Top Five Sports Books

[Lewes' best seagull]

Fatty Batter - A great cricket book and also has a lot about Sussex.

 

[xenophon]

"Fly Fishing" by J.R. Hartley

 

[Carrot Cruncher]

I could Google it, but would like your pearls. What is it about? Obviously worth a read.

That it is.

The premise is a group of friends start a criket team at uni in Oxford, which they then continue with varying levels of success. After playing many touring friendlies around the country, the idea is hit upon to play a game of cricket on every continent, with all the trials of going on a cricket tour multiplied 10-fold. It is extremely funny and rings true, especially if you've been on a cricket tour.

A word of warning though, and trying not to spoil it, but do NOT read the ending of this book in an environment which could be socially awkward, unless you like crying in public - moving doesn't come close to describing it.

If you're going to Millwall and are going to be in the London Bridge area some time in the late afternoon Friday, you can borrow my copy if you like.

It's been compared to "Rain Men" by Marcus Berkmann, but I think it's unfair to do this, yes they are humourous cricket books but different in style. Marcus Berkmann is the Marcus in PSP.

 

[Stat Brother]

I too enjoyed Fatty Batter.

Of the genre I read, cycling.
Looking For Robert Millar, is a good read, but I'm biased as Millar was my favourite sportsman, for many years.
But the best cycling book, I've read is The Hour, by Michael Hutchinson.
1 man's seemingly 1/2 arsed attempt to beat Chris Boardman Hour track record.
Not just for cycling people as very funny.

Honourable mention for Gladys Protherow Football Genius, although probably somewhat dated now.

 

[CheeseRolls]

Garrincha: The Triumph and Tragedy of Brazil's Forgotten Footballing Hero

One of his legs was two inches shorter than the other. He lost his virginity to a goat, slept with hundreds of women and sired at least 14 children. When he played for the Brazilian national team in the 1950s and early 60s, he scored 34 goals and won the World Cup twice. He killed his mother-in-law in a car crash, then died of drink. His name was Garrincha, and his exploits make Paul Gascoigne look like an amateur.

 

[Glenn Murrays' hernia]

Rothmans Football League Year Book 1989-90, 1990-91, 1991-92

Team from a Town of Chimneys

Crickets Strangest Games

 

[The Merry Prankster]

Only a game by Eamon Dunphy
Ball Four by Jim Bouton (sp)

 

[BBH]

SeaBiscuit
Moneyball

Two absolutely top drawer books, which I could not reccomend more.

Others well worth a read.

Miracle of Castell di Sagro
The Blind Side
Barca

 

[Lord Bracknell]

Currently enjoying 'A year with Verona' but it would, most probably, not make my shortlist.

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.

 

[Barrel of Fun]

That it is.

The premise is a group of friends start a criket team at uni in Oxford, which they then continue with varying levels of success. After playing many touring friendlies around the country, the idea is hit upon to play a game of cricket on every continent, with all the trials of going on a cricket tour multiplied 10-fold. It is extremely funny and rings true, especially if you've been on a cricket tour.

A word of warning though, and trying not to spoil it, but do NOT read the ending of this book in an environment which could be socially awkward, unless you like crying in public - moving doesn't come close to describing it.

If you're going to Millwall and are going to be in the London Bridge area some time in the late afternoon Friday, you can borrow my copy if you like.

It's been compared to "Rain Men" by Marcus Berkmann, but I think it's unfair to do this, yes they are humourous cricket books but different in style. Marcus Berkmann is the Marcus in PSP.

A very kind offer, thanks. Despite bein a Londerner now, I am givin the game a swerve. Too tricky to get over there in good time.

I have a £50 voucher sitting in Amazon, so shall purchase the book on your recommendation. Not afraid to cry in public, but shall aim to finish the book in private.

 

[Barrel of Fun]

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.

I got given it when it came out, but never ot round to reading it. Some big names for Verona..! Chievo? Pah! There's a bomba in your pants, di baio.

 

[Tooting Gull]

I went off Tim Parks a bit after going to the first Serie A derby between Chievo and Verona. He had a big piece in the Guardian about it after, and shamefully omitted to mention the horrendous, deafening and constant racist abuse suffered by Chievo's black players which dominated the match, even though it was a classic and Verona came back to win 3-2 from 2-0 down in front of 40,000. Both were substituted. Someone had told me he was 'quite close' to the Verona hard-core (who have a very bad reputation). You were left wondering whether any mention of the racism might have affected his relationship with his new mates.

Pity, because he's written some very good books about Italian life and culture, even before the football stuff.

 

[The Large One]

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.

 

[withdeanwombat]

Please help.Old.Memory dimming.

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers won the FA Cup ?

 

[Tooting Gull]

Great review. Lovejoy reminds me of a bloke at work, and this is him to a tee.

 

[Flavor Flav]

Marcus Trescothic, coming back to me. Only if you like cricket though

 

[seagullsoverlincoln]

Feet in the clouds - Richard Askwith (at the same time about a history of fell running, a season of fell races and the authors quest to complete the Bob Graham round - 42 lakeland peaks over 74 miles and 28,500 feet of ascent in 24hrs!)

I agree,Feet in the Clouds is a brilliant book.

Football wise, Dynamo, about Dynamo Kievs match against the Germans
in WW2 was brilliant

 

[Austrian Gull]

Five that I've enjoyed:

Provided you don't kiss me (about Brian Clough)

In search of Robert Millar

The Far Corner by Harry Pearson (about football in the North East)

Tony Cascarino's autobiography

Morbo (about Spanish football)

 

[house your seagull]

Morbo (about Spanish football)

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

 

[The Spanish]

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.

I could do with watching the Martin Freeman interview again where he asks Lovejoy to name a Ramones album due to Lovejoy in his Barley-esque way having a Ramones t-shirt on. f***ing brilliant.

Books - I have just read Theatre of Silence, by Some Bloke. Quite good, with the emphasis on quite.