Salute to working class heroes

Sports Books 2005: Gary Lineker recently recounted how one of his four sons had left him rather deflated by observing how great it must be, "to have David Beckham for your dad". Having scored 48 goals in 80 games for his country and lifted the Golden Boot at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, the 45-year-old might have expected to be a little more appreciated in his home.

But the fame football brings is a fickle thing, and the reality is that for most youngsters Lineker is primarily famous for being a television presenter.

In My Father and Other Working Class Heroes (Yellow Jersey Press, £15.99), which recently won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, Gary Imlach (also a television presenter) starts from much the same point as Lineker's son as he seeks to retrace his father's career in football following his death at the age of 69.

Stewart Imlach was an old-fashioned outside-left from a small fishing village called Lossiemouth. He went on to play for Bury, Nottingham Forest and Crystal Palace, before winding up as a coach at Everton.

While at Bury he finished the joinery apprenticeship he had started before moving south for £150, but he went on to have a good playing career, featuring in the Forest team that won the FA Cup in 1959, a year after he had played for Scotland at the World Cup in Sweden.

Asked at the funeral about his father's career, Gary realised he knew little enough about it other than these barest of facts. This book is the product of his subsequent attempt to atone for having taken so much for granted over the preceding years.

A beautifully written, poignant and often humorous account of a life in a game that now seems almost unrecognisable, it is not just a hugely enjoyable read. Imlach paints a vivid and moving picture of British football in the 1950s and 1960s and of the men who played it.

In the days of the maximum wage and almost callous indifference among club owners to their players, Imlach senior made little more than the working-class men who came to see him play each week and knew, in stark contrast to the multi-millionaire stars of today, that when his days in football were at an end he would almost certainly be obliged to take his place among them once again.

As much an indictment of a system as a tribute to a man, it is comfortably as good a book about the game in England as has been produced in recent years.

Elsewhere, the pickings from abroad are rather thin. There is what seems a particularly large crop of player biographies (and ghosted autobiographies), with Terry Butcher, John Terry and Ryan Giggs the subjects of the more respectable (and readable) efforts.

Interest in this sort of thing (if much at all can be worked up) depends, almost invariably, on the club loyalties of the would-be reader. A rare exception in a year that has brought us a predictable glut of books about Chelsea is Patrick Barclay's Mourinho: Anatomy of a Winner (Orion Books, £14.99), which though scarcely packed with revelations into its subject nevertheless manages to provide an interesting insight into the career to date of the Portuguese manager.

The book has the feel of something that was put together at a brisk pace, though Barclay is a vastly experienced and talented football writer who works these days with the Sunday Telegraph.

When Saturday Comes - The Half Decent Football Book (Penguin, £20) is not quite what most regular readers of the monthly magazine, which celebrates its 20th birthday next year, will expect. Despite specific claims on the jacket that the book will make you laugh, there is little evidence of the humour that has made the parent publication such an enjoyable read over the years.

Instead, what you get is a fairly straightforward A to Z (well, Y actually) of the (largely British) game.

It may be a little on the dry side, but it is well researched, well produced and concisely written with bite-sized entries on countless clubs, players and related topics, such as hooliganism, trophies and penalty shootouts (hands up who knew that Manchester United beat Hull City in the first one back in 1970 after a 1-1 draw in the Watney Cup).

At home, meanwhile, Eoghan Rice captures many of the elements that make Imlach's book so good with his oral history of Shamrock Rovers - We Are Rovers (Nonsuch Publishing, €18.99).

Through exhaustive interviews of players, past and present, officials and fans (including, bizarrely enough, Maureen O'Hara), Rice provides an engaging and timely reminder of how the club, long the country's most successful but now experiencing such hard times, came to mean so much to so many and a flavour what life is like in and around the wider game here.