Booked!

John Smith

Description

Booked! The Gospel According to our Football Heroes is a funny, fascinating digest of over 120 footballer autobiographies. Authors John Smith and Dan Trelfer have forensically examined the life stories of legends, hard-cases, cult heroes and one or two players they vaguely remember playing for Portsmouth - so you don't have to. Along the way, they discovered answers to questions they never knew they needed to know. Which coach has a tattoo inked by Mickey Rourke? Which maverick witnessed his gaffer murder an animal in a team talk? Yes, the revelations from this Pandora's Box may melt the reader's face, like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But they also offer an insight into the strange world that footballers inhabit, using their very own words. What drives star players apart? And what binds them together, beyond an almost universal love of Rod Stewart? Booked! investigates a unique world full of sex, booze, cash, fights, glory, bitterness, fame - and incessant, relentless banter.

Sujets

• Humour

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785314742
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2018
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
John Smith Dan Trelfer, 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978-1-78531-393-6
eBook ISBN 978-1-78531-474-2
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Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. Title Contenders
2. The Legend of Andy McDaft
3. Be Our Guest
4. Food Drink Drink
5. Celebrity
6. Hard, Harder, Hardest
7. Call the Cops
8. The Gaffer
9. Fight! Fight! Fight!
10. Banter, Tomfoolery and Hi-Jinks
11. The Man (or Woman) In Black (or Green or Yellow or Red)
12. Top Shelf
13. Why Can t We All Just Get Along?
Postscript
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Foreword
By Lee Dixon
All I can say is: it s about time. With so many autobiographies by footballers out there, it s difficult to keep up. Even with my natural curiosity about the lives of other players, I simply haven t had time to read all the books by my contemporaries, let alone those who came before me and those who came after. (I played with Paul Merson for ten years and still haven t bothered to read both of his books; sorry, Merse.) So thank goodness that John and Dan have done the legwork for us and present here the stories, opinions and best bits from well over a hundred stars of the game.
There are three things you need to know about Booked! Firstly, this has clearly been a passion project for the authors, and their love of the game and its many characters constantly shines through. Secondly, it s very, very funny, and you will laugh a lot. And thirdly, while footballers love to embellish things a little for the sake of spinning a good yarn, the stories contained within this book are authentic and enlightening, and take me back to the dressing room, the training ground and, of course, the pitch of my own playing days. I might have been there when some of this stuff happened, including Steve Bould s epic nine-dinner coach journey (you ll see), but certain parts of this book were eye-opening, even for me.
With the 2018 World Cup having been one of the best in living memory, maybe football fans are falling in love with the game all over again - and this book is a good place to start, either for the dedicated football fan who already has an in-depth knowledge of the game, or for the more casual supporter who just likes funny, interesting and occasionally outrageous stories.
It was nice to be asked to write at the front of this book, and I guarantee that by the time you reach the back of it, you will have a better understanding of some much-loved people in the game, you will have plenty of stories to share with mates and you might even have a new-found appetite for reading the books of footballers. But most of all, you will have laughed a lot. And you can t say fairer than that.
Enjoy yourselves.
Introduction
I have never taken drugs, but I would imagine that the nearest thing to a psychedelic experience must be winning the FA Cup Final at Wembley.
It begins, as all things should and must, with The Keegan.
Until the person who has both taken psychedelic drugs and won the FA Cup steps forward to either confirm or deny the above statement (we might be looking at you, Brian Kilcline), we are duty bound to take Kevin s word for it. We may have a list of other players that might potentially help with our enquiries in that area, but this book is not about speculation. Rather it s about the facts, and the first-hand accounts, and the nuggets of gold, like our opener from King Kev.
His statement is the very tip of the iceberg of profound truth, dubious wisdom, cod philosophy, eye-watering vitriol, troublesome muck-raking, wild speculation, infuriating inaccuracy, outright fibs, surprising vindictiveness and banter (oh, the endless banter) that can be found within that greatest of book genres - the footballer s autobiography.
This book is a sort of almanac of the funniest, strangest, stupidest and most brilliant things we have found in reading so many of these joyous memoirs, but it also serves as a portrait of the average footballer - and sometimes the above-average footballer.
Former (insert almost any Scottish football club outside the big ones here and it will likely work) midfielder Chic Charnley says, Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, it s absolutely bloody useless. This book takes the opposite view. We bloody love the hindsight. And not just because Charnley goes on to tell us about the time his manager genuinely murdered a living creature and threw the carcass at a player as part of a motivational team talk.
In the modern world of football, we can see too much. Our newspapers, computers and chosen mobile devices can be saturated with football, from the tiniest morsel of speculative transfer gossip, to every possible stat you could want about every player or team you could want. In an era when we can access live Turkish second-tier football at the click of a mouse, who among us has time to keep up with it all?
As we drown under an avalanche of instant information and access it s easy to forget what s truly important in this game we love - the little things. Such as:
- Stuart Pearce claiming he can recognise every one of his team-mates just by their feet.
- That time Ian Marshall frightened the medical staff at Bolton by attaching his heart monitor to his dog without telling them.
- The manager who used a glove puppet as part of his unsuccessful cup final team talk.
Moments like these could be lost to us like tears in the rain if we don t stop for a moment, take stock and indulge in a sumptuous feast of hindsight. With this in mind, your authors have read and digested well in excess of one hundred footballer autobiographies, so you don t have to. And now we re ready to excrete the very best and, naturally, the very worst bits into this critical compendium. You re welcome, society. This book contains genuine moments of
Insight:
Some people have suggested that I was able to see more than other players because my eyes are further apart than normal.
- Pel on why he was so very bloody good
Inspiration:
He was the man that gave me the courage to wear ripped jeans.
- Ashley Cole on Freddie Ljungberg
Hero-worship:
If he d have told me to stick my head in a bucket of shit I d have done it without hesitation.
- Roy McDonough on playing for Bobby Moore
And Outlandish Boasts:
Not only did we introduce button-down collar shirts into the West Riding which, until then, were unheard of, we also started the Wooly Bully dance craze too.
- Frank Worthington on him and his trend-setting mate Glyn
And that s just the content. That s before we touch upon the colourful prose. Joseph Heller once responded to being asked why he had never written anything as good as Catch-22 with a pithy Who has? We can only assume that Heller has never come across the Barry Fry autobiography chapter entitled Play-offs, promotion and ponces . And we suspect he s never soaked up the glory of a great chapter from the pen of Wally Downes called Bish, Bash, Bosh , where Downes asserts: The start of 1986 was, to put it lightly, shit. And surely we can be certain that Joseph H has definitely not sat down in his comfiest armchair to lose himself in Alan Brazil s evocative opening to There s an Awful Lot of Bubbly in Brazil :
It was the most beautiful evening you could imagine in the ski resort of Meribel. The sky was inky black, the snow was as white as a tin of Dulux paint.
Stirring stuff, we re sure you agree. Not a crisp clean sheet, not a glistening, bejewelled blanket, not a fresh page on which to write the story of your day, but a tin of white paint. Specifically, Dulux paint. Strong enough to open with, Alan? Yeah, that ll probably do.
Every footballer is as unique and wonderful as a snowflake, each with their own unusual anecdotes and strange quirks. And yet, after devouring so many of these books, we ve discovered that, in many ways, they re remarkably similar too. Regardless of the era in which they played, it seems that most footballers have been arrested, met Rod Stewart and/or witnessed the wanton destruction of shoes or socks in the name of team bonding. Managers will often be disparaged, even despised, but almost always simply because the man in question wasn t writing the name of our unreliable narrator on his team sheet every week. And we ve found that just about every footballer has some kind of anecdote involving male genitalia. Perhaps it s a natural consequence of seeing your workmates naked every day, we re not really sure, but footballers genuinely do have a thing about their winkles and balls.
As time goes on, the footballer autobiography may become a lost art form. Current and future players will be earning enough money on a weekly basis to swim in it like Scrooge McDuck, so may decide they have no need to spill their guts in the hope of selling a few books and boosting the pension pot. Instead, they may choose to keep their thoughts and feelings private, meaning we may never know what makes the likes of Ruben Loftus-Cheek tick.
Players are more guarded now, and why wouldn t they be? Their every move off the pitch is documented by tabloid journalists for their papers and websites, or by Citizen Media with their arsenal of iPhones who are waiti