The Puffin Book of Football (Puffin Books)

BRIAN GLANVILLE

Sports & Outdoors

Puffin Books

The Puffin Book of the World Cup (Puffin Books)

Literature & Fiction

'The best book on football ever written'. No, that is not some copy-writer's hyperbole, it is the judgement of Franz Beckenbauer, winner of the World Cup as both player and manager.In Football Memories, Brian Glanville himself writes, 'The central character, Garry, was a Scottish inside-forward based on Danny Blanchflower. This, largely because the footballer had to be untypically intelligent and aware, as well as an accomplished performer. Danny, so fluent, so original, and in certain ways so flawed, seemed an ideal model. Yet he, or his surrogate, could not carry the whole book. I used various voices. His wife's. My own.'From J. B. Priestley's pre-publication endorsement - 'I enjoyed this highly original novel' - praise has been constant:'This is a brilliant novel. Any footballer can see a little of himself in Gerry Logan, as I did when I first read it. The book tells what the pressures are like in the game, the temptations to which successful players are exposed and yet the human qualities tell us much about society and human nature in general.' Derek Dougan'The best novel on soccer I have ever read.' Daily Herald'Soars into first class fiction.' The Spectator'An acid fable of our age, solid with expertise about football and its seamier secrets.' Daily Mail 'The whole world of big time soccer, with its glamour and bitter feuds, made very real.' Sunday Telegraph

The Rise Of Gerry Logan

Literary

Hodder Paperbacks

Goalkeepers are Crazy and Other Football Stories

Queen Anne Press

Soccer: a panorama

TBS The Book Service Ltd

Len Rawlings was the greatest goal-keeper of his time, but that was long ago. In The Dying of the Light we see a great footballer in sad decline living in wretched obscurity in a Croydon semi-detached. Rejected by his son, he still lives with his wife. Although loyal, she is bewildered and ineffectual. It falls to his school-teacher daughter, Jenny, to be his support. Defying him in childhood, she now feels his plight seeing him as a man who has been cruelly exploited, encouraged to 'live his life backwards', a man off whose heroics other people once fed their fantasies, and who has been cast aside now he can longer fulfil them. It is Jenny too who cannot bear to see him slipping ignominiously into disgrace, misery and ultimately death, she who wants him to make one final clarion protest against 'the dying of the light'.Though father and daughter they could scarcely be more dissimilar, and their joint narration of the story gives it a strange polarity, an unusual tension. For Jenny, professional football is something trivial, peripheral and adolescent. For Len, it is quite simply his life.

The dying of the light

Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.

Soccer: A History of the Game, Its Players, and Its Strategy.

Crown Publishing Group

The Story of the World Cup: The Essential Companion to Germany 2006

Football (American)

Faber and Faber

This is the dramatic and controversial history of the world's leading tournament. Brian Glanville's classic account is a celebration of the great players and matches from Uruguay in 1930 to Germany in 2006 - and a bold attack on all those who have mismanaged the 'beautiful game'.

The Story of the World Cup: The Essential Companion to South Africa 2010

Faber&Faber

The Sunday Times history of the World Cup;

HarperCollins Distribution Services

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Books by BRIAN GLANVILLE