I got this book as part of a football book box set last Christmas and hadn’t quite got round to reading it but once I started, I couldn’t out it down. The ‘66 World Cup happened before I was born but as an England fan I always had great affection for the little man that ‘ran himself daft’ that day.
This book got right into the detail of both the playing and managerial side of the game and the injustice of how heartless football clubs can operate. Obviously we only have Ball’s side of the story but such is the cynicism in the game I’m not entirely surprised to read about how it was, and is, being run.
I think what got me was the total lack of respect for someone, one of only 11 who have won football’s greatest prize, was treated at times. I was shaken to read that a 10 year old boy had spat him while he was manager at Stoke and how he was made to carry the can for the farce that was Manchester City in the late 90s.
On the family side there is the moving tributes to his wife, Lesley, who died of cancer and for his family and friends. I think what particularly hit home for me personally was that her death followed a not dissimilar pattern of my mother’s some five years later.
Alan Ball died two years after this book was written but reading it he seemed so alive that he must still be around somewhere. I remembering him playing for Southampton and always noted his managerial progress because of the England connection so when he died of a heart attack in 2007 I felt I’d lost a relative too. By a quirk of fate his funeral was two years to the day before my mother died.
I may have made this review a bit more personal to me but if you are a football fan then this is a must read. In a way, despite the problems he encounted along the way, he saw the golden age of football from the sixties until it began to eat itself with the money men of the Premier League.

The 1980s pop group, Frankie goes to Hollywood, are back in the public eye with a remix of their classic track, Relax, and a new Best of collection called Frankie Say Greatest.
McLAREN – ALL

So it was true. 
I’ve never known another time in my life when an air of depression seems to permeate every waking moment. Don’t get me wrong I’m contemplating anything untoward but it’s ever more difficult to shake off the gloom and despondency that attaches itself to what we do on a day-to-day basis.
I’m from an era when doing the League and FA Cup double was considered virtually impossible. Spurs did it for the first time in 70 years in 1961 and Arsenal did it again in 1971. By the time Liverpool did it in 1986 I was 17 and hardly anyone had won more than two trophies (if you count Europe) for a century. Unfortunately we have phrases like ‘double double’ and ‘treble double’ now so ‘treble treble’ is on the cards.
I overheard a weird conversation on the bus yesterday. There were two lads of a school leaving age talking about school and education generally. One said he was going to go to university and the other couldn’t understand why.
So here’s an overview of last night’s web traffic experiment…
This blog is not a high traffic blog but it doesn’t do bad largely due down to three posts associated with self-help guru Tony Robbins. One is a
In a quick scan of some old football statistics I noted that a few great players had faced each other at the opposite ends of their lengthy careers. This set me thinking about how far back you go with a minimum number of individuals. Of the current set of Premier League players Ryan Giggs is one of the more celebrated and is approaching 18 years at the very top of the game. Mental recollection told me that Peter Shilton would’ve appeared in one Giggs early matches and as he had made his debut in the 60s I knew Sir Stanley Matthews would have come into the equation too.

