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'Vivid and poignant. It paints portraits of players as people living in the real world, not the 7-Star hotels of Dubai. Men existing in their communities as central figures, not protected in gated communities from the hoodies.' --Daily Express
'An absolute gem - inspirational' --Sunday People
'As up close and personal as it is possible to be' --football-league.co.uk
'No punches are pulled by either author or club, ensuring a frank and brutally honest - and at times very funny - account of life at the sharp end of football.' --When Saturday Comes
'Brilliantly honest' --Daily Mirror
'An absolute gem - inspirational' --Daily Mirror
'Vivid and poignant. It paints portraits of players as people living in the real world, not the 7-Star hotels of Dubai. Men existing in their communities as central figures, not protected in gated communities from the hoodies.' --Daily Express
'Brilliantly honest' --Sunday People
'As up close and personal as it is possible to be' --football-league.co.uk
`The latest and most extraordinary fly-on-the-wall account of a football club from its grassroots up.'
--Rob Bagchi, Guardian
`The latest and most extraordinary fly-on-the-wall account of a football club from its grassroots up.'
--Rob Bagchi, Guardian
Vivid and poignant. It paints portraits of players as people living in the real world, not the 7-Star hotels of Dubai. Men existing in their communities as central figures, not protected in gated communities from the hoodies. --Daily Express
An absolute gem - inspirational --Sunday People
Brilliantly honest --Daily Mirror
As up close and personal as it is possible to be --football-league.co.uk
No punches are pulled by either author or club, ensuring a frank and brutally honest - and at times very funny - account of life at the sharp
end of football. --When Saturday Comes
'An absolute gem - inspirational' --Sunday People
'As up close and personal as it is possible to be' --football-league.co.uk
'No punches are pulled by either author or club, ensuring a frank and brutally honest - and at times very funny - account of life at the sharp end of football.' --When Saturday Comes
'Brilliantly honest' --Daily Mirror
'An absolute gem - inspirational' --Daily Mirror
'Vivid and poignant. It paints portraits of players as people living in the real world, not the 7-Star hotels of Dubai. Men existing in their communities as central figures, not protected in gated communities from the hoodies.' --Daily Express
'Brilliantly honest' --Sunday People
'As up close and personal as it is possible to be' --football-league.co.uk
`The latest and most extraordinary fly-on-the-wall account of a football club from its grassroots up.'
--Rob Bagchi, Guardian
`The latest and most extraordinary fly-on-the-wall account of a football club from its grassroots up.'
--Rob Bagchi, Guardian
Vivid and poignant. It paints portraits of players as people living in the real world, not the 7-Star hotels of Dubai. Men existing in their communities as central figures, not protected in gated communities from the hoodies. --Daily Express
An absolute gem - inspirational --Sunday People
Brilliantly honest --Daily Mirror
As up close and personal as it is possible to be --football-league.co.uk
No punches are pulled by either author or club, ensuring a frank and brutally honest - and at times very funny - account of life at the sharp
end of football. --When Saturday Comes
Product Description
No one likes Millwall. They don't care. But what does it really take to be a part of this team, or a supporter? A British Sports Books Awards 2011 nominee, Michael Calvin's Family provides a unique glimpse into the soul of a real football club. Award-winning sports writer Calvin follows Millwall through an emotional promotion season. There for the first day of training, he was on the substitutes' bench at Wembley, 333 days later. He vividly portrays players and management as family men, close to their roots. In captain Paul Robinson's words : 'We're playing for the people who hate their jobs, who'd love our lives.' Forget the glitz of the Premier League - this is the beautiful game in all its raucous glory. Intimate and compelling, Calvin's unforgettable picture of lower-league English football is essential reading for anyone for whom football is far more than just a game.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When I first read Eamon Dunphey's insight into my beloved Millwall Football Club it was my first forray into football literature. I wrongly assumed this was how all football books were written and that set me up for some serious disappointment as I read other footballers autobiographies over the next few years! Not until Steve Claridge wrote 'Tales from the Boot Camps' did something come close to offering a proper window into how football works. 'Family' offers something dififerent to both of these works by virtue of it's modern day setting. Football has changed beyond all recognition from the game I started watching in the late 80's but Millwall are extremely fortunate that the bond between fans and players is still relatively close. As a kid Millwall was part of my extended family and now my younger brothers are experiencing the same feeling 20 years on. This book captures that with its tales of Neil Harris visiting fans in hospital and injured players joining the fans in the crowd and leading them in song.
The book itself has a Hollywood ending with promotion at Wembley in the playoffs (sorry, a spoiler there that is equivalent to revealing the iceberg bit in Titanic!) but the ending doesn't really matter. It's the journey rather than the destination and had Millwall fallen at the final hurdle it wouldn't have detracted from the insight into the club under the current regime.
'Family' affords you an opportunity to see how a modern lower league football club (with it's fair share of problems) works. It's a world where kids dreams are dashed in a heartbeat, where a years rehabilition can be set back with one bad tackle, where WAGS are worried about moving the kids schools and meeting the mortgage payments rather than which designer handbag to buy.
As a Millwall fan I always knew how special this club was but Michael Calvin has put it onto paper for a larger audience to see. I really hope this book is read by other clubs supporters because however much you hate us I swear you will have just a little bit more respect for us afterwards. If nothing else you will be writing to ask if Michael can follow your side for a year!
The book itself has a Hollywood ending with promotion at Wembley in the playoffs (sorry, a spoiler there that is equivalent to revealing the iceberg bit in Titanic!) but the ending doesn't really matter. It's the journey rather than the destination and had Millwall fallen at the final hurdle it wouldn't have detracted from the insight into the club under the current regime.
'Family' affords you an opportunity to see how a modern lower league football club (with it's fair share of problems) works. It's a world where kids dreams are dashed in a heartbeat, where a years rehabilition can be set back with one bad tackle, where WAGS are worried about moving the kids schools and meeting the mortgage payments rather than which designer handbag to buy.
As a Millwall fan I always knew how special this club was but Michael Calvin has put it onto paper for a larger audience to see. I really hope this book is read by other clubs supporters because however much you hate us I swear you will have just a little bit more respect for us afterwards. If nothing else you will be writing to ask if Michael can follow your side for a year!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I'm a QPR fan so I wasn't sure at first whether a book about Millwall would interest me; but a friend - who is a Millwall fan - urged me to read it. True the basic structure of `Family' is a game by game account of Millwall's successful promotion campaign into the Championship - capped by winning the League One Wembley play off final in May 2010 - and as such of particular appeal to Millwall fans; but nevertheless the author describes each match so vividly that you can't help but be taken along with the high and lows of the season. It's clear however from the first page and throughout each of the 300 plus pages following that the writer - Michael Calvin - is using last year's campaign as a vehicle, a way of telling the reader not about Millwall perse but about football in general. This is a book about the nuts and bolts of football - real football; not the fantasy football of the Premier League distorted by Sky TV revenue, Middle East Oil Sheiks and Russian oligarchs, but of a real world football where lack of funds is of necessity replaced by the passion and sheer compulsion of the people involved. Very skilfully the author has threaded fifty plus voices throughout the book - voices that to his credit are incredibly candid and genuine - weaving them all together into what is essentially a primary source oral history of what makes up a football club in 2010. From the shareholders, to the chairman, the chief executive, the club QC through to the playing staff - the manager, coaches, physios, scouts and players - and on to the police, members of the local community and of course the fans - each is given a voice to express their roles, opinions, hopes and reflections. I finished the book last week and at three o'clock Saturday as I sat with my son before kick off - QPR vs Burnley - I looked at the fans around me, at the Director's Box, the managers and coaches in the dug outs and the players waiting for the whistle and for the first time - because of what I'd learned from `Family' - I had a real insight into how my football club was run. I would highly recommend the book to all fans of football.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It is of course a no-brainer that most books about football are hugely disappointing, and books written by footballers (and/or their ghosts) are almost always tedious accounts of what should be fascinating affairs.
Michael Calvin's 'Family .... ' is for that reason not just a great book but a real achievement, undoubtedly aided by the level of access granted to him by Millwall Football Club, he gets into the guts of the club and in doing so takes us there as well, you can almost smell the lineament oil and hear that boisterous crowd.
Far too much has been made of the fact that this book centres around Millwall FC, a club that usually gets a bit of a kicking from the outside world, Calvin is (or was) a Watford fan, I myself am a Brentford fan, the point is that it doesnt matter, this could be a document of any club that would call itself a small club, even a big small club like Millwall. The book didn't change my opinion on Millwall because it didn't need changing, Millwall is a fantastic football club and the vast majority of their supporters are proper passionate football fans, working class people following a working class club, Millwall was for so many reasons the perfect choice of subject for this book, that it may change some people's perception of Millwall is not the point but merely a bonus.
I can't think of a real football fan that craves decent literature and real insight that would not love this book, it's not just for Millwall fans, it's not just for supporters of unfashionable clubs, in fact this would probably more fascinating to the wealthy fan that sits in his corporate box at Old Trafford than anyone because it offers such a revealing window in to how a smaller club functions at every single level.
If you like football, read this book.
Michael Calvin's 'Family .... ' is for that reason not just a great book but a real achievement, undoubtedly aided by the level of access granted to him by Millwall Football Club, he gets into the guts of the club and in doing so takes us there as well, you can almost smell the lineament oil and hear that boisterous crowd.
Far too much has been made of the fact that this book centres around Millwall FC, a club that usually gets a bit of a kicking from the outside world, Calvin is (or was) a Watford fan, I myself am a Brentford fan, the point is that it doesnt matter, this could be a document of any club that would call itself a small club, even a big small club like Millwall. The book didn't change my opinion on Millwall because it didn't need changing, Millwall is a fantastic football club and the vast majority of their supporters are proper passionate football fans, working class people following a working class club, Millwall was for so many reasons the perfect choice of subject for this book, that it may change some people's perception of Millwall is not the point but merely a bonus.
I can't think of a real football fan that craves decent literature and real insight that would not love this book, it's not just for Millwall fans, it's not just for supporters of unfashionable clubs, in fact this would probably more fascinating to the wealthy fan that sits in his corporate box at Old Trafford than anyone because it offers such a revealing window in to how a smaller club functions at every single level.
If you like football, read this book.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
All human life is here
As the title suggests I am not a big football fan and the cult of celebrity and the resulting biographies make my blood run cold. Read more
Published 19 days ago by Olddogandgrump
If you only read one book about lower league football...
Make it this one. I'm a follower of a lower league club, with no interest in Millwall, but this gives so much insight into how a team & club is run. Read more
Published 29 days ago by J. R. Butler
Roaring success
Calvin tells it like it is in this warts-and-all account of Millwall's 2009/10 season which culminated with victory at Wembley in the League One play-off final. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Mr. K. Rance
Wonderful
A wonderfully written book into the real side a English football (not the nonsense we are made to read and watch in the media). Read more
Published 2 months ago by Mr. C. J. Molnar
A book to make all Millwall fans proud
I could not put this book down! It gave a genuine insight into the goings on of Millwall and was very well written! Read more
Published 3 months ago by MISS A J LAMBERT
Family; life death and football
This book is a fantastic read and a true insight into Millwall without the usual negative bias againt the club and fans.
Published 5 months ago by clarky
Amazing!
cant recomend this book highly enough! could not put it down! got through it in a day and a half and just wished it didnt end! great book! well done Mr Calvin!!!
Published 5 months ago by starkey
just the ticket
Bought this book to take on holiday , couldnt put it down from day one. Any Millwall fan will love this book as you can really relate to it in detail. Read more
Published 8 months ago by markyboy
Supberb
I like a lot of people thought yep another one of those football books but no this was different straight from the heart and to the point this is a book for all real Millwall Fans.
Published 15 months ago by thedee
No-one likes us - we dont care!!
Great read for Millwall fans. Unfortunately first book ordered did not arrive. However Amazon sent replacement which arrived before Xmas.
Published 16 months ago by Mrs. Denise Croker
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