Top Five Sports Books

[Simster]

Certainly NOT in the top five sports books, but this is in the top five sports (biography) books reviews...

When Saturday Comes - The Half Decent Football Magazine - No love, no joy

No love, no joy

Helen Chamberlain’s former sidekick has celebrated leaving Soccer AM for 6.06 with a book. Taylor Parkes wants to know why anyone – anyone – thought it was a good idea to expose the presenter’s ego and prejudices across 288 smugly written pages

Soccer AM is a bad memory: hungover mornings in other people’s flats, disturbed by a crew of whooping simpletons, the slurping of pro and ex-pro rectums, cobbled-together comedy that made me long for the glory days of Skinner and Baddiel’s old shit. Yet Tim Lovejoy himself, with his fashionably receding hair and voice oddly reminiscent of Rod Hull’s, I remember only as an averagely blokey TV presenter – in fact, one of the few averagely blokey TV presenters to make me clack my tongue in irritation, rather than buff my Gurkha knife. Other than as a namesake of The Simpsons’ self-serving man of the cloth, he barely registered; just a bland, blond ringmaster in a cocky circus of crap. Almost a surprise, then, to find that his new book is not just *tedious in the extreme, it is utterly vile.

Chopped into “chapters” that barely fill a page, in a font size usually associated with books for the partially sighted, Lovejoy on Football is part autobiography, part witless musing, and one more triumph for the crass stupidity rapidly replacing culture in this country. Hopelessly banal and nauseatingly self-assured, smirkingly unfunny, it’s a £300 T-shirt, a piss-you-off ringtone, a YouTube clip of someone drinking their mate’s vomit. Its smugness is a corollary of its vacuity. I hope it makes you sick.

First, it’s clear that being Tim Lovejoy requires a very special blend of arrogance and ignorance. When he’s not listing his media achievements with a breathtaking lack of guile, he’s sneering at those “sad” enough to take an interest in football history, revealing his utter cluelessness about life outside the Premier League (in a section called “Know Your Silverware”, he refers to “League Three”) and making sundry gaffes, major and minor. He names Johan Cruyff as his all-time favourite player, then admits he’s only seen that five-second World Cup clip of the Cruyff turn. Grumbling about footballers’ musical tastes, he complains that “all you’ll hear blasting out of the team dressing room is R&B, rather than what the rest of the country is listening to” – by which he means indie bands. Everywhere there are jaw-dropping illustrations of insularity, self-*satisfaction and a startlingly small mind.

There’s something sinister here, too: beamingly positive, thrilled by wealth, too pleased with himself to ask awkward questions, Tim Lovejoy is the football fan Sepp Blatter has been waiting for. Roman *Abramovich’s darling young one. Not least for his complacency: his lack of understanding of how football works (and doesn’t work) is best illustrated in a section called “Give Your Chairman A Break”, in which he defends “that Thai bloke at Man City”, and implores us to “look at the Glazers... you would have thought they were nothing but a bunch of Americans intent on buying the club and selling off Old Trafford to Tesco judging by the howl of protests from the fans. Within two seasons though, they had won the title and built a squad the envy of Europe.” Bang your head off the wall at such unreviewable stupidity – Tim’s infantile ideas of shunning “negativity” prod him into precisely the kind of thinking that has had such hugely negative influence on the game. “Look across our national team” – he means England, by the way – “and there isn’t one player who wouldn’t walk into any side in Europe... why is it, before every tournament, we start believing we’re overrated?”

And, surprise: Lovejoy is as wretched a starfucker as could be inferred from his television shows. Everyone in football is Tim’s mate (and here we have pictures to prove it, stars looking confused in his grinning, over-familiar presence, frozen by an arm around the shoulders). He’ll “even watch the occasional game of rugby now, because I’m friends with a lot of the players like Will Greenwood, Matt Dawson, Lawrence *Dallaglio and Austin Healy”.

It’s perhaps telling that among the many anecdotes offered here, the most heartwarming (and least surprising) involves Tim getting clattered hard by Neil Ruddock in a charity game; even in this version of the story, there’s nothing to suggest Razor meant it affectionately. Still, our man is blinded by quite astonishing hubris, reprinting a photo of a banner at Anfield reading “LOVEJOY SUCKS BIG FAT COCKS” with a glee that is nothing like self-deprecation. “The hardest thing about leaving *Soccer AM,” he says regretfully, “is the thought that I might no longer be influencing the game.” True, it’ll be tough. But who knows? Perhaps the game will struggle on.

It’s not that there was ever a time when football on telly wasn’t in the hands of dimwits, poseurs and blowhards. It’s not that Lovejoy is significantly more objectionable than TV shits of ages past. The point is, in his own mind and that of the powers that be, he’s one of us. He is us. Savour that. God help us.

That really is fantastic. Does anyone rate Lovejoy? The bloke is and always has been an absolute cock.

 

[New Carpet?]

"Fly Fishing" by J.R. Hartley

Oh, and also:

The Damned United by David Peace
Playing The Moldovans At Tennis by Tony Hawks
Keane: The Autobiography by er, Roy Keane

 

[strings]

I quite enjoyed 'FA Confidential' by David Davies. Probably not one of the best sporting books ever, but certainly worth a read.

 

[Storer68]

It must be odd reading it now.

I wonder if Tim Parks has ever come to terms with the rise of Chievo? I know I haven't.

Chievo
Hellas

The Hellas Verona Tragedy
By: Francesco | May 5th, 2008
Hey Italy Offside Readers, this nice post comes from Steven of the Palermo Offside. He writes about the decline of storied club Hellas Verona.

The Hellas Verona Tragedy


I don’t know about you guys, but one of the things that sparked my interest in Calcio was Tim Parks’ book ‘A Season With Hellas Verona’. I just noticed the book in the public library of my small town, browing trough the authors that started with a P, looking for a book by Flemish author Elvis Peeters. Instead, I went home with a book about a team my father once called ‘the worst team to be a fan of’. Myself, I didn’t know a lot about Hellas, except for the fact that they went up and down divisions frequently, had a few very good young players like Camoranesi and Mutu and that Preben Elkjaer Larsen went from Lokeren, a Belgian club 15 kilometres from where I live, to Hellas and became a star. Since reading the book, I’ve always kept a soft spot for I Scaligeri. Now, five years later, Hellas are on the verge of becoming the next Pro Vercelli.

In 1985, Hellas won their first and only title. 23 years later, it’s still seen as a dubious win by the big teams. The ‘84/’85 season was the only one ever to be played with random chosen referees. Before then, referees had always been appointed by a special commission of referees (the ‘designatori arbitrali’). After the betting scandal of the early eighties it was decided to clean up the image of Italian football by picking the referees randomly instead of appointing them. Hellas won, and Samp, Torino and Inter took the other top spots. A strange result, and not to the liking of the big teams. The next season, the referees were picked by the old system again, and Juventus won. The Scudetto was Hellas’ only achievement: they lost three Coppa-finales, and never made it to the big boys. Still, people remember legends like Larsen and Hans Peter Briegel and coach Osvaldo Bagnoli.

After that, Hellas went from bad to worse. For those who haven’t read Parks’ book and want to know what happened during the 90’s and 00’s: read it! The book ends with the relegation in 2002, telling us things will get better. But they haven’t. Two years later, in the ‘03-’04 season, Hellas is fighting to keep their head above water in Serie B. The next season saw Verona battling for promotion, but last year things went from bad to worse. After ending 18th in Serie B, the Gialloblù had to play Spezia in a two-legged relegation play-off. After a 2-1 loss and a 0-0 draw, Hellas was relegated to Serie C1 for the first time in 64 years. But the disaster struck again this season. Hellas was expected to go straight back to the Cadetti, but with only one game left to play, they will have to play relegation play-offs again this year. To avoid Serie C2. A new relegation will be the end for Hellas, and will see the end of one of the most loved and hated teams in Italian football. By the end of May, we’ll know what’ll happened to the real Veronese team.

 

[thedonkeycentrehalf]

'Penguins Stopped Play' is an absolute joy.

Totally agree with this. It was recommended to me by a friend and I read it in a day during a long return train trip to Bristol for work. The book will make you laugh out loud at times (embarrassing when travelling on your own by train) and, as CC said, may also bring a tear to the eye as well. You don't need to be a cricket fan to appreciate it either.

The other book I would recommend is Dynamo by Andy Dougan about how the players of Dynamo Kiev were saved from exportation to Nazi labour camps. It's not a light read but is a good book.

 

[seagullsoverlincoln]

dynamo-Dynamo Kiev in WW2
Feet in the Clouds-one mans fell running oddesey
ultramarathon man-Dean Carnazes
Stan Bowles autobiography-can't remember name of book
black,white and Gold-Kelly Holmes

 

[Cheeky Monkey]

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer about the disastrous 1996 Everest ascent.
The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev (RIP) about the same 1996 Everest ascent.
Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

 

[Austrian Gull]

I hear that Tor! is quite the wonderful book too - anyone read it?

Have done so and it is good but Morbo was outstanding.

Oh, I've just remembered 4-iron in the soul. About a journalist caddying on the European Tour - great read.

 

[Basil Fawlty]

I loved reading The Damned United, but for me my favourite Sport book I've read was Pele.

 

[rcf0712]

All football I'm afraid, IMHO the top 5 I've read would have to be;
Build A Bonfire - a piece of history lest we ever forget
All Played Out - superb insight into England's Italia 90
The Good The Bad and The Bubbly - George Best, a rioutous read if there ever was one
Addicted - Tony Adams, as frank and therapeuticic as it gets
Fever Pitch - mainline to the heart of all footy tragics from the 70's (we know we're the best)