For the love of the beautiful game

Oct 24 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Do we need another book about football? Yes, if it’s by ace scribe Hunter Davies and is especially for boys – and girls – of all ages. Peter Elson reports

YOU don’t need a psychology degree to discern writer Hunter Davies’s interests when his biography was called The Beatles, Football and Me.

As the Fab Four’s first official biographer way back in 1967, he spawned a worldwide industry in Beatleology, but these days seems to be happier focusing on his other great love, football.

Again, this is an area with which he’s had a long and successful literary association, not least with his 1972 seminal book, The Glory Game, which charted Tottenham Hotspur vicissitudes over a year.

Now he’s heading back to the future with The Bumper Book of Football, which is not only a celebration of those football compendia of yesteryear, but is also an attempt to update the format. All in time for Christmas.

With Merseyside’s pre-eminence in the game, there’s plenty of reference to and trivia about Liverpool (including a page and a half of Bill Shankly quotations) and Everton.

While there’s nothing on Tranmere, Chester, Runcorn or Ellesmere Port, but you should be warned, the cobbled end of the M62 is comprehensively covered.

“I’ve always loved those bumper books and annuals of football from the ’50s and ’60s, but my personal collection goes back to editions from the ’30s,” says Hunter, who is married to the novelist Margaret Forster.

“Present-day football magazines for kids, such as Match, have barely any text, which I think is very poor and lets down the reader, whatever their age, compared to, say, Charlie Buchan’s Football Monthly, which started in 1951.

“Boys (and girls) should have proper stuff to read as I did, so I followed the format and tried to make it look like the old-fashioned bumper boys books.”

This retro-book market was opened up by surprise hit The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn and Hal Iggulden, which resembles old Eagle annuals, playing on parental anxieties that children don’t read enough meaty but wholesome material.

“Although there is a similarity in looks, this has worked against us as I don’t want people to think my book is a rip-off. I thought of this before the Dangerous Book for Boys,” says Hunter.

“The difference with my book is that everything is up to date, so it’s not like the Dangerous Book for Boys in which everything is deliberately old.

“For example, the bit on how to be a footballer is totally modern. I properly explain the difference between a football school of excellence and an academy.

“This covers how they work and how to get in. Similarly, during the ’50s, these sort of books explained about the apprentice system.

“Although those old publications could be naive and optimistic, they didn’t rubbish our stars, nor were they cynical about our great game. And I’ve decided not to go down that road either. So sex romps, bungs and Wags don’t feature in this book.” Aa an avid collector of football memorabilia , some 80% of the illustrations in the book come from Hunter’s own archive of books, programmes, tickets and other ephemera usually lost in the waste paper bins of time.

“I’m very proud of the jokes in this book, on the top of every page, which I loved and I kept it going throughout the whole book,” says Hunter. “This is what they used to do in the Dandy, Beano and Hotspur, along with facts and daft information.

“Some of them are made up by myself. I’m particularly proud of the Aaron Lennon one. He says to a girl on the street, ‘Give us a kiss’ and she says, ‘You’re a little forward!’.”

Even this newly minted quip has a slightly period feel to it, I suggest, so Hunter conjures up a Liverpool FC example: “Why did Peter Crouch? Because he saw Darren Bent”, which certainly has a more modern ring to it.

The book is peppered with fascinating facts, amusing incidents and quips from his magpie memory. Who recalls Gary Sprake, Leeds Utd goalkeeper, in a game against Liverpool in 1967? Sprake changed his mind just before throwing the ball out to a colleague – and threw it into his own net. The Kopnoscenti launched into a then popular Des O’Connor song, Careless Hands.

What sort of reader is this book aimed at?