

A Season with Verona
Author: Tim Parks (Usually dispatched within 24 hours)

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Fantastic
As a fan Of football and more specifically Italian Football, on seeing this book I decided to but it, and what a read. From the moment the season begins it is one rollercoaster ride of a game after another, well written and brilliantly funny Tim Parks makes a seemingly un-glamourous football team into a group of players you actually care about. It is however the fans stories that are the most interesting and it is these that really make the book. The passion that these fans show for Hellas Verona is incredible. I have certainly become a fan of the best team in Verona and indeed of the writer Tim Parks.

Forza Gialloblu!
Parks - an Englishman who has lived and worked in Italy for some 20 years - spends a year following his local football team: provincial alsorans, Hellas Verona. He travels the length and breadth of the country, attending every match of the 2000/01 season; a campaign which dissolves into a desperate struggle to maintain Serie A status. Set in the style of a match by match diary - the first few months are written from the perspective of an ordinary fan; but when the club get wind of the book, Parks is invited to spend time with the management and playing staff.

Reading as part travel, part soccer book - it offers a fascinating insight into Italian fan culture: the hierarchical power struggles within the ‘Brigate Gialloblu’ - the club’s notorious followers; allegiances (strictly adhered) with a select few Serie A peers; and the equanimous acceptance of season end match fixing. The access granted to the squad enables a close observation of the rarefied atmosphere in which a professional football club operates: pampered but secluded players, concerned more with their own careers than of possible relegation; the morose and under pressure head coach, cutting an isolated figure when results go against him; the financial burdens of keeping an unfashionable club afloat amongst the top echelon. Italy’s regional idiosyncrasies, stereotypes, and rivalries are also explored: the Veronese are regarded by outsiders as parochial, uncouth racists; indeed the Brigate initially treat an Englishman within their ranks, with a mixture of suspicion and bemusement. For extra flavour, the book is peppered throughout with Italian dialect, helping to bring the myriad of colourful and passionate characters encountered to life.

The author’s obvious enthusiasm for his adopted club and country is both endearing and infectious; inevitably, it’s all too easy to become engaged in his team’s plight. Football fans everywhere will empathize with the agony and ecstasy, the nail-biting obsessiveness, Parks has to endure over the course of what turns into a dramatic season; and - with writers’ serendipity - climaxes in the most thrilling denouement. A splendid read.

Forza Gialloblu!

Ronnie Pander

amazing book not only for football fans
As a long term Sheffield Wednesday fan I was most pleased to find this book on the shelf of my favourite bookshop a couple of weeks ago. I’ve always loved stories about football, but especially about mad football ites, people like myself who follow their beloved team week in and week out. Although I’ve never been to Verona and I don’t know anyone in Italy, I felt like I have an awful lot in common with the people Mr Parks amazingly describes. The excellent thing about this book however, is that even people who are not particularly keen on football, can easily read it. It clearly emerges from the pages of this manuscript that Mr Parks is not only a passionate supporter of Hellas Verona, but also a clever academic. At some stages of the book i envied the author for his incredibly huge ability to describe the emotions us football fans go through during a whole season.
Needless to say that although it is quite a thick book (about 450 pages) I read it in less than two days.
Thanks Mr Parks for sharing your passion with us readers, I wish you all the best for your professional life and your team.

The Greatest Footballer You Never Saw: Robin Friday Story
Author: Paul McGuigan (Usually dispatched within 24 hours)

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There was and is only one Robin Friday
First a confession. I’m an exiled Reading fan and as a 15 year old Robin Friday was my hero. I well remember standing in the South Bank at Elm Park and watching this magician beat defenders and then seemingly wait for them to catch up so he could beat them again! To me he was as good as George Best and should have been as famous. I was there against Tranmere in what was a vital promotion battle when we won 5-0 and he scored THAT goal.

This book is excellent and my only regret is that it has taken me this long to find it. For a Reading fan from the 70’s it is so evocative but for any football supporter or anyone with an interest in the human condition it is a great read.

If Robin Friday was twenty five years old today he would be earning millions and would hopefully be receiving wise counsel from whichever club was lucky enough to have his services. Instead he played in an era when lower division footballers earned half the wages of scaffolders and plasterers and were largely left to their own devices off the field. With a little bit of the pastoral help that today’s players get from the bigger clubs who knows….

The diary style and first hand nature of a lot of the comments in this book help to put everything in perspective and in it’s own historical context. I finished the book in one gulp and put it aside with nostalgia and emotion flowing over me and an over powering sadness at the thought of what might have been.

A cracking good read
As a football fan (well, barely at the moment - West Ham), and as a lover of sporting biographies, I found this book to be a cracking good read. - I was a teenage football nut in the seventies and from what it says in the book about how good Robin Friday was, it’s hard to believe that I’ve never heard of this player. He must have occasionally featured on Big Match highlights on Sunday afternoons. I’d love to see some footage of him. Anyway, the book takes you on a journey of ambition, success, self-destruction and ultimately sadness. It’s a bit slow starting and the diary format takes a few pages to get used to, but once you’re into it, it’s difficult to put down. At the end you’re left with a feeling that maybe he truly was the greatest footballer you never saw.

If Liam Gallagher were a footballer
Co-written by ex-Oasis gutarist Paul McGuigan, a couple of chapters into the book you can see the why writing a book on an obscure 4th division footballer of the 1970’s had an direct appeal to a man who had spent five years on the road with the Gallagher brothers.

Robin Friday played less than three seasons for the (old) 4th divison Reading RC and then “retired” after a short spell at Cardiff City at the ripe old age of 24. Undoubtedly of remarkable natural ability ( he could have played for England we are repeatedly told by a string of credible witnesses), it is however Friday’s off field antics which hold your interest and largely explain why two decades on McGuigan chose to write a book about him.

In terms of style this is not a classic biography, relying almost exclusively on a series of interviews with family and friends and contemporary newspaper reports. But all this is put together very well by McGuigan and co-author Paulo Hewitt making the book very readable. Indeed, this somewhat hotch potch approach almost perfectly reflects the life of Robin, a man who even at the peak of his career seemed to live out of carrier bags and cheap digs with a variety of wives,women, boozers and drug dealers never far behind him.

The book is funny, intriguing and tragic - Friday died in poverty aged only 38 in 1990. But the authors succeeed in presenting Robin Friday as a genuine talent and lovable rogue that for all his obvious faults you can’t help liking. A good read. You wouldn’t need to be a football fan to enjoy it, and in the absence of evidence from an era when TV coverage was limited to the big clubs a fitting tribute to a player I had never heard of but wish I had.

Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football
Author: David Winner (Usually dispatched within 24 hours)

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This is very uncharitable but …
This is very uncharitable but …

I stuggled through to page 34 where the author claims Rodney Marsh played in the 1966 World Cup final (apologies to the under-30s, but he didn’t, and any football fan of that era could tell you the eleven who did) and then I decided to give up.

For the first 33 pages, I read an account of how English football was all about strength and manliness and avoiding skill, in contrast to Argentinian and lots of other football, which is all about skill, and I was starting to think why am I reading these clichés?

And then I read that if only Alan Hudson and Stan Bowles had played more for England the national team would have won more, and then that Alf Ramsey was ‘old school’ - in fact he wasn’t, his way of playing was new.

And then, get this, that Johnny Giles was a hard man who threatened the break Rodney Marsh’s leg …. Whereas Marsh, in fact, once admitted he deliberately broke another player’s leg.

Coming next - I cheated and looked at the next chapter - was an attempt to say Roy Keane was like an English Boy’s Own character. Go to Cork and say that, mate.

The moral of this story is not to buy books about football written by ‘writers’, people from cultural studies faculties or people who usually write about Victorian ’social theory’.

Hooligans: A-L of Britain’s Football Gangs v. 1
Author: Nick Lowles (Not yet published)

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“News of the World” Football Annual
Author: Stuart Barnes (Not yet published)

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THE football fans’ bible
If you want all the football facts and trivia you are ever going to need then this is the book to have in your pocket at the Pub Quiz!
Serious students of football rely on the Rothmans / Sky Sports book, which is comprehensive; but if you are looking for something smaller but still exhaustive then the News of the World Football Annual should be the one you go for.
Everything is here - and as the oldest annually printed football gazeteer it has the authority of years of refining.

News of the World Football Annual
An essential book for all serious football fans. Contains all fixtures for the current season as well as comprehensive reviews of past seasons football results and records. I always buy this at the start of every season, as the season only kicks off when this book is published.

Tor!: The Story of German Football
Author: Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger (Usually dispatched within 24 hours)

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The story of German Football
I couldn’t believe how good this book was. It tells you everything you ever wanted to know about German football. It’s origins, how it progressed, developed into the Bundesliga.

It’s written in such an entertaining style and is so informative. There are loads of stories, from the stories behind team names such as Energie Cottbus and Carl Zeiss Jena, to detailed looks at significant figures in German football history from Franz Beckenbauer to Lothar Matthaus, from Gerd Muller to Rudi Voller. Then there are the tales of German football during the Nazi Era, from players who went missing and those whose fate was all to obvious.

There is a detailed account of football from the old East Germany. It is divided into a different section, as it should be, from the West German football league. Then came reunification and the players who found bigger fame once they moved to the West from the East, Jens Jeremies and Sebastian Deisler being two such players.

This is not just a straight, German football history book. It’s too well written for that. It is one of the best football books I’ve read and I’ve read many. There are many lighter moments in here too, you will be laughing out loud to. Sehr gut und Einfach klasse!

Superb & Very Readable History of German Football
I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend. This was an excellent decision. Cheers Stumpy…

This history of football in Germany is well written, funny and tragic. There were so many things that I learnt from this. From the way teams were named and originated to stories that just make you laugh out loud and others that reduce you to tears.

As an example there is the story of a player signed by a team who said “They wanted to give me a third of the gate receipts. I told them No Way. I won’t accept less than a quarter.”

To think that the Germans had no professionalism or national league until 1963. The way that the national federation controlled the game and looked on professionalism as a disease to be fought off is unbelievable to us.

This book proves that there is more to German football than Bayern Munich. It shows how team rose and fell and how the game developed from an “unpatriotic” and “foreign” one into a world beater. This teaches us about the German people and their view of us and other countries.

They are bemused at our image of them and do not understand our rivalry and obession with the War that pervades the meetings between our countries.

I highly recommend this to every who wants to gain an insight into the history and development of the game in Germany.

El Macca: Four Years with Real Madrid
Author: Steve McManaman (Usually dispatched within 24 hours)

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Good Afternoon, Gentlemen, the Name’s Bill Gardner
Author: Bill Gardner (Usually dispatched within 24 hours)

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Story of a real Terrace Legend
I have been waiting for this book to come out after hearing that this “West Ham legend” was writing one. It gives a good and honest account of him growing up as a fan and following his idols all over the country and abroad !!! He has built a reputation over the years from nearly every person or football supporter that tried to bully him and knew that he was a man to be respected. With Cass’s book in my bookcase,this will be read over and over again …….

My mate Bill
I was ready for just another hooligan epic, but this book realy tugged on my emotions.
I know the author - although my association is recent, and not in the hooligan days - and I can vouch for the fact the he is an abolute gentleman. For any West Ham fan this book is an absolute must, it made me feel proud and brought a tear to my eye as well as making me laugh. It doesn’t glorify violence, just emphasises the values that society today has lost.
All I can really say is thanks for writing this Bill, and where’s vol.2?

AT LAST!!!!!!
Here is the book that ALL fans of this genre of book have been waiting for. Was it worth it? Well, for this reader, the ais nswer is a big YES! As someone who knows the person, this book opened up a new side of Mr Gardener that l never knew about, his private side! This is not another of those ‘we did this, they did that’ book, but a story of the man himself, written frankly and, best of all, HONESTLY! The only thing that lets this tale down, for me, is that there is not enough of the football fights that, undoubtably, took place. But for this it would have gotten 5 stars! I have read most,if not allm of this style of book and place it within the top 5. The people who should REALLY read this book are the ‘normal’ fans who despise the, so called, hooligan element. For this book is about a REAL fan, a fan that CARES about his mates and fellow supporters, a fan that supports HIS team against any other. It tells of a man who had the mantle of leadership thrust upon him when he didn’t ask for it. It tells of a man who stood tall for those around him, a beacon of hope in a, sometimes, desperate position, You’ll read of trips to away games where, in most cases, violence was the norm for most fans travelling, but the thing EVERYONE will get from reading this is the sense of RESPECT the man carried throughout his time as a, so called, hooligan! When serious rivals can put their hand on their hearts and say that Bill Gardener was up there with the best of them, a true terrace legend but, most of all, not the sort of person you would want to get on the wrong side of!

Read this and learn as the likes of Bill Gardener will never be seen again which, to me, is a really sad state of affairs because the world needs people like him to stand up for the ‘little’ people, the ones that get picked on!!

With this book the legend that is Bill Gardener will live on and long may it do so!!