kenoki wrote:Goldstar wrote:Hello Ladies and Gents
I've been reading the updates on this post since last fall, and figured it was time to say hello. American football is one long commercial anymore (or 3 yards and a career-ending injury), so real football is on the tube way more these days in my house. Between that and reading Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch", I'm becoming hooked. Any other literary suggestions for a history of the grand game? I have heard "Soccer in Sun or Shade" is a good one, but haven't found it locally.
Cheers,
Frank
hey frank,
fever pitch and sun and shade are the only football books i've read! but i have to admit fever pitch is pretty much directly responsible for my relatively new love (4 yrs?) of epl (before that it was just chivas or club america on univision). what a great book... in my top twenty of all time. he really makes you interested in his obsession, almost envy it.
i found soccer in sun or shade at borders books, so you should be able to order it there on their computers or through amazon.com. very quick little read. and then there's 442 magazine which you can find at any ole' borders or barnes and nobles.
anyway, most of the guys in this thread seem to know everything about the game, so i'm sure they will be much more helpful to you.
welcome to the board!
I have been thinking about this over the week or so since this was posted. FourFourTwo is definitely a good magazine, I don't read it often but whenever I pick a copy up I'm impressed. The back issues are always good value, which is the sign of a good magazine I reckon.
There are three classic books that immediately came to the mind. For an understanding of how a football club works, try
'The Glory Game' by Hunter Davies - more well known for his writing about The Beatles. He spends a season with full access at Tottenham Hotspur in 1971, and he writes about every aspect of the club and it's players from bottom to top.
From the same era is
'Only A Game?' by Eamon Dunphy. This is a similar behind-the-scenes book, but with the distinction of being written by an actual player. Dunphy kept a diary of his season, published it, then got into a load of trouble. The book is helped tremendously by the fact that Dunphy is an egotistical prick. It starts in summer, but only gets as far as November; by that time, things aren't going well.
(
'Full Time' by Tony Cascarino is a more recent book by a footballer with a similar warts and all philosophy, although the revelations were more to do with Cascarino's personal life than the football.)
The one I'd most recommend, though, is
'Football Against The Enemy' by Simon Kuper. It's a sort of travelogue, examining the relationship between football and politics worldwide. That's something that I think is important to understand if you want to fully appreciate the game. It was published in the early nineties, so doesn't deal with the last decade or so of astronomical changes, but it provides a lot of historical information (and trivia) and afterwards I bet you'll feel like you've got a fuller grounding in what football is all about.
I'd also suggest looking for anything by
Brian Glanville; anything that interests you from
WSC Books - in fact, I've just noticed [url=http://www.wsc.co.uk/wscbooks/hdfb.html[/url]this[/url], which I haven't seen before but could in fact be just the book you're looking for;
'The Goalkeeper's History Of Britain' which compares Britain's place in Europe to a goalkeeper's place in a football team; and
'Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff' because it is about Johan Cruyff.
And then you can treat yourself to the
Billy Bremner Picture Book from Leeds United AFC.