SPECTATOR SPORT
Booked for Christmas
Frank Keating
STOCKING-FILLER of the year is again a completely updated Umbro Book of Foot- ball Quotations (Stanley Paul), in which the hapless Graham Taylor unsurprisingly war- rants more entries (just) than Brian Clough. The latter gets a fast and fascinat- ing hardback biography, His Way (Robson), from the splendid Patrick Murphy, who had a long working relationship with the old nutty genius. Also from Robson, Three Sides of the Mersey is a richly appealing his- torical chronicle of the trio of clubs up there, the Reds, the Blues, and the Rovers. How's this for the great Tom Lawton's Christmas Day half a century ago: We played on Christmas morning. I forget who we were playing at Everton. We were in the bath, and suddenly the Tranmere people came in and said, 'We're a couple of players short to play Crewe at Crewe. Would anyone like a game?' Aye,' I said. 'Go on, I'll help you out'. 'Are you sure, Tom?"Yeah'. So I went to play for Tranmere Rovers in the afternoon.
With Bath RFC as pre-eminent these
days as soccer's Liverpool were and Manch- ester United are, it was about time an histo- rian dipped the quill into the gold-leaf. Brian Jones has done the honours with love and relish, Bath: Ace of Clubs (Breedon), and even dates the birth of the club's glim- merings of grandeur back to Monday, 5 April, 1965, when they beat Bristol at the Rec and 'Fishy' Evans had an advertise- ment in the programme exhorting, After the Line Out, Tackle a Good Meal of Scrum- ptious Fried Fish and Chips. Happy days, eh?
For cricketers, everyone says the book of the year is unquestionably the stack of
beguiling essays by that workaday lyricist of too diffident charm, David Foot. Beyond Bat and Ball, by all accounts and criminally, failed to find a single London publisher back from lunch and it was left to the most aptly named Good Books, of Melksham, Wilts, to put it out. I have yet to lay my hands on a copy, but am looking forward to Christmas afternoon (hint, hint). The sum- mer, of course, was kicked off (or, in a way, out) by Graeme Wright's Betrayal: The Struggle for Cricket's Soul (Witherby), an appalled and emotively timely warning to Lord's and its mandarins by a born pam- phleteer who used to edit Wisden. Alas, as they duck it will probably sail harmlessly above their heads, what with an index including (not only Led Zeppelin between Barrie Leadbeater and Alan Lee, and Buddy Guy separating Griffith and Hadlee) Bagehot, Gibbon, Goethe, Montaigne, Rousseau, Seneca, Tocqueville, Wittgen- stein, as well as Barnett (Correlli, not Char- lie) and Horace (just Horace, and certainly not Hazell).
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