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England, the English and Euro 96
by Michael Gibbons
Pitch Publishing, £12.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 352 June 2016

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It’s now 20 years since Euro 96, a relentlessly mediocre, often sparsely attended tournament won by an unexceptional Germany team that stumbled over the line carrying a busload of walking wounded. Realistically, it should be best forgotten. Yet, oddly, it continues to exert a strong hold over English football’s folk memory. Not because of the standard of play, or because England achieved anything beyond a restoration of respectability, but… just because. For better or worse, its name has come to evoke an unrepeatable moment in time.

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Uli Hesse on the fraught play-offs to reach the Second Bundesliga in 1991

4 June ~ Twenty-five years ago Hansa Rostock won the last-ever East German cup final, but that wasn’t the end of football in the GDR. After the German reunification, East German teams were distributed into the West German league pyramid. When the Bundesliga was formed in 1963 the clubs were admitted base on a ranking calculated over the previous 12 years, yet for the teams in the GDR’s Oberliga, it came down to how they performed over just one season.

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by Elmar Neveling
Ebury Press, £12.99
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 351 May 2016

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Attempting to write a biography of someone with an ongoing career means that your work is never quite done. As a contributor to DFB Bundesliga magazine, Elmar Neveling has been well placed to chart the rise of Jürgen Klopp over the past decade. A book published in Germany in 2011 Echte Liebe (Real Love) brought Klopp’s achievements with Borussia Dortmund into some kind of focus, but landed between back-to-back Bundesliga titles. A new version, published four years later, was able to evaluate his achievements (including the German double and reaching a Champions League final) from a better perspective. Klopp’s decision to cut short his post-Dortmund sabbatical has now necessitated an extra chapter in this English version of the book, probably earlier than Neveling anticipated, to cover the start of his Liverpool tenure.

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How Bury triumphed 
in British football’s worst year
by James Bentley
SilverWood Books, £14.99
Reviewed by Charles Morris
From WSC 350 April 2016

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The story of how a hard-up Fourth Division club succeeded against the odds and won promotion in 1984-85 using just 15 players has immediate appeal to fans of smaller clubs. The underdog theme also chimes with the present, as Leicester, Bournemouth and Burton confound expectations this season. The tale’s backdrop is compelling, too, because 1984-85 was a nadir for British football, a period besmirched by appalling hooliganism and the tragedies of the Bradford fire and the Heysel stadium.

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by Philip Kerr
Head of Zeus, £7.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 348 February 2016

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Fiction with a sporting setting is notoriously variable in quality. Binary win-lose outcomes reduce the scope for ambiguity and authors may either be poor writers or under-informed. Philip Kerr sidesteps all of these traps with ease. His fictional club, London City, provides the context for crime rather than a narrative end in itself.

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