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Featured Categories : Sports, Hobbies & Games : Football : World Football
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"In hindsight it seems natural that (they) should have arrived in our living room the year after the first moon landing. They were, after Apollo11, the second great event of the new telecultural age."Garry Jenkins journey in search of Pelé and the 1970 Brazilians began when he was a 12 year old, living in a small village in West Wales, and dazzled by the images on his television.
The Mexico World Cup was the first to be widely broadcast in colour and multi-racial Brazil, brilliant in gold and blue against the bleached turf, embraced the new palette as if it had been created for them.
World Cup winners define successive epochs in the game and the way it is won. The casual brilliance of the Brazilians was the fullest expression to date of everything that is beautiful about the sport.
Jenkins meets the surviving titans and finds unexpected answers to the questions of how they came to play the way they did and why the world has waited in vain for the Brazilians to show us again the summits that can be reached by 11 men and a football.
Following their progress from ignominious defeat in the 1966 tournament to the legendary dismissal of Italy and the rest of the world four years later, Jenkins vividly recreates the games themselves, but it is the stories from off the pitch that make this a uniquely entertaining portrait.
This thoughtfully crafted work is infinitely richer than the usual, breathless homages to the team. A definitive tribute to the definitive 11. --Alex Hankin
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This is the story of how Glenn Hoddle coached England to defeat in two of their four matches in France 98, and thus failed in his efforts to lead the country to World Cup triumph. Though to read Hoddle's unrepentant assessment of his decision making and approach, you might initially be fooled into thinking that England actually won the thing, until we eventually get round to David Batty's missed penalty and sad reality is again restored. Hoddle, as he must be in his position, is a stubborn and talented man who is utterly certain of his own mind. This is fine when you're winning but, as ever in football, when you lose it's not enough to say that you should have won. All that matters is the final score and so, for instance, Hoddle's cruel disclosure of Paul Gascoigne's response to being left out of the squad or his trust in faith healer Eileen Drewery now sound just embarrassing, while if he'd pulled it off they might seem like strategic masterstrokes. But at least in this book you get Hoddle's side of the story absolutely straight. Sporting biographies are the home of the dilute and the banal but here what you see is what you get and the reader can judge Hoddle accordingly. So start judging! --Nick Wroe
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Think you've read it all when it comes to football? This book will certainly provide a new angle.When one thinks of footballers plying their trade on foreign shores, rarely does Japan come to mind. Serie A in Italy, or Spain's Primera Liga, maybe, but the J-League? An ageing Gary Linker apart, most fans would struggle to name any European or South American footballing luminaries who have packed their boots and headed to the Far East.
Yet the surprise uncovered by Ultra Nippon is that there are many from football's first world earning a living in the J-League, playing, coaching and even refereeing.
Adding himself to the western contingent hooked up with the fortunes of the Japanese game, Jonathan Burchill has come up with a story which provides the ultimate contrast to standard football fare. For starters, you don't get teams called Grampus Eight, Shimizu S-Pulse, and Kyoto Purple Sanga just anywhere. And that's not the only contrast.
Birchall's odyssey takes in samba bands and giant parrots in a football world devoid of hooliganism. Organised dancing, not fighting, is clearly all the rage at Japanese grounds, and as the story unfolds the effect that Japan's national history, and culture and characteristics have had on the integration of the game become clear.
For much of the last few decades, the Western world has looked East with astonishment, at achievements economic and technological. In the football world, the pattern is different. Japan, with little confidence, looks West for its lead on the pitch, even if everything else surrounding the game seems from another world. Such a culture of deference appears to run right through the Japanese game.
Its influence has provided a bizarre canvas on which the author has painted a fine picture, making essential reading for the thinkers in the football fraternity. Planet football could and can easily be very different.
For any fan thinking otherwise, this should be compulsory reading. --Trevor Crowe