Football Book Review Thread

[Ray de Galles]

Football Book Review Thread

Toto Gramsciddu wrote:

The first is Simon Inglis' Stadium Odyssey .

Have they dropped the main title 'Sighlines' from the edition you have and just gone with the sub title? That's annoying, if so.

Endorse everything you say about the book though, I must give it a re-read.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Um, no. I was just very, very tired when I posted it, apparently. It is indeed Sightlines: A Stadium Odyssey. My bad.

[danielmak]

Football Book Review Thread

Toto Gramsciddu wrote:

Also, while on vacation last week I read two other books worthy of mention.

The first is Simon Inglis' Stadium Odyssey. Formally, this isn't about football at all; it's about Inglis and his obsession with stadia. This of course has the potential to be brutally anorak-y but Inglis is an absolutely lovely writer; modest, self-deprecating, but not afraid to try some odd literary devices to get his point across (a faux-epistoalry chapter between a Greek and a Roman arguing the merits of the Colosseum vs. Olympia to demonstrate the ancient nature of the modern stadium vs. traditional stadium debate; an imaginary conversation with Papa Hemingway about the Pamplona arena, etc). And in the end, it isn;t really - or at least entirely - about stadia; it's equally about the kinds of communal experiences one can have within them. Two of the best chapters are about bullfighting in Spain and the hurling final at Croke Park.

If you're a ground-hopping nerd, there's stuff in here for you (4 chapters describing a 6-day groundhopping trip to Buenos Aires is a treat). If you;re interested in the politics or economics of stadia, ythere are bits in here for you. If you love baseball, the chapters on Wrigley Field and the Atsrodome are both excellent...seriously, there's almost nothing not to like here. Sure, 300 pages on stadia can sometimes seem a little wearing, but I can't imagine a nicer writer to guide one through it - quite excellent.

AG--how much of this book focuses on football stadiums? Although, I'm not a ground-hopping nerd myself (kind of hard to do living in the US, where everything is so spread out and not having the cash to travel), I am fan of the blend of travel narratives blended with football, so is there enough in this book about football to merit a purchase. Although I am also a baseball and hockey fan, I don't really care enough about the culture surrounding either sport to read about stadiums in those sports.

On that note, perhaps AG or others can answer this. Are Inglis' other books about football stadiums (esp. stadiums in Europe) written in a more narrative/cultural history prose or are these books more traditional history/photo comobos (i.e., coffee table books or not quite coffee table books but not in the vein of something like A Season with Verona, Behind the Curtain, etc.)? An interesting cultural history that features more literary prose would be appealing, but I can't find any excerpts from his books on-line, so I figured it was worth asking here.

[Guest]

Football Book Review Thread

Cheers TG/AG

In fact this is exactly what I'll be exploring when I get out to Israel and the West Bank next later this month, assuming the trip doesn't fall through. I might even manage to get into Saudi to watch a match at last!

[The Exploding Vole]

Football Book Review Thread

danielmak wrote:

perhaps AG or others can answer this. Are Inglis' other books about football stadiums (esp. stadiums in Europe) written in a more narrative/cultural history prose or are these books more traditional history/photo comobos (i.e., coffee table books or not quite coffee table books but not in the vein of something like A Season with Verona, Behind the Curtain, etc.)? An interesting cultural history that features more literary prose would be appealing, but I can't find any excerpts from his books on-line, so I figured it was worth asking here.

All Inglis's books are worth reading. The ones on football grounds tend to offer potted histories of the clubs as well as how the ground developed. They're engagingly written, even for those of us who aren't anoraks.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

DM - among non-football grounds covered in this volume, Inglis covers the Sydney Olympics, the bullring at Pamplona, Wrigley Stadium, The Astrodome, a rugby field in Auckland whose name eldues me, and Croke Park in Dublin. Given what you describe as your interests, I think you'd like it.

II - I'm looking forward to reading what you come up with! Any publishers lined up?

[ursus arctos]

Football Book Review Thread

Wrigley Stadium

Absolutely appalling error from Gramsci.

danielmak, I'll second the praise for all of Inglis' books, though also suggest that you take a look at the Rough Guide to European Football, which is focussed more on the match day experience in each city and less on the architecture of the grounds themselves. At one point, I had multiple copies of an earlier edition, and if I can find them, I would be happy to send you one.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Oh, for...Field. Wrigley Field.

I really need more sleep.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

On the subject of architecture and stadiums, the book Stadium Worlds: Football, space and the built environement has just arrived on my desk. 294 pages of dense architecture-themed German sports sociology. Good times.

A review to follow, eventually.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Will You Manage? The Necessary Skills to Be A Gaffer By Musa Okwonga

The level of skill required to be a manager is, as Musa Okwonga correctly points out at the beginning of his new book Will You Manage?, often underrated. Whereas it can be difficult to empathise with the players – those impossibly athletic thoroughbreds – its very easy to look at the more rotund dude in the ill-fitting track suit and say "I could do that". And, indeed, we do it all the time - who doesn’t second-guess a manager with respect to player moves, formations, tactics and substitutions. Indeed, it's practically our God-given right as football fans to do so.

The conceit of this book – or perhaps it's just a canny commercial ploy – is that any one of us could be a manager, if we possessed the right mix of skills. Okwonga then invites the reader on a tour through these skills, examining each of them with a judicious use of anecdote and learned references (it's probably the first football book which makes reference to Aristotle's Poetics, for instance). Gradually, but deftly, one is stripped of the notion that top managers are anything but otherworldly in the devotion and skills they bring to their work.

Will You Manage? is organized identically to Okwonga’s previous book, A Cultured Left Foot (so minus a few points for lack of originality, if that sort of thing matters to you). In the earlier work (which did not receive anything like the notice it probably deserved), he looked at the physical components of greatness among players – feet, heart, a sense of fun, etc and devoted a chapter to each. In this book, he’s doing the same thing with the mental and leadership qualities required to reach managerial greatness - vision, strategy, communication, etc. For some reason, the organizing principle doesn’t work quite as well in this book; possibly because it's so obviously derivative of earlier work, but mainly, I think, that it's harder to organize his musings around the abstract nouns he has chosen to describe the managerial essence.

Let's be clear that this is not a book from which many on OTF are likely to learn much. Despite the occasional scholarly reference, this is not a particularly scholarly treatment of the position of the manager. Nor does it have any pretensions, as Barney Ronay’s survey of the position did, to being some kind of history of the position; the managerial anecdotes, for instance, are almost all from the last twenty years (and almost all from England, too, which precludes the book being an at least geographically-complete tour). No trawling through archives here – Okwonga's research is basically restricted to ringing up some semi-famous managers - Gianfranco Zola is as close as we get to a genuine star - and asking them some questions.

But that's not to suggest the book is feeble or stupid: it most definitely is not. Okwonga is well read and is capable of bringing illuminating references from history, religion and sociology to bear on managerial dilemmas, which usually has the effect of raising the standard of discussion significantly. I say "usually" because although this occasionally produces some gems (I particularly liked his invention of the term "Pandora's Six-yard box"), it does also on occasion go spectacularly wrong. In particular, the phrase: "I wonder, if Sun Tzu were alive today, how good he would have been at Fantasy League Football" has to be an early contender for Most Ludicrous Sentence of the Decade.

From a more didactic or snarky writer, it would be easy enough to write off that kind of prose as being that of a wanker. But here's the thing: Okwonga is quite clearly a very decent guy. He's empathetic, generous and gentle; he can’t really give you a sense of what it feels like to be subject to the kinds of pressures that face modern managers, but he does always emphasize the difficulties. He can't tell you not to get angry at Arsene Wenger for buying another effing teenaged attacking midfielder when what the club needs is an effing goaltender and an effing central defender but he can, gently and persuasively, show that Wenger's day-to-day work is several dozen orders of magnitude more complex and difficult than a brief spell on Football Manager might suggest it is. And, as a result, it makes you wonder whether you were right to get so angry in the first place.

(At this point, it’s probably worth pointing out that one of the book’s weaknesses is the over-importance accorded to games like Football Manager and its ilk. It's probably meant as an attempt to engage with the source of most reader’s most sustained engagement with the concept of managing, but after awhile it gets irritating. Even quite apart from being the source of the Sun Tzu quote, above, the chapter containing the four-page interview with Henry Gregg, winner of fantasyleague.com’s 2005-06 season, had the unfortunate effect of lowering the overall quality of the book).

The perfect audience for this book is someone who is football-mad but has yet to really read much on the subject . For such readers, the exclusively post-Thatcher nature of the managerial anecdotes will be seen as welcoming rather than limiting. And of course, the clarity of Okwonga’s writing (a pleasant by-product of his poet's background) is a big plus as well. (My boy Benito, for instance, *loved* the book...thought it was better than Kuper, largely because it never strayed far from the subject and always used examples that he'd heard of. Take that for what it's worth).

For the more engaged football reader, Will You Manage? may not teach you much, but it is still the kind of book you’d be glad to have read when arguing the toss with mates down the pub. Each of the nine main essays do illuminate some crucial aspects of what might be termed "the Managerial Condition", and they do so in a fun and uncomplicated way. Though there’s no sustained thesis here; rather, it is a series of astute observations about the difficulties of modern management. In short, it makes you think.

[ad hoc]

Football Book Review Thread

I recently read "Why England Lose" which had the review line "An Arsene Wenger of a Book" emblazoned across the top. I presume the publishers thought that this implied it was intelligent and thoughtful, whereas for most people it probably implies that it only ever sees one side of any story, wilfully ignoring or overlooking facts that go against its theories/world view. Proved to be an extremely accurate summary of the book frankly.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Zing! Well done.

[The Exploding Vole]

Football Book Review Thread

Seconded.

[SpanglyPrincess]

Football Book Review Thread

"Football Fascism and Fandom",

I have read some journal articles by the authors of this, I think I need to get hold of a copy. Not sure I will agree with much of it but it might be an interesting read at least.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Nice to see you around the joint, SP.

I'm supposed to get a review copy of this shortly. I can send it to you when I'm done, if you like.

[Yoss]

Football Book Review Thread

Nice thread folks,especially from AG. I've just had a skim through it and seen several reviews of books I was thinking about reading.

One book I didn't see mentioned but would highly recommend is Richard Sanders' Beastly Fury, on the early development of the game in Britain. That's my only recommentdation at the moment but I'm going to start reading more footie books from now.

[The Exploding Vole]

Football Book Review Thread

I've read this, Yoss, and it's very good. I thought I'd mentioned it somewhere on here.

[Tony C]

Football Book Review Thread

Going back a few pages - and a few months - I've just started reading Goldblatt's 'The Ball Is Round' and I can see that I won't be putting it down much.

Thoroughly recommended.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

So, OK - I've just picked up a copy of a book entitled "Interismo, Leninismo", which will probably take me months to read because my Italian isn't really up to it. However, if I can parse the book jacket properly, the argument seems to be that Inter's gradual shift from a man-marking system to a zonal marking system is actually some sort of "collectivist revolution", and therefore last year's treble is (metaphorically at least) an expression of Marx and Engels' greatest hopes.

I'm not kidding about this. That's really what it's about.

[The Exploding Vole]

Football Book Review Thread

Still to come: Colchester United and logical positivism.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

TFC: Being and Nothingness.

[ursus arctos]

Football Book Review Thread

Newcastle United: The Prison Notebooks.

[Antepli Ejderha]

Football Book Review Thread

Just finished Baghdad FC by Simon Freeman, I would recommend it even though it is a bit bitty and disjointed at times. More than anything else it covers stuff that I had no real idea about. It does read like the book of a documentary which is what it actually aspired to be.

[danielmak]

Football Book Review Thread

I have to say up front that I'm a bit embarrassed to write this pseudo-review, but will post none-the-less, if for no other reason than because I have spent almost a year with this book and need some closure. :-)

In February I bought Richard Brentall's Games Beyond Frontiers: A Football Fan's Odyssey, which I planned to read during my downtime at a conference in Liverpool. The one day I actually had some time to chill was the first day I got there and I preferred to walk around the city until the jet lag kicked in and I had to sleep rather than sitting in the hotel reading a book. When I got back from the conference, I read the first half of the book in two or three nights, reading just before I went to sleep and then left the book on the nightstand with plans to continue that pattern. The problem is that that pattern only existed because I was getting back to US central time and was going to bed at about the same time the missus was going to bed. After I was back to my normal routine (2-3am bed time) my reading stopped (her bed time is around 10pm). If I had my act together, I would have just grabbed the book and read at other times, but I had other stuff to read and figured I'd get to it. So, it has taken nearly a year to finish the book because I have only gone to bed at "a decent hour" 2-3 times since I returned from that trip and the last time was about a week ago, meaning I finally finished the book.

Ok, enough of the autobiographical, although that autobiography is fitting in that Brentall's book consists of 13 chapters about seeing football games in 12 1/2 different countries (he includes Hong Kong after the territory was returned to China and he writes about East Germany in 1979 and then the east in a re-unified Germany in 1990---so 12 1/2 seems good). The chapters cover nearly two decades of travel, some of which are about seeing West Brom either in friendly tournaments or during some brief forays into UEFA continental competitions, but most chapters are about seeing National teams or club teams in the countries to which he traveled. Almost all of these chapters are about Europe, but Brentall also writes about seeing club teams in Argentina, Chile, and Hong Kong.

The problem with my disjointed reading is that it is hard for me to provide the kind of details that I would like to provide (this is perhaps more of an embarrassment than it taking me nearly a year to read 146 pages), but I can say that folks who dig the football-travel literature combination, will like this book. Sometimes the chapters are bit heavy on travel and light on football and sometimes light on travel and heavy on football, but the best chapters weave both: Carl Zeiss Jena v. West Brom in 1979, Ferencvaros v. Pesci MSC in 1992, and Magdeburg v. Bordeaux/Dynamo Dresden v. Malmo in 1990.

Brentall is a good writer with keen observations; the ability to balance humor with serious reflection on relationships among politics, culture, and football; and, like many good travel writers and fans who enjoy traveling to see football, a desire to meet local fans and learn from them about their love of football/concerns about footballing culture/sense of changing political climates. Although the book is not of the same high quality as A Season with Verona (which also blends football, culture, and politics), it's still worth your time if you enjoy a blend of travel writing and football culture, and I assume your time with this book will be much shorter than mine.

[axel]

Football Book Review Thread

Received two copies of Glourious 1911 book about Bradford City winning the 'first' FA cup in 1911, and the subsequent slaughter of the team in WW1.

http://bantamspast.co.uk/index.php?categories=Glorious%201911

Anyone want my spare copy?