Search: 'laws'

A quest to reclaim the soul of football by leading the world's ultimate underdogs to glory
by Paul Watson
Profile Books, £12.99
Reviewed by Nick Dorrington
From WSC 303 May 2012

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"Pohnpei," read the Wikipedia article, "have never registered a win." That sentence alone was enough to pique the interest of frustrated football writer Paul Watson, who was sick of regurgitating news and writing profiles of players he had barely heard of. Searching for a national team bad enough to give them a chance of earning an international cap, he and flatmate Matt Conrad stumbled across Pohnpei, a tiny island in the Pacific ocean whose football team seemed to fit the bill.

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My Autobiography
by John Robertson
Mainstream, £17.99
Reviewed by Geoff Wallis
From WSC 298 December 2011

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In his preface to WH Davies's The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, first published in 1908, George Bernard Shaw revealed that he did not know whether to describe its Welsh subject as "a lucky man or an unlucky one". A century later this autobiography by the self-styled "chubby little lad from Uddingston" insists that luck played a major role in his sporting career, albeit luck offset by life-changing misfortunes in his personal life – his first daughter was born with cerebral palsy and died at a young age, and his elder brother was killed in a car crash in 1979.

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The Tragedy of Robert Enke
by Ronald Reng
Yellow Jersey Press, £16.99
Reviewed by Mike Ticher
From WSC 297 November 2011

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Considering young men are a group at high risk of suicide, the number of active footballers who have taken their own lives is surprisingly small. Dave Clement, Alan Davies and Justin Fashanu are perhaps the best known in Britain, all in their declining football years. That makes Robert Enke a rarity among rarities: the Hannover 96 goalkeeper was at his peak, in a season that should have led to the World Cup, when he walked in front of a train in November 2009.

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Growing Up Fast
by Theo Walcott
Bantam Press, £18.99
Reviewed by Cameron Carter
From WSC 297 November 2011

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This is not a life of peaks and troughs. There are no regrets, no fatal flaws, no falls from grace – just a rapid rise to the top by a polite young man from Newbury. Theo Walcott's story is an incredible one, but only from one angle: his youth.

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Success and Failure at Burnley FC
by Dave Thomas
Vertical Editions, £12.99
Reviewed by Alan Tomlinson
From WSC 294 August 2011

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When Burnley drew Bolton Wanderers in the Carling Cup the season after their Premier League campaign, all was in place for a morality play as much as a football match. Owen Coyle, the Bolton manager, had walked out on Burnley in the middle of their first year back in English football's top tier for 33 years. Burnley tumbled down the league table, Bolton survived and Coyle was labelled Judas by inconsolable Burnley fans.

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