Football Book Review Thread

[rick derris]

Football Book Review Thread

didn't bother doing a chapter on the Czech Republic/Slovakia, because for some unfathomable reason he doesn't consider it to be in eastern Europe.

well, Prague famously was always west of vienna. probably still is

[Guest]

Football Book Review Thread

So are Zagreb and Llubljana, and Wilson wrote about Croatia and Slovenia...

What are your books called Antonio?

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

They're specialized books on education and education finance in Canada. I guarantee you've never heard of my work unless you obsessively read the foreign news section of the THES (or rather, used to read it before the new owners gutted it).

[Guest]

Football Book Review Thread

I see

Re - your data base, what else has Bennetts written? Can't find anything by him apart from a guidebook to St Petersburg. No football articles though...Football Dynamo says he is a journalist and a translator - who does he write for?

[danielmak]

Football Book Review Thread

Sorry, this might be slightly off topic for this thread, but has to do with writing about football so I figured it was more fitting to ask here than elsewhere on the board.

I am wondering if anyone has read any intelligent articles/essays about Blatter's 6+5 plan? If so, can you share links or citations?

Also, I can't remember the year when most European leagues eliminated limitations on the number of foreign players on the pitch at one time to no limits (I am guessing this had something to do with the formation of the EU, but perhaps not). Similar to my previous question, do you have any recommendations for thoughtful articles/books that addressed that change? Thanks.

[Jimmy Bignutz]

Football Book Review Thread

Does Wilson's book cover the DDR?

[ursus arctos]

Football Book Review Thread

Pretty sure it doesn't.

There is a book to be written there.

[Jimmy Bignutz]

Football Book Review Thread

You got that straight. I really wish someone would.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

No, Wilson didn't cover the DDR. Tor! has a chapter on it, though.

[Guest]

Football Book Review Thread

Antonio Gramsci wrote:

No, Wilson didn't cover the DDR. Tor! has a chapter on it, though.

And an excellent chapter it is too! Not really sure whether DDR footy justifies a book, to be honest - is there really enough material beyond "Stasifying" it?

Someone should do a book on Austria and Hungary instead and how it all went t*ts up.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Good material on both of those in Wilson's latest and in the Goldblatt book, I think, Sash.

Goldblatt's really a standout when looking at football in ther inter-war period (Austria's period of dominance). I think that's the period where the general literature is the weakest, and yet in most countries it was precisely in this period that leagues began to be formed and international competitions (both at the club and country levels) really began.

[Guest]

Football Book Review Thread

Yep, I've read those chapters in both of them but I reckon, there is scope on expanding this up to a stand-alone volume.

On my original subject in this thread, I was passing by a Waterstones the other day and popped in to have a quick look through Riordan's book. Hmmm... a rather detailed description of a 2-2 draw that never happened. Also, he reckons he replaced a player called "Valery Volkov". I can't find such a player in any reference material. Currently asking some of the older fans. At the moment I can't find anyone who's heard of him!

[Guest]

Football Book Review Thread

Got distracted from Wilson's "Pyramiod" arranging a job move, so now back to it, 2/3 of the way through and the chapter on Lobanovskiy. Irritated me a bit, so gonna pose the following questions to him when the next issue of his blog comes out on the Guardian website:

1. I note two references to Spartak apparently fixing games. I note no references to Lobanovskiy's Dinamo apparently fixing games,
despite the fact that these away draws which you ascribe to the Dinamo "model" raised so many eyebrows that eventually a limit on the number of draws in a season was introduced (anything over the set limit led to no points being scored for drawn matches). Why don't you mention this?

2. You position Malofeev's Dinamo Minsk as the "Sincerety" to Dinamo Kiev's "Science". Why is there no mention of Beskov's Spartak, who were reknowned for their pretty yet brittle style and who were, after all, Kiev's main rivals over a longer period of time than Minsk? Malofeev was in charge 1978-83, whereas Beskov was at Spartak 1977-88 (he also picked them up in D-2*, got them promoted and made them champions, with the team staying in the top-3 over the period of 1979-1987). I would add that I find it incredible that Prokopenko gets so much attention and there is no mention of Cherenkov!

*Spartak and Dinamo Minsk went down the same season (1976, Autumn), except Minsk were rock bottom, whereas Spartak were relegated only after a set of very interestingly consistent results in the final round of games, which caused a lot of controversy at the time. In fact, some Spartak fans still harbour bitterness towards Torpedo 30 years later for their team not even trying in Erevan.

[Guest]

Football Book Review Thread

Thanks for the info! Re - Comrade Jim - I was a bit surprised that there were no photos to back up his claims. No i know why it seems...

[pawlu]

Football Book Review Thread

Been a bit of time but here's my review of Football Dynamo. For those who want a summary: I liked it. I also did an interview with the author which can be read here

Hopes around Russia’s probabilities at the European Championships weren’t that high. True, they had Guus Hiddink, a master in getting teams to outperform expectations, but their limitations were deemed to be too much even for him to overcome. After all, they’d qualified for the championships largely because of England’s incompetence and their defeat to Croatia in the final group game.

Of course, that isn’t how it turned out to be. Russia were one of the tournament’s great entertainers – their demolition of Holland in the quarter finals was arguably the best match of the whole competition - and Andrei Arshavin emerged as the true star of the tournament.

This, coupled with Zenit St. Petersburg’s greatly undervalued UEFA Cup success – this is a side that trashed Bayern Munich to get to the final – and the continued emergence of players from the Russian league where Liverpool’s Martin Skrtel is the latest example has raised the profile of the Russian game.

Given this background, Marc Bennetts' book Football Dynamo could hardly have been better timed.

Attracted by the writing of Leo Tolstoy and other litterary greats, Bennetts decided to spend a year studying the language and culture in Moscow but has stayed there for over ten years.

Not that it was always easy. Understandably for someone in an alien culture, he was initially attracted by football, something that he could easily comprehend and feel an attachment for.

Yet rather than being simply a passing interest this has developed into a true passion for the local game and this book is the result of that.

The chapters are loosely dedicated to individual sides and, through a wide range of interviews – Oleg Romantsev is the only who he fails to talk to - coupled with his personal insight on Russian culture, Bennetts manages to convey what each club is about. He accepts the negative perceptions that outsiders may have of the Russian game but, rather than trying to put up arguments about why these views are incorrect, he tries to explain them so that they no longer seem so strange.

It is a successful approach, none more so when it comes to dealing with the subject of match fixing. For all the progress that has been registered and for all the money available to the likes of Zenit St Petersburg and CSKA Moscow, it is impossible to get round the rumours of corruption. Bennett never tries to give an answer as to whether this exists nor does he ever try give the impression that he will be in a position to do so, even though he does ask the question an awful lot.

Ultimately, he himself is trying to convince himself either way. Everywhere he goes, he is met by official denials and unofficial resignation that corruption is part of the Russian game. Yet neither view is overwhelmingly convincing leaving the read with the overwhelming sensation is that, whilst corruption might be present, this isn’t as widespread as some make it out to be.

Football Dynamo does not have too much historical depth to it which is acceptable since Bennetts has opted to focus on what has gone one since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Even so, certain mistakes – such the claim that Liverpool never faced a Soviet side: what about Dynamo Tbilisi? – should have been polished up.

Yet these are minor quibbles. Bennetts' passion and fascination for the Russian game are infectious and, coupled with his inquisitive thirst for deeper knowledge, are elements that help make this a hugely entertaining book.

[pawlu]

Football Book Review Thread

Have started reading Wilson's Pyramid book but it seems to be such a heavy read that I'm having difficulty starting off. Also want to buy When Friday Comes but it isn't on play.com yet and I don't want to pay Amazon's hyper-inflated postage rates.

Anyway, here's my review of Elephants lions and eagles:

Growing up as a football mad teenager, the weekly purchase of Guerin Sportivo was a must. The Italian magazine was cheap enough and, in any case, I could easily get the money for it off my parents with the excuse that it was helping me learn Italian.

But what made it such a must read in the eyes of a kid fed up with the banalities that proliferated what were roughly the English equivalents of Match and Shoot was the serious edge to its writing. Games were analysed in detail, arguments eloquently put forward and players from every corner of the world spoken about.

This latter insight – remember, this was the pre-internet era – always fascinated me. How much football did these guys get to watch to be able to talk with such authority about an eighteen year old in his debut season in South America? How many people did they know and how did they manage such a wide range of contacts?

Those questions remained at the back of my mind until reading Filippo Maria Ricci’s – a regular writer in Guerin Sportivo - opening chapter in his book ‘Elephants, lions and eagles’. Ricci’s opening gambit reveals that most of his early writing about African football was gleaned by visiting African embassies in Rome in the hope of gaining access to newspapers from the respective countries.

An ingenious way – even if a myth shattering one – of getting a leg up the journalistic ladder.

Ricci’s interest in Africa, however, wasn’t exclusively down to it providing him with a previously untapped niche’ but rather a genuine one. And it is around that love of African football and his regular trips to the continent to follow up stories that this book is centred.

As with any book written from such a personal perspective, you have to allow room for the author’s own idiosyncrasies. So it is here where Ricci, wittingly or not, is often guilty of name-dropping people he met on his trips, something that can be irritating if you pay too much attention to it.

I didn’t but the same cannot be said of the tactic of resorting to articles he’d written – translated, of course – about the particular subject he happens to be talking about. It smacks of laziness and an attempt to add pages to a book that is very much on the anorexic side of thin. Whatever the aim of adopting such a style was, it has passed me by.

It is disappointing because otherwise the book is hugely enjoyable. Ricci is engaging, has a very interesting story to tell ad adds insight on a continent about which very little is known.

It also suffers because of inevitable comparisons with the high standard set by other When Saturday Comes books (Morbo and Tor in particular) but, even so, - and despite other shortcomings – I don’t regret buying and in the main it was a good read.

Anyone who is still thinking about making the purchase however, would be well advised to proceed with eyes open so as to avoid being disappointed.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Hey, Pawlu, thanks for posting those!

I have finally slogged my way through James Montague's When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone, so here goes:

There are a decreasing number of places in the world that have been "done" in football literature. The US, Japan, Russia as well as most of Europe have all been treated in recent years; as has the continent of Africa (albeit less thoroughly). So the idea of a book covering football across the entire Middle East - virgin territory as far as the literature is concerned - is an enticing one.

In patches, the book is good. It covers a lot of ground - 10 countries including Israel and 2 regional championships - and does useful yeoman's work in explaining the main footbll rivalries in each country and how the rivalries do or don't correspond to local social cleavages. In a few countries, he adds some genuinely unique local touches: his examination of the role of khat in Yemeni football is very well done, for example. As a result, Montague has added a tremendous amount to the literature just by setting pen to paper.

And yet, and yet. The problem is that this is not really a book about football in the middle east, let alone any "war zones" that Montague's editor has casually equated with the middle east in such a facile and offesive manner. It is a book about James Montague careering arond the region for 12 months trying to get material for a book. Thus, the patchy coverage of countries in the book - presumably his inability to get a Saudi visa explains the glaring omission of the region's only genuine footballing power.

But more irritating is his Giles Goodhead approach to chronicling a country's football: too often, he simply jets in for the country's big derby, see things kick off (he seems to have seen more than his fair share of riot police), and jet out again. Any deeper analysis of football and culture in a single culture is sacrificed to the quick time-scale of these weekend jaunts, and he hasn't troubled himself to do a synthesis chapter that might help one make sense of how football, both local and international, has both affected and been afected by the region, it's cultures and its religions.

What's not sacrificed is any description of the good times he's had in various places. I lost count of the number of times he talked about smoking up or having pot hangovers. It may not be the best book ever written about football in exotic places, but it's almost certainly the best book ever writted about James Montague. It is a resolutely, even aggressively first-person account. Occasionally, this style works: in Syria, for instance, when he ends ends up having to face the military bureaucracy in order to cover the army's team, Al Jaish. But most of the time it's just self-indulgent.

Whoever edited this book deserves a smack upside the head for allowing (or possibly even suggesting) Montague to take this appraoch. Buried beneath the self-indulgent garbage are an awful lot of nuggets. In the hands of a wiser craftsman, these might have added up to an interesting collection of stories, linked together by a thoughtful narrative about place, culture and sport. Too often, though, this book settles for being superficial derby porn, an approach which can be exhilarating in small doses but whose attractions fade over 285 pages.

Montague's ownership of the topic of football in the Arab world, at a time when they are creating big new professional leagues (such as the UAE's, which launched last week) and buying into existing ones, means he is sitting on a gold mine of information and stories. We'll be hearing a lot more from him over the next few years: one can only hope that over time he can develop a less tourist-driven approach to the game.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Hey ho! Arrived in the mail today, via abebooks, the 1954 classic Soccer Revolution, by Willy Meisl, which if I'm not mistaken is the first english language book to look at football in continental Europe (it was published in the immediate aftermath of the famous 6-3 loss to Hungary).

On the inside cover, it talks about how the book will trace the rise of what are now (i.e. in 1954) the great football nations...Austria, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Uruguay....and Denmark (to which I give a hearty "wtf?").

Anyways, top of the pile for this one - back soon with more.

[pawlu]

Football Book Review Thread

Antonio: been reading Montague's articles on the Guardian and invariably they are very good. Either you are hard to please or else he's written well below par for his book.

Have you read "Prophet or Traitor The Jimmy Hogan story?" I've got a feeling that you'd like that.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Pawlu: Probably a bit of both.

I should say I've found his shorter articles to be good, too. But then, he doesn't aggressively insert himself into his Guardian stories the way he does in this book.

He's a good short essay writer. A 300-page book was a beyond his range.

And no, I've not read that book you mention. I'm not even entirely sure who Jimmy Hogan is, to be honest.

[Guest]

Football Book Review Thread

Hello AG...thanks for taking the time to read and review my book (the clue as to which one is in my username!). Much of it is valid criticism although I guess some is down to your preference for first person travelogues, which I gather you don't have much time for, which is fair enough. And you're right about the Saudi thing...it is virtually impossible, as a journalist to get into Saudi. I did manage to smuggle myself in using a scuba diving trip in the Red Sea as a Trojan Horse (there were a couple of angles I wanted to take, Mecca's Premier League club, where it is technically illegal to watch the team if you're not Muslim, exploring the 'football fatwas' which I touched on in the introduction, the Riyadh Jeddah rivalry...and I had arranged with Figo's agent to shadow him during his first few weeks at Al Ittihad who had signed for. As it turned out I got stuck in the middle of the Red Sea, missed all the games and Figo ended up pulling out of his contract, so it wasn't for the lack of trying!).

I do want to point out two things in my defence though. The first is that I was acutely aware of what you call 'derby porn' and tried to mix it up. So the Palestine chapter is about women's football, Qatar about money in the Gulf, Iran about its national team, Yemen about qat, Iraq about the Lion's build up to the Asian Cup, Syria about the influence of the army, Israel about the political nature of its league. I only really deal with a derby as the focul point of the chapter in Egypt and Jordan (Lebanon is more about how EVERY match is some form of derby!) Secondly, rather than jetting in for a weekend and jetting out of various cities I actually lived in the Middle East for close to three years. Some places I only visited a handful of times for obvious reasons…they are pretty dangerous places to go to. Take Iraq, for instance, where I travelled off my own back as a freelancer in the north and was embedded with the US navy in the south...Iran I was denied a visa and decided to turn up at Iman Khomenih airport without one on the off chance they might let me in...British journalists aren't exactly welcomed over there! So I followed the Iranian fans and team in the UAE and Germany for the World Cup too. Yemen is an incredibly dicey place. Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE (not to mention other places like Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman which didn't get their own chapters) I visited countless times, Israel alone I've been to close to ten times. For example the chapter on Palestine details how conditions for the women's national football team deteriorated as the Hamas Fatah split grew over three separate visits. Anyway, I hope you don’t mind me pointing this out…and thanks for the constructive criticism about everything else…it's been duly noted...thanks! James

[EIM]

Football Book Review Thread

I love it when stuff like this happens.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Good lord, this does keep happening. I once wrote a top ten list of football authors on my blog and Andrew Jennings write in to say how pissed of he was not to be in it. Which, to be honest, seemed a bit small.

Inshallah Iron (great name, btw), I think most of your points are quite fair. As Pawlu said, I'm pretty hard to please and no, I'm not an enormous fan of travelogue (others around here are, though, as we established a few pages back).

Couldn't you have gone straight into Riyadh as a tourist rather than messing about with scuba on the Red Sea? There's a massive tourism agency office right by the US embassy - they can't all be there to *prevent* tourism. The Makkah angle - yikes. That *would* have been dodgy.

Are you not still based in the Gulf? I assumed based on the UAE piece in the Guardian that you were.

Hope you stick around the board - it's a fun place.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Onwards.

So, I finished Soccer Revolution on the weekend. It is, I realise an Ur-book. So many of the tropes of modern football writing are crammed in there it's dizzying.

Meisl - the younger brother of the brilliant Hugo Meisl of Austria - wrote this book about fifteen years after he came to England and had been writing in World Sports for over a decade. He wrote it as a bitter warning to his adopted country: English football clubs are overly commericalized, insufficiently tactically minded, doesn't pay enough atention to training, and have a dangerous predilection for speed over technique (recognize anything in there?). He even makes the observation that england's no-brains-but-lots-of-battling style has an upside in that it was this spirit that allowed England to win the Second World War. Plus ca change...

The book came out in the immediate aftermath of the 6-3 and 7-1 maulings by Hungary in 1953 and 1954. Virtually every book on football history (including the recently released Inverting the Pyramid now parrots this book's observations about the era. However, Meisl actually pinpoints the ro as having visibly set in much earlier, and gives equal weight to England's dismal performance in a now more-or-less forgotten match against a FIFA rest-of-the-world XI a month before the famous Hungarian match at Wembley.

What he pinpoints is a failure of imagination in english football, a stubborn resistance to playing football in any other way than it is done in "the cradle of the game". No less than the owners, players and managers, he criticizes the British press, spending nearly an entire chapter outlining his incredulity that, having spent 3000 pounds each to travel to Brazil to watch the 1950 world cup, no british paper was willing to spend another 50 pounds to keep them on for another two weeks to watch the rest of thr tournament after England were knocked out by the Americans at Belo Horizonte. There was no point in covering the rest of the tournament after that because "there was no story in it".

This book is an attempt to get the English to understand about the world of football beyond its shores, by providing potted histories of the game in other major countries. In this way, it is a way station for a while genre of future literature that unfortunately didn't really get started until Simon Kuper kick-started it in 1996. But intriguingly, even though Meisl could have stated what he did from a position as an expert in central european football, he chose to present himself in this book as an Englishman (right on the inside cover, Meisl is described as "a naturalized Englishman", presumably believing his fellow nationals would be less likely to accept his admonitions if he was a foreigner.

The book itself, it should be said, is not especially well written. Even allowing for a slightly archaic prose style, it careens wildly from topic to topic with little rhyme nor reason. But it's influence on later thinking about footbally, tactics, training, and the placing of the english game in the context of the broader world is undeniable, and it's worth a gander just for that.

[Guest]

Football Book Review Thread

You're right...there are loads of tourist offices in Saudi Arabia. It attracts more tourists than almost anywhere else. Problem is they are all religious tourists, for hajj. No good for a non Muslim! So you have to be sponsored by a company in Saudi...and the scuba thing was away around the problem. Although I was told that the Saudi's are openeing up and I had offically recieved the first British, non-Muslim tourist visa I still needed someone's patronage.

Anyway, I'm not based in the Gulf anymore but I'm in Abu Dhabi this week. I come back to the region at least once a month to keep my hand in...do you do anything other than read?!