Remember Sergio Aguero's late goal to win the title for Man City? Or, best of all, Geoff Hurst's hat-trick wining the World Cup for England in 1966? Over half a century, Match of the Day has witnessed some of the greatest moments in football history, week in, week out. From the big shorts and brown leather balls of the Stanley Matthews era, through the classic tussles of the old First Division, right up to the glamour of the globe-spanning game that we know today, football has undergone an incredible journey - and now, in this milestone 50th year, Match of the Day celebrates the very best of the drama and the heartache. With evocative memorabilia and photography throughout, relive the story of the beautiful game, season-by-season. Featuring favourite Match of the Day memories from top players and long-standing members of the MOTD team, this is the ultimate collection of football memories for any fan.
'A brilliant take on the modern game - Robbie tells it like it is' Rio Ferdinand Robbie Savage is one of Britain's most recognisable football pundits. Incisive, forthright and bold, Savage never holds back where the beautiful game is concerned. No Premier League footballer has ever divided opinion quite like Robbie Savage. Mr Marmite, as he was often known (among other things), rampaged his way through almost 350 games in the Premier League and along the way picked up more yellow cards than Gary Lineker has crisps and more enemies than Joey Barton and Neil Warnock put together. In his explosive new book, I'll Tell You What..., Savage lifts the lid on all aspects of the modern game. Managers, players, the Premiership, the European game, the FA Cup, kids' football, and pushy football parents are just a few of the topics that Savage takes on in his inimitable provocative style. Robbie tells us why: * Brian Clough, not Sir Alex Ferguson, is the best Manager the world has ever known · * As a player, he would have complimented any one of Jose Mourinho's teams · · * Vanity should not be confused with 'Good Grooming' · * You simply can't knock on Mark Hughes' door and invite him for a game of golf - even if he invites you · * Drinking wine does not win you football matches · Coaching badges are ridiculous · * He could never become a manager. Or could he? · * Football is easy · * Good manners should come before diamond earrings · * The League Cup has the edge over the FA Cup Robbie Savage's straight-talking common sense is only the start of it. I'll Tell You What is a modern-day guide to life, and should be read by anyone who has an interest in anything at all, especially football. Few may actually agree with him, but everyone listens.
Brighton & Hove Albion: On This Day chronicles, in diary form, the major events in the British football club's history. With individual entries for every day, and multiple listings for more historic and busier days, the book includes all the club’s big matches, cup finals, significant events, and sensational signings—and is fully endorsed by the club.
Millwall FC, founded in Victorian times, have a tremendous history to delve into. This book will provide you with all you want to know about the Lions, and some stuff you don't... The Millwall Miscellany is a book on the Lions like no other, packed with facts, stats, trivia, stories and legends. Featured here are loads of stories about the club from 1885 to the present day. Here you will find player feats, individual records and plenty of weird and wonderful tales, quotes ranging from the profound to the downright bizarre and cult heroes from yesteryear – a book no true Millwall fan should be without.
How would you feel if your football club was bought by a businessman who saw your ground as real estate? And what if your ground was demolished leaving you with nowhere to play next season? Many fans believe that when Bill Archer, a Blackburn-based entrepreneur, bought Brighton and Hove Albion, he had no passion for the club or the game but rather saw an opportunity to make a profit. If so, he made the fatal mistake of misjudging football fans. In July 1995, Brighton's local daily paper led its front page with the headline 'Seagulls Migrate', announcing that the Goldstone Ground was to be sold to a property developer for £7.4 million and that 'home' games were to be played at Portsmouth. All this without one word of consultation with the fans. What followed was the biggest campaign in the history of football to save a club. Drawing on dozens of interviews with people directly involved - the fans, the FA, the players and the management - Build a Bonfire dramatically traces the progress of the two-year fight with the board: two years of despair, absurdity and solidarity. In so doing, the book not only explores implications for other clubs, in a world where the battle lines between football and money are being drawn ever tighter, but also creates a picture of that strange and wonderful thing: the football fan. And having lived through the crisis and listened to the fans, the authors can offer their Ten Essential Steps to Depose your Club Chairman, should the need arise . . .
A father-daughter story that tells of the author’s experience growing up in a separatist fundamentalist Christian cult, from the author of the national bestseller Ghostwalk Rebecca Stott grew up in in Brighton, England, as a fourth-generation member of the Exclusive Brethren, a cult that believed the world is ruled by Satan. In this closed community, books that didn’t conform to the sect’s rules were banned, women were subservient to men and were made to dress modestly and cover their heads, and those who disobeyed the rules were punished and shamed. Yet Rebecca’s father, Roger Stott, a high-ranking Brethren minister, was a man of contradictions: he preached that the Brethren should shun the outside world, yet he kept a radio in the trunk of his car and hid copies of Yeats and Shakespeare behind the Brethren ministries. Years later, when the Stotts broke with the Brethren after a scandal involving the cult’s leader, Roger became an actor, filmmaker, and compulsive gambler who left the family penniless and ended up in jail. A curious child, Rebecca spent her insular childhood asking questions about the world and trying to glean the answers from forbidden library books. Only when she was an adult and her father was dying of cancer did she begin to understand all that had occurred during those harrowing years. It was then that Roger Stott handed her the memoir he had begun writing about the period leading up to what he referred to as the traumatic “Nazi decade,” the years in the 1960s in which he and other Brethren leaders enforced coercive codes of behavior that led to the breaking apart of families, the shunning of members, even suicides. Now he was trying to examine that time, and his complicity in it, and he asked Rebecca to write about it, to expose all that was kept hidden. In the Days of Rain is Rebecca Stott’s attempt to make sense of her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, to understand her father’s role in the cult and in the breaking apart of her family, and to come to be at peace with her relationship with a larger-than-life figure whose faults were matched by a passion for life, a thirst for knowledge, and a love of literature and beauty. A father-daughter story as well as a memoir of growing up in a closed-off community and then finding a way out of it, this is an inspiring and beautiful account of the bonds of family and the power of self-invention. Praise for In the Days of Rain “A marvelous, strange, terrifying book, somehow finding words both for the intensity of a childhood locked in a tyrannical secret world, and for the lifelong aftershocks of being liberated from it.”—Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill “Writers are forged in strange fires, but none stranger than Rebecca Stott’s. By rights, her memoir of her father and her early childhood inside a closed fundamentalist sect obsessed by the Rapture ought to be a horror story. But while the historian in her is merciless in exposing the cruelties and corruption involved, Rebecca the child also lights up the book, existing in a world of vivid play, dreams, even nightmares, so passionate and imaginative that it helps explain how she survived, and—even more miraculous—found the compassion and understanding to do justice to the story of her father and the painful family life he created.”—Sarah Dunant, author of The Birth of Venus
This biography of Dixie McNeil captures the genius of the football legend who shot to prominence in the 1970s. He was instrumental in helping Hereford Utd and Wrexham FC to reach the second tier of the English league for the first time in their histories. Dixie played in an era long before the big football salaries came into being.
When unsolved crimes resurface, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace faces a possible copycat killing in Dead Like You, by award winning crime author Peter James. The Metropole Hotel, Brighton. After a heady New Year's Eve ball, a woman is attacked as she returns to her room. A week later, another woman is assaulted. Both victims' shoes are taken by the offender . . . Roy Grace soon realizes that these new cases bear remarkable similarities to an unsolved series of crimes in the city back in 1997. Dubbed 'Shoe Man', the perpetrator was believed to have attacked five women before murdering his sixth victim and vanishing. Could this be a copycat, or has Shoe Man resurfaced? When more women are assaulted, Grace and his team find themselves in a desperate race against the clock to identify and save the life of the new sixth victim . . . Although the Roy Grace novels can be read in any order, Dead Like You is the sixth gripping title in the bestselling series. Enjoy more of the Brighton detective’s investigations with Dead Man's Grip and Not Dead Yet. Now a major ITV series, Grace, starring John Simm.
A time-travelling, genealogical adventure, bringing pre-industrial, rural, eighteenth-century England vividly to life on the page. One day Ian Marchant, acclaimed author of books on music, railways and pubs, decided, as all men of a certain age must, to have a dig around his family history. Surprisingly quickly, a web search informed him that his seven-times-great great-grandfather, Thomas Marchant had left a detailed diary from 1714 to 1728. So far, so jolly ... Life-loving diarist Thom - who liked a drink and a game of cards - feels recognisably Marchant to Ian. With fascinating detail we learn about Thom's family farm and fishponds; about dung, horses and mud; about beer, the wife's nights out, his own job troubles and their shared worries for their children. But as Ian digs deeper beyond the Sussex diary's bucolic portrait he discovers a subtext - a family descended from immigrants, with anti-establishment politics, who are struggling with illness, political instability and cash crises - just as their country does three centuries on. 'When I was reflecting late one January evening on the differences between Thom and me, I realised the unbridgeable thing that comes between us is industrialisation. He lived right at its beginning, while I am living somewhere towards its end. Old Thom Marchant was one of the last people before industrialisation to understand how his world worked - and how to be largely self-sufficient in it. He knew where his food came from, his fuel, his water, his clothes. He knew how the welfare system worked, and was part of its administration; he knew who looked after the roads, too. He collected taxes. He was not separate from the system, but part of it.' Rich with immersive detail, One Fine Day draws a living portrait of Marchant family life in the 1720s and how their England (rainy, muddy, politically turbulent, illness-ridden) became the England of the 2020s. 'Elegiac, consistently funny, deeply moving.' - Richard Beard 'Ian Marchant is one of England's most original writers. One Fine Day is a masterwork.' - Monique Roffey
