Books are grand cos they're a mentally healthy alternative to the constant churn and anger of social media. I don't read enough of them because my brain is fucked cos of the constant churn and anger of social media.
Here are some books I have managed to persuade my attention deficit mind to focus on for a few hours that I think are decent.
I'd love ye to recommend some stuff too just cos I'd like to read some good stuff. Here goes...
Be Good, Love Brian - Growing up with Brian Clough - Craig Bromfield
I love Cloughie. I find him the most fascinating of people. He's probably the single greatest football manager to have ever lived and a singular personality with plenty of sharp edges to compliment his undoubted humanity. This book is an amazing journey. In short, the author meets Clough by chance one day and ends up living with him, becoming a kind of adopted child to the Clough family. It's as much about the author's experiences of childhood poverty and his relationship with his own family as it is the Cloughs but that works really well. He draws a beautiful contrast between life with and without Brian. Football only really makes its way into the story quite late on but that doesn't matter. Whilst at times, he creates a warm picture of his memories, other details are chilling - the details of midnight flits from an abusive father are sketched through child's eyes in a really powerful way. Clough's presence in his life grows bigger and bigger as he gets older and the reader gets to feel the same open eyed wonder at being up close with Brian as the author must have felt. One of the most unusual football books I've read.
More than Game - Saving Football from Itself - Mark Gregory
This isn't a riveting read in some senses, but stay with me for a moment. This is one of those 'football is a right old mess' books but where other books provide angry polemic and political tub thumping, this book approaches the situation with cold hard facts. It's written by an economist. It shows. Again, that's not a criticism. It's the kind of book that you can refer to in order to make a point properly. It's the kind of book which looks at evidence first instead of just telling the story the author wants to tell. It's got interesting perspectives for sure, the writer is thoughtful and looks at things like his own relationship with a club funded by gambling fortunes and is especially interesting on the way that football funds community work but overall, the facts and figures of the finances are the star. It's an important book that illustrates some of the structural issues of our game in a stark and inarguable fashion.
More than Game - Saving Football from Itself - Mark Gregory
This isn't a riveting read in some senses, but stay with me for a moment. This is one of those 'football is a right old mess' books but where other books provide angry polemic and political tub thumping, this book approaches the situation with cold hard facts. It's written by an economist. It shows. Again, that's not a criticism. It's the kind of book that you can refer to in order to make a point properly. It's the kind of book which looks at evidence first instead of just telling the story the author wants to tell. It's got interesting perspectives for sure, the writer is thoughtful and looks at things like his own relationship with a club funded by gambling fortunes and is especially interesting on the way that football funds community work but overall, the facts and figures of the finances are the star. It's an important book that illustrates some of the structural issues of our game in a stark and inarguable fashion.
Fit and Proper People - the Lies and Fall of Owna FC - Martin Calladine and James Cave
Another book about the state of football, but this time one with an amazingly tense story despite seemingly set around footballing backwaters. Calladine and Cave begin investigating a kind of crowd funded football club purchase that on the surface appears all about benevolence and democracy but as the numbers unravel, turns out to be built on quicksand and deceit. The authors weave their own alarming experiences of threats, violence and shoddy police protection together with broader picture details of the wild west of football finance. This is an eye opening book about the vulnerability of the game to the kind of nefarious sorts that are attracted to football club ownership and the painfully poor protection we all have from scams and con artists.
Fear and Loathing in La Liga - Sid Lowe
I loved this book. It is to my shame that I don't know all that much about the Spanish Civil war and (as Clough would have it) all that type of thing. I now know a lot more about Spanish history and a lot more about two clubs who dominate the world football landscape and about Spanish football in general. Lowe gets the level of detail just about right, lingering on certain players or managers like Di Stefano or Herrara just long enough to give you a feeling of intimacy with the topic, but managing to not stray into banal detail. Whilst the football is at the fore, he contextualises the two clubs in terms of their position in wider Spanish society and he does so fairly, showing that the idea that Madrid were simply 'the Franco team' and Barca 'the heroic upstarts of the resistance' is a gross over-simplification.
This is how it feels - An English Football Miracle - Mike Keegan
This is how it feels - An English Football Miracle - Mike Keegan
In contrast to some of the above, this is quite a light read. It's ace though. If, like me, you are slightly wistful for a bygone age when a decent manager and the sort of money you can pull together from a board of local businessmen could occasionally disrupt the football landscape, then this book will be exactly the sort of escape from an era of oil money, global branding opportunities and executive salaries that you need. Royle is probably not remembered in the way he should be - he comes across really well in this book. Football as whole back then seems simultaneously a lot more ramshackle but also kind of more raw than it does now. I read it in one sitting which says a lot.
The Peoples Game - Football, State and Society in East Germany - Alan McDougall
This is definitely the hipster choice. When I bought this, my heart dropped. This wasn't a football book, I thought, but an academic study. It appeared dry, wordy and serious minded. I persevered and discovered it was anything but. Details of life in the DDR burst from the page. Fans gathering at the wall to hear games they'd been cut off from, clubs encouraged in and out of existence. Terrace culture and the sense that a football crowd could be a tiny oasis of free expression (and violence at times.) The astonishing and at sometimes comically inept details of Stasi officers tailing the national team abroad. This book may have its roots in academia but it's a sensational history of everyday life in a place that still feels shrouded in mystery even today.
Dynamo - Defending the honour of Kiev - Andy Dougan
This is definitely the hipster choice. When I bought this, my heart dropped. This wasn't a football book, I thought, but an academic study. It appeared dry, wordy and serious minded. I persevered and discovered it was anything but. Details of life in the DDR burst from the page. Fans gathering at the wall to hear games they'd been cut off from, clubs encouraged in and out of existence. Terrace culture and the sense that a football crowd could be a tiny oasis of free expression (and violence at times.) The astonishing and at sometimes comically inept details of Stasi officers tailing the national team abroad. This book may have its roots in academia but it's a sensational history of everyday life in a place that still feels shrouded in mystery even today.
Dynamo - Defending the honour of Kiev - Andy Dougan
More Eastern Europe but this time, Ukraine. I read this book before Putin's own siege and several times since, I've been struck by images from it. It follows the story of the Nazi attack and occupation of the city and tracks what happens to players. Resistors, collaborators, those who flee and those who end up in death camps. The story of the war is one that is endlessly retold, but the details of everyday life beneath the dates and figures are fascinating. The fact that football goes on at all is incredible, but the account of the infamous 'death match' in which a scratch side of Ukrainians including some of the Dynamo Kiev stars play the best players the occupiers can put together is astonishing.
All of the above stuff you have to pay money to read but here are some things that you don't.
The Lonely Season - Coventry City blog
The Lonely Season - Coventry City blog
When we played Cov, one of their fans paid my blog the compliment of 'it's a bit like the lonely season but not as good' - I hadn't read the lonely season. I therefore read the lonely season. I could see what they meant. It's decent. It seems to have stopped in March - I hope it carries on.
Loft For Words - QPR fan site
The writing of Clive Whittingham makes this site special. Most sites where there is a load of links, fancy pictures and a few adverts tend not to be very good but this has the quality you'd expect when the website has a pun so good that it works twice for its name. It's superb and as with the Coventry page, it's a pleasure to read something that is idiosyncratic and skilfully put together that feels true to the writer as opposed to an attempt to ape a more commercially familiar style.
Loft For Words - QPR fan site
The writing of Clive Whittingham makes this site special. Most sites where there is a load of links, fancy pictures and a few adverts tend not to be very good but this has the quality you'd expect when the website has a pun so good that it works twice for its name. It's superb and as with the Coventry page, it's a pleasure to read something that is idiosyncratic and skilfully put together that feels true to the writer as opposed to an attempt to ape a more commercially familiar style.
I'd particularly like some suggestions for other blogs that are really good. I know I've read some others I've liked this last season but I can't remember them -
This year, I really need to collect them into one app or suchlike as it's harder and harder to find content that is actually decent and isn't just some trolling shite where people speculate wildly about fuck all and call that 'content' or incredibly boring official stuff which is just basically placeholder material with a nice picture.
This year, I really need to collect them into one app or suchlike as it's harder and harder to find content that is actually decent and isn't just some trolling shite where people speculate wildly about fuck all and call that 'content' or incredibly boring official stuff which is just basically placeholder material with a nice picture.
My previous set of reading recommendations are here. You can obvs read this blog for free too if you want.
You can follow MCLF on facebook or Twitter or use Follow.it to get posts sent to your email
If you appreciate the blog and judge it worth 1p or more, then a donation to one of the causes below which help kids and families in Blackpool would be grand.
0 comments:
Post a Comment