ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BITEBACK PUBLISHING
Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2017.
Before Pep Guardiola and before José Mourinho, there was Béla Guttmann: the first superstar football coach.
Remarkably, Guttmann was also a Holocaust survivor. Having narrowly dodged death by hiding for months in an attic near Budapest as thousands of fellow Jews in the neighbourhood were dragged off to be murdered, Guttmann later escaped from a slave labour camp. His father, sister and wider family were murdered by the Nazis.
But by 1961, as coach of Benfica, he had lifted one of football’s greatest prizes: the European Cup – a feat he repeated the following year. Rising from the death pits of Europe to become its champion in just over sixteen years, Guttmann performed the single greatest comeback in football history.
Lee Howey was inspired to write this book after reading the autobiographies of other footballers. These were household names with glory-laden careers whose exploits on the pitch will never be forgotten. Yet, despite access to such fabulous raw material, they have mostly produced bloody awful books – predictable, plodding, repetitive, self-important and just plain boring. They may have been better footballers than Howey, but he has written the most entertaining football memoir you are ever likely to read.
Not that Lee Howey’s football career is in any way undistinguished. He won the First Division Championship with his beloved Sunderland in 1996 and played in the Premier League against some of the most celebrated names in English football, including Jürgen Klinsmann, Ryan Giggs, Eric Cantona, Gianfranco Zola, Peter Schmeichel, Ian Wright, Alan Shearer and Fabrizio Ravanelli – and not always unsuccessfully. It wasn’t all assaults upon the kneecaps on wet Tuesday nights in Hartlepool (though there was plenty of that too).
This honest, thoughtful and hilarious book may not end with an unforgettable game at Wembley or a 100th England cap. However, it will amuse and delight fans of all teams in its portrait of the game of football before it disappeared up its own backside.
One of the most exciting footballers of his era, Vince Hilaire is a cult sporting figure. His career spanned over 600 games and included spells at Crystal Palace, Portsmouth, Leeds United and Stoke City, playing in every professional division.
Vince shared a dressing room with some of football’s biggest names of the time, including Kenny Sansom, Mick Channon, Gordon Strachan and Vinnie Jones, and was managed by some of the superstars of British football. This book offers a fascinating insight into the methods of these managers, from Malcolm Allison and Terry Venables, with their free-flowing football reminiscent of the famous ‘Busby Babes’, to the contrasting rigidity of Howard Wilkinson’s Leeds.
A trailblazer in the professional game, Vince outlines the difficulties he faced as a young black player making his way in football in the 1970s, and the dread he felt playing at certain grounds. Candidly detailing Vince’s journey into and out of professional football, this hugely entertaining autobiography tells the story of the beautiful game as it used to be played.
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