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My Story
by Perry Groves with John McShane
John Blake, £17.99
Reviewed by Jon Spurling
From WSC 240 February 2007 

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As Arsenal’s new age breed of teetotal, sinewy robots dazzle opponents with the speed and accuracy of their passing game, George Graham’s functional but highly successful collection of home-grown Englishmen and rising lower-league stars belong to a bygone era. In the 14 years since his departure from Highbury, Groves, a £75,000 snip from Colchester, has been granted cult-­figure status. In the (frequent) long silences at home games, the “We all live in a Perry Groves world” chant – sung to the tune of Yellow Submarine – is occasionally aired, and there are two websites dedicated to Graham’s first Arsenal signing. In recent weeks, there has been a concerted campaign by numerous Arsenal sites to ensure that Groves’ tome outsells Ashley Cole’s autobiography; a battle which is being won fairly comfortably.

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The Unknown Story of Britain’s Greatest Sportsman
by Mick Collins
Aurum Press, £14.99
Reviewed by Ian Farrell
From WSC 243 May 2007 

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Living in an age when sporting versatility means being able to answer one of Sue Barker’s tricky “away” questions, the fact that Ian Botham once had a few run-outs for Scunthorpe seems extremely impressive to me. That Denis Compton won the FA Cup with Arsenal verges on the surreal. But even Compton starts to seem hopelessly limited after reading Mick Collins’s excellent ­biography of Max Woosnam: captain of his country in both football and tennis, Olympic gold medallist, scratch golfer and Lord’s centurion. Applying the word “genius” to sportsmen is always contentious, but rarely has the term “all rounder” been better deserved.

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A Labour Of Love?
by Martin Roderick
Routledge, £22.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 244 June 2007 

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In the mid-1990s, Martin Roderick was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It spelled the end of his professional football career, but also explained why he had suffered pain and exhaustion for several years. His managers and club doctors had already decided why he was so tired. He was a lightweight, a “big time Charlie” who didn’t like playing in the lower divisions. Their solutions: various forms of verbal bullying and a couple of ibuprofen. Since leaving football, he has pursued an academic career and written a thesis based on anonymous interviews with nearly 50 professionals, as well club doctors, physios and a few agents, which explores football as work.

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A Clueless American Sportswriter Bumbles Through English Football
by Chuck Culpepper
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99
Reviewed by David Wangerin
From WSC 249 November 2007 

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The disaffected fan will readily identify with the first eight pages of Chuck Culpepper’s book, a catalogue of much that is wrong with American sport, which the Virginia-born expatriate claims left him afflicted with “Acute Sportswriter Malaise”, the product of “a 14-year career immersed in a vat of drivel, banality and corruption, especially drivel”. His conclusion – “sport sucks, but I’d hate to live without it” – could be a motto for the 21st century.

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The Autobiography

Norman Whiteside
Headline, £18.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 249 November 2007 

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It’s June 1991, and Norman Whiteside won’t get out of bed. His fearless attitude on the pitch inspired a Manchester United fanzine, The Shankhill Skinhead, but he spends his “bed-in” crying, unable to come to terms with the reality that he is finished as a footballer at 26. So begins Determined, his autobiography, and he spares readers none of the harrowing details as he traces how a series of medical decisions, made in good faith and often the standard treatment then available, had, as he puts it, “done for him” by the time he was 18. By that tender age he is unable to rotate his hips, giving him his trademark robotic-style run, has lost his pace, and has a knee in which bone grinds against bone. Chips will henceforth regularly flake off into the joint, causing excruciating pain, swelling it up to the size of a swede, necessitating further surgery. Injuries used to be discussed in macho style in football autobiographies, an inevitable consequence of a man’s game, the honourable scars of battle. The recent trend of revealing the pain, both physical and mental, of professional football is refreshing and welcome, if often difficult to read without wincing.

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