The Glory Game (Mainstream Sport)

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I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic is different. The Manchester United striker revels in his role as pantomime anti-hero, but goes deeper than mere Marmite pastiche. The searing honesty of how his relationship with Pep Guardiola disintegrated at Barcelona– which notably details how fragile that seemingly unshakable ego can actually be – is refreshing, as is how an unforgiving upbringing spending time between an overworked cleaner mother and indifferent alcoholic father shaped everything that followed. Whitehead, Richard (10 November 2003). "Writes of passage". The Times. London . Retrieved 4 May 2010. (subscription required) Davies has stated that the first football team he supported was Queen of the South, when he lived in Dumfries. [1] After moving to Carlisle aged 11, he adopted English Football League club Carlisle United. [11]

Glory Game: Year in the Life of Tottenham Hotspur The Glory Game: Year in the Life of Tottenham Hotspur

Davies’ 1972 book offered incredible insight of life at a football club as he was granted unprecedented access to Tottenham Hotspur’s 1971-72 as they went on to win that season’s UEFA Cup and challenging at the sharp end domestically. I’d originally been told that as a club, Spurs would be completely unapproachable, and that Nicholson would be dour and difficult,” recalled Davies. “He was completely cooperative though, and when I informed the players that I would keep 50% of the royalties and split the other half equally between them, they were happy too. It wasn’t a huge amount of money though!”

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Armitstead, Claire (8 February 2016). "Margaret Forster, award-winning author, dies at 77". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 18 January 2017. Davies has also written a biography of the fell walker Alfred Wainwright, and many works about the topography and history of the Lake District. Something unexpectedly nice about the book is that there are no photographs. At the time it was written, most readers, especially Spurs fans, would have known what the players looked like. Now you realize them on a different and deeper level, as humans rather than an image. Through Hunter Davies’ descriptions, for example of Martin Chivers popping the plate with his front teeth out before games, you draw the characters in your own mind. Journalist Davies spent an entire season with the team, training with them, visiting the players’ homes and witnessing the dressing-room confrontations – a luxury that seems so alien in modern-day football’s PR-managed world. Ken Loach might have turned all this into a powerful social film, but the avuncular Davies sprinkles in so many cheery anecdotes that the book bounces along enjoyably ' ( Sunday Times ) - Praise for VOLUME 1: THE CO-OP'S GOT BANANAS!

Glory Game - Penguin Books UK The Glory Game - Penguin Books UK

The scope of the book is not only restricted to what goes on within the club. The fans feature heavily, with hooliganism starting to rear its head and with the author being in amongst it, there are some vivid tales of the aggro that used to regularly take place on the terraces and the lads who perpetrated it are all wrapped in as part of the match-day experience. He writes a football column for the New Statesman. [7] A compilation of these articles was released as a book, The Fan, in 2005 by Pomona Press. Davies writes "Confessions of a Collector" in The Guardian's Weekend colour magazine. [8] He has written a book about his collections with the same title.

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Books on the business of football can be unreadably dry, but The Beautiful Game? is passionate and bleakly humorous. Quite aside from the depth of the research, what sets Conn’s book above Tom Bower’s Broken Dreams, a mystifying winner of the William Hill’s Sports Book of the Year Award in 2003, is the sense that he really cares. Broken Dreams was riddled with errors, both of fact and of spirit; Conn, simply by noting, for instance, that fans know intuitively why Notts County matter, taps into a depth of tradition of which Bower has no grasp. Bower just says football is in a very bad way; Conn tells us why it is worth putting right. Jonathan Wilson Football life in 1972 is light years away from the current game. The salaries are nowhere near comparable, the lives from this day and age being regarded as fairly average, training facilities that would be regarded as primitive now and the only surprising contrast to today was after an FA Cup defeat at Leeds, when the team return to London by train and encounter some Spurs fans. Expecting to be on the end of their anger at having lost, they receive positive support despite the cup run being ended. McDonagh, Melanie (12 February 2016). "Hunter Davies: 'As long as I live she'll be with me' ". London Evening Standard . Retrieved 18 January 2017. Davies joined the sixth form at Carlisle Grammar School and was awarded a place at University College, Durham to read for an honours degree in History, but after his first year he switched to a general arts course. He gained his first writing experience as a student, contributing to the university newspaper, Palatinate, where one of his fellow student journalists was the future fashion writer Colin McDowell. After completing his degree course he stayed on at Durham for another year to gain a teaching diploma and avoid National Service.

Glory Game by Hunter Davies - AbeBooks Glory Game by Hunter Davies - AbeBooks

I was hoping for a bit more on his time with the Beatles and the 1960s more generally. Hunter touches on these areas but as he has written so many books, and newspaper columns, and done many other interesting things, he doesn't dwell on anything for long. The only subject that gets extensively covered is his life with Margaret. There is no way that a writer these days could possibly do what I did in The Glory Game,” explains Hunter Davies. “He or she wouldn’t be able to get past the minefield of agents, lawyers and officials.” The exposure of the dreadful state of English social attitudes; whether it be about gender roles or sexuality or race relations. This tells of a white male only world that was becoming at odds with the progressive and inclusive world that was over-taking it. There are numerous cringe-worthy sections and several that would have been indefensible even in the dark ages of 1971. Davies, Hunter (20 July 2016). "Hunter Davies: After Margaret died, I had to sell our family home". The Daily Telegraph. London . Retrieved 16 December 2018. Davies, Hunter (17 April 2008). "Modern fitba, eh?". New Statesman. London . Retrieved 20 November 2013.a b c Davies, Hunter (28 June 2007). The Beatles, Football and Me. Headline Book Publishing. ISBN 978-0755314034. And to celebrate the 50th anniversary since The Glory Game came out, Well Offside photographer Mark Leech delves into the Offside Sports Photography Archive to dig out the pictures taken for the book.

The 50 Best Football Books Ever: 30-21 | FourFourTwo The 50 Best Football Books Ever: 30-21 | FourFourTwo

The format. A season makes for a good story. The opportunity to explore different aspects of the club and the characters therein. You get to know people and care a little about them in human terms. I've enjoyed a few books that have taken this approach and this challenges my favourite which up until now has been I Lost My Heart to the Belles by Pete Davies where Davies once again showed himself to be a generation ahead of his time.When the first edition of The Glory Game was published in 1972, it was instantly hailed as the most insightful book about the life of a football club ever published. Hunter Davies was, and still is, the only author ever to be allowed into the inner sanctum of a top-level football team (Tottenham Hotspur) and his pen spared nothing and no one. 'His accuracy is sufficiently uncanny to be embarrassing, ' wrote Bob Wilson in the New Statesman. 'Brilliant, vicious, unmerciful, ' wrote The Sun. One review on here complains that it should be about a team that was very successful and suggests Manchester United. Apart from the historical facts being against this, (United were in a dreadful slump during this period) the glory in the title is glory that is aspired to not necessarily enjoyed. Tottenham seem to me to have been an excellent choice if the aim was to capture the essence of early seventies English football. But, this was fortuitous. Hunter Davies was looking to the present for his readership and was as surprised as anyone when the book kept selling. It is still very much worth the read if you can remember the players. I think it is probably worth the read if you don't. Davies, Hunter (9 November 2003). "Posher than Hampstead?". The Sunday Times. London. (subscription required)