The Glory Game
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Product Description
Product Description
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.
Davies spent a whole season with the team, training with them, visiting the players' homes and witnessing the dressing-room confrontations. In the modern era of painstaking media management and tight security, no sportswriter will ever again be granted such unprecedented access. While some features of the game have changed beyond all recognition - notably the all-consuming role that money now plays - inside every club the dramas and tensions revealed by Davies remain, making the book a timeless classic and securing its position as one of the best books about football ever written.
About the Author
Hunter Davies is the author of over 30 books, including such classics as A Walk Around the Lakes and the authorised biography of The Beatles. As a journalist he has contributed to the Sunday Times, The Independent, the Daily Mail and the New Statesman, while as a broadcaster he has presented many programmes for BBC Radio 4.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
glorious in it's sideburned depiction,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Glory Game (Contemporary Sports Classics) (Paperback)
this book perfectly encapsulates spurs, and more widely, seventies football. tottenham hotspur were (and still are) a glamorous, charismatic club who attract a lot of media attention , both positive and negative - and this book is a fascinating insight into the runnings of a first division team from the manager, the players and all the backroom staff - no physios then of course, but hard trainers who told you to 'run off' that cartilage tear! the depictions of such luminaries as jimmy greaves, alan gilzean and the mercurial bill nicholson are exact - leaving no stone unturned. if somebody is blunt and impolite, even downright rude, it is stated in it's liniment-tainted way. this book is basically how it was! my favourite passage covers the away european cupwinners cup tie in foreign climes. drawn away to a french side, bill lambasts the team at halftime due to their lack of application - and they promptly go out in the second half and proceed to gain a 0-0 draw, with barely any more effort. good result in hindsight, but that is not enough for bill - and he hammers that home to the players in typical unforgiving style. a warts n all depiction of the way football was before the huge injection of cash and the new found interest in the premier league. definitely worth a read!
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book that spawned a new type of football writing,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Glory Game: The New Edition of the British Football Classic (Mainstream sport) (Paperback)
Don't let the fact that this book follows the 1971/2 Tottenham Hotspur club put you off from reading it (even if you're a Gooner). The Glory Game was the first in-depth look at what goes on at a football club, both on the pitch and behind the scenes. The fact that it's Spurs is inconsequential - it could have been any First Division club. Davies' account is easy-to-read, the chapters seem to fly by, and I found myself excited to know what happen next in Spurs' season, even though it took place 30 years ago! This is the standard that other season diaries of clubs should be measured against - sadly, most fall well short.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An essential read for all soccer fans,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Glory Game: Year in the Life of Tottenham Hotspur (Paperback)
As a fly-on-the-wall documentary of a top flight team in the early seventies this book won deserved praise at the time of its publication. If anything, given the advent of commercialism at all levels of top standard sport in the UK, the book makes even more fascinating reading these days as it offers a glimpse into a world now gone, where a player's worth was not a purely monetary value but was determined by his peers, where a manager's vision was allowed time to bear fruit, and where players were discouraged from portraying themselves as anything but what they were - salaried employees in a fickle business. Davies' style of journalism, in which the players are allowed to speak for themselves, makes this book an insight also into the opinions, fears and prejudices of professional footballers - a refreshingly honest alternative to the 'spin doctored' and ghost written accounts that normally pass as the opinion of today's breed. For those of you genuinely interested in the recent history of the professional game and those also who would like to peek beneath the veneer of today's football club/corporate business hype this book makes essential reading. Spurs fans amongst you who might stumble pronouncing Ginola but have no problem accepting the concept of a Welsh midfielder called England - regard this book if not as your bible, at least as one of the principal epistles of your faith! (Pay particular attention to the player profiles at the back of the book and the hopes for his future expressed therein by a certain young player called Joe Kinnear - now there was a guy going places!)
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