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    I'm just finishing The Farther Corner and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Harry Pearson relays embittered terrace humour like no one else but there's plenty of acute observation and emotional depth beyond the laughs. Nice to see a shout out to treibeis on page 296 too.

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      I'm missing treibeis . I hope that he's okay.

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        Originally posted by Gangster Octopus View Post
        I'm missing treibeis . I hope that he's okay.
        He's been online today which is a good sign. To find out when he last posted you have to subscribe, I presume he approves that or not.

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          Originally posted by Benjm View Post
          I'm just finishing The Farther Corner and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Harry Pearson relays embittered terrace humour like no one else but there's plenty of acute observation and emotional depth beyond the laughs. Nice to see a shout out to treibeis on page 296 too.
          I'm about 90 pages in an really enjoying the book. I agree about the emotional depth. One feature that I don't remember from the first book, although it has been more than a decade since I read it, is the inclusion of a lot of banter at the matches. I dig this move to help put a reader in the scene. Also, this is certainly a way to show the complexity of fandom versus merely describing that fandom.

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            Another shout out for The Farther Corner from me too. Very enjoyable read and whilst the format was the same as the first book, the content and context were subtly different (and not poorer for it either).

            Have had it on the kindle for a while and have just started Coventry City: A Club Without a Home by Simon Gilbert. Not wanting to laugh at our chums at the properly tarmac'd end of the M69, but was genuinely interested in the machinations, intrigue and plots that could have driven a club so far down, and so far away from home. Very factual, but written (so far) in an easy style which pulls no punches and am emnjoying the read, if not the fate that befell the Sky Blues.

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              Originally posted by Benjm View Post
              I'm just finishing The Farther Corner and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Harry Pearson relays embittered terrace humour like no one else but there's plenty of acute observation and emotional depth beyond the laughs. Nice to see a shout out to treibeis on page 296 too.
              https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07W3NF8...d_i=5400977031

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                HP personal life has clearly taken turn for the worse since the first book and this is reflected in the follow up. More wordly wise than fresh faced innocence for sure. Though with a gap of nearly 30 years a sense of inevitability for this is unavoidable. Thought I would miss the trips to the area League games that formed occasional interludes of first book but didnt-HP kept a running commentary throughout as to how the season was unfolding for the 3 League teams. In the case of Boro especially things have changed very little. Sunderland have somehow got worse than 1992/3 which historically was a low era anyway. NUFC like the author have lost the fresh faced innocence of that era.

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                  Sticking with WSC podcast presenters, I saw Daniel Gray's new one in Waterstones at the weekend after I'd not seen any marketing of it anywhere. Similar to his first, it's 50 more delights of modern football and I bought it, even though modern football hadn't really interested me since 27 August 2019 and it was probably 'modern football' that led to Bury's demise. I've only dipped in so far but it's very well-written as expected and much of it still resonates.

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                    Daniel Gray is a lovely writer.

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                      My review of The Farther Corner here.

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                        I heartily recommend Glen Wilson's book. Ian's review of it is essential but I can't get it to link.
                        Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 17-12-2020, 12:22.

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                          Here's the link to my review of Glen's/UP's book.

                          (You can view up to three free articles per month at Soccer America, after that it's subscription only. To US readers/soccer fans - it's very cheap, and contains far more than me pontificating once a week.)

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                            I'm enjoying 'The Turning Season' by Michael Wagg that follows the clubs from the Oberliga in 1989/90 though it's not quite the book I want abour football in the DDR. It's part travelogue part history but really just focuses on the fourteen teams from that season. The author is self effacing enough to acknowledge this and pretty much says that Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger had it right in Tor! that the story is just too fantastical to ever be told properly, but tales of the scoreboard at Brandenburg and the floodlights at Erfurt are well worth the read.



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                              Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
                              I heartily recommend Glen Wilson's book. Ian's review of it is essential but I can't get it to link.
                              As a very sporadic visitor to the books board I've only just seen this; thank you Satchmo. Very kind of you.

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                                The latest in the Magic of the FA Cup series was reviewed in the last issue of WSC (Moyes on the cover). The review is positive but I can't gauge anything about the writing style from the review. Has anyone read any of these? I can't tell if the books are a combination of stats and quotes or if there would be something more engaging happening from a writing standpoint

                                https://www.curtis-sport.com/the-magic-of-the-cup

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                                  Originally posted by Greenlander View Post
                                  tales of the scoreboard at Brandenburg and the floodlights at Erfurt are well worth the read.
                                  What are the stories here?

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                                    Originally posted by Sporting View Post

                                    What are the stories here?
                                    The scoreboard looks like the sort of thing found on county cricket grounds in Taunton or Worcester. What was once full of wires and dodgy electrics is now a big, old box populated by Herr Schmidt who has a raft of foam panels, each painted with an individual letter or number in that yellow dot style of those early electronic scoreboards. So not only for each game are the teams are meticulously spelled out in full, at the end of the day the panels are turned over to a side painted black so it looks like it has been switched off.

                                    Meanwhile the floodlight pylons are those that lean as though straining to get an uninterrupted view of the action, the type, as far as I know, that have never been a style seen in the UK. The author goes on a quest to measure the angle with a cheap protractor and ends up penning a love letter to floodlights.

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                                      I bought Paul Weller's autobiography Not Such A Bad Life, which deals with his promising career at Burnley cut short by developing colitis and Crohn's disease. He was a combative midfielder with definite quality before his struggles with illness. The book talks about sharing dressing rooms with Glen Little, Ian Wright and Paul Gascoigne, the fearsome Stan Ternent and other "characters". Since retiring he's an occasional co-commentator on Clarets Player and is one of my favourites on the mic, insightful and erudite.

                                      Unfortunately, this doesn't come across in the book. I suspect that is because it was co-written with a bloke who writes quite a few Burnley based books. Said bloke was in the WSC letters pages a while ago, complaining about a review that WSC had given him. Anyway, it's clear where Wellers voice stops and said co-authors voice starts - I got very annoyed with yet another "it was a lot harder in them days, not like the cossetted environment and dressing rooms you get now, back then the trainers would boot me up the arse as motivation, can you imagine that these days, you'd been filling in forms asking you to describe your feelings about the incident". It's clearly at odds with Weller himself who remains appreciative and supportive of the club, the staff, the town and has settled into a car dealership business.

                                      You can buy it direct from him (he's on Twitter @paulweller18) with a top-up donation to the Gary Parkinson Trust. Personally, I'd give the money direct to the Trust and buy a car from him.
                                      Last edited by Snake Plissken; 07-06-2021, 14:48.

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                                        Ok, so as my Euro 2020 reading, I decided to take on "From Partition to Solidarity: the first 100 years of Polish football" by Ryan Hubbard. Like the Polish national team, there's some good, some bad, but ultimately kind of uninspiring.

                                        The thing about national histories of football, is that you either have to tell the story of the co-evolution a nation and a footballing culture, or you have to talk about the divisions of a country as expressed through various club rivalries, conflicts etc. (Or both: see Jonathan Wilson's Angels with Dirty Faces for the apotheosis of this style). And the problem with this book is that Poland is uniquely unsuited to either approach.

                                        For the first few years, Poland is not a single country - so section 1 is really a set of parallel histories across Russia, Austria and Germany. This is actually one of the really interesting bits, with a bunch of quite interesting details about how various ethnic FAs applied for membership in FIFA just prior to WWI, and how this led to the creation of a rival Union Internationale Amateur de Football Association (UIAFA). It doesn't go into sufficient detail about this, but it;s an intriguing piece anyway.

                                        Then there comes the issue of how to weld these different groups together in the aftermath of independence, and how to create both a league structure and a national team where money was tight and travel connections between the various parts of the country are weak (I have gradually become intrigued with regional league structures in countries too big and poor to have a single national pyramid after reading about India's system in "Barefoot to Boots"). And it[s ok, I suppose, except Poland is really unremarkable in this period - no players or teams you've ever heard of, and virtually nothing on the international stage worth talking about (except maybe the home game against Hungary four days before WWII broke out, which is kind of interesting). Some interesting stuff about how ethnic germans in Silesia came to terms with Polish citizenship through football, though it's really only treated through the experiences of a couple of players rather than through the eyes of clubs and communities. This is followed by the obligatory chapter in most European football histories: "what footballers did under the Nazi occupation". Whatever.

                                        (now that I think about there's actually very little in here about Jewish clubs in inter-war Poland - maybe a reflection of how effectively the Nazis destroyed records of jewish civil society or incuriosity on the part of the author? not sure).

                                        So then you get into the Socialist period, which is kind of interesting. Again, Poland has to come to terms with losing a bunch of teams from the east and integrate a whack of new ones from the west, which surprisingly doesn;t get a lot of treatment. rather, what we get is a decade of internal club rivalries (50s and 60s), after which time the domestic league sort of gets forgotten about, and the book devolves into a series of descriptions of Polish teams (mainly Legia and Gornik) going deep in Europe on various occasions (the three-legged Gornik v. Roma tie of 1970 was interesting, but most of these are fairly tedious.

                                        And then...everything domestic disappears for awhile so the book can focus on the Golden generation of the 70s and early 80s. And I kind of get this as an editorial decision, but JESUS CHRIST IS IT FRUSTRATING TO READ. because here you have a national team pulling miracles on the pitch while having no sense of how they are able to do this despite a crap domestic league which was incapable of producing teams which could go far in Europe at the time. how did they do it? What was their secret? No idea. It;s just game re-cap after game re-cap with no synthesis or analysis of team-building or tactics or anything. It's like the exact opposite of Jonathan Wilson is writing this section.

                                        And then, after an interesting section on a couple of important moments where football matches played a role in the evolution of the Solidarity movement,,,it just ends. The transition from socialism to capitalism (usually accompanied with a westward migration of skilled players) is pretty interesting across eastern europe, but this story is pretty skimpy from 1989 onwards and essentially non-existent after 1997.

                                        Basically: the book has it moments. But not that many. And it misses a lot of opportunities. Again, insert your own metaphors here.




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                                          "Independently published", I see. There's just no getting around the need for a proper editing process.

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                                            Socialist
                                            ?

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                                              Ok, I have another: the Black Man in Brazilian Soccer, by Mario Filho.

                                              So this is supposed to be some kind of Brazilian classic, just recently translated into English. It's six chapters of about 55 pages apiece, each one more or less covering a decade from 1900 to 1960. The first four were published in the late 1940s, the last two in the early 1960s. But.

                                              1) It's not really about football in Brazil, it's about football in Rio. Sao Paolo barely gets a look-in and the rest of the country not at all. Basically it's Flu-Fla, Botafogo, America and Vasco and that's about it.

                                              2) It's not about Blacks in Football in the sense that one would use that term today. It's really a series of vignettes about Brazilian footballers over the course of 60 years, some of whom happen to be black, and the author takes pains to point out how the blacks were different and were treated differently. A modern book with the same title would probably try to situate blacks socio-demographically and trace their rise to prominence with the game. This book just tells little stories - most of which probably make a hell of a lot more sense if you are more familiar with early 20th century Rio than I am - and lets you work out the impact of race for yourself. Inductive rather than deductive, I guess.

                                              Anyways, takes a fair bit of patience to read. I think you'd have to be pretty excited about Carioca football already for this one to get the blood pumping.


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                                                Oh yeah, a few months ago I read "Who Ate All The Squid", on Korean football which was published last year. One of those "season with" books written by an English expat living in Korea, Devon Rowcliffe. Team is the Busan I'cons (formerly Daewoon Royals, now Busan iPark) and the season was 2003, when Ian Porterfield was somehow put in charge. (Why a 17-year gap between experience and publication? No idea. Deeply mystifying.)

                                                The team was not very good. The club has few fans, it's terrible on the field, and it all happened so long ago that the link to anything meaningful today is basically zero. There are the odd funny moments, and it's pretty good on what squad culture is like and how foreigners do/don't fit in. But overall it's hard to like a book with so little "hook".
                                                Last edited by Anton Gramscescu; 27-06-2021, 11:40.

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                                                  Of course, it's possible that I just don't like football books anymore.

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                                                    Originally posted by Anton Gramscescu View Post
                                                    (Why a 17-year gap between experience and publication? No idea. Deeply mystifying.)
                                                    This is very strange. My most recent football reading has been a variety of "doing the 92 in a season" or groundhopping books. Almost all were written a few decades back, so I am choosing to read out of time. But the authors are certainly linking what happened at that time so the books were current when published.

                                                    My only guess would be that the author wrote the book 17 years ago, couldn't find a publisher, sat on it, and then self-publishing took off and he decided to publish it. Or he hit some birthday milestone that had him questioning the life he has lived and felt like he needed to make his mark in the world. The publication was the end goal, so he didn't think to go back and re-write an intro or sections in the book that could link to the present or foreground why that time mattered.

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